Microsoft Surface has been unveiled, and while it’s quite eye-catching and innovative on the surface, it also is going to require some serious thought in a few areas:

• Security: How do you protect files that pop open magically by placing a device on the tabletop? Those photos you didn’t want to show your boss, for example?
• Fingerprints: I know, I know. This is a problem with all touch screens, but there’s not exactly a good spot to storea cloth so you can clean the thing.
• Spills and other messes: Used in a restaurant, you’ll see rings from perspiring glasses, spills from food and drinks, trash (straw wrappers and the like), and all sorts of other messes. People put things on tables. It’s a fact. And unless the touch-screen is only a small part of a much larger table, you can expect your Veal Parmagiana to interfere with sharing photos.
• Aesthetics: How many household rooms are designed in such a way that one of these babies will automatically fit in with the decor? I hope it comes in different colors, and I hope someone launches a line of accessories for stylizing the machine.
• Value: This tabletop isn’t designed for getting real work done (can you imagine sitting there for a long period of time to work on a design or write some code?), so at most, Surface will be used primarily for quick meetings in offices, sharing photos and such with friends at home, and other less-than-essential things. It has marginal value for the buck (this thing has got to be expensive).
• Scratches: Alongside the inevitable cleaning nightmare, these tabletops are surely to get scratched up, and that will surely make for a less attractive tabletop, prominently displayed in the center of your living room. It’ll make good and bad first impressions, simultaneously.

I’m sure there are more, but these are the issues off the top of my head. You know, the surface.

That said, I think the technology has a lot of potential. Providing MS comes up with solutions to these and other potental problems, they could be on to something really great. Imagine designing applications that work on this machine. That’s fun for the whole family!

On the surface, Surface is a glorified kiosk. But I’m sure this is just the start of what Microsoft has in mind. Once they dig a little deeper, I’m sure Surface will have many uses we have yet imagine. Microsoft has just barely scratched the surface.

Jakob is a swell cat. He offers up tons of useful information about web design on a regular basis, and for that, I’m grateful. But today, he’s just dead wrong.

Today’s Alertbox article is called “The Myth of the Genius Designer”. Sadly, it’s crap.

The whole article leads up to the following three points:

“To summarize:

The first point is obvious - a good designer is better than a bad one. The second point is where I take exception, primarily because of the words “rather than guesses”.

Yes, good designers work off of usability data. But it’s not one rather than the other, it’s both.

Good designers also work from experience. They leverage a designer’s common sense. They work off of hunches. Not guesses. Hunches. There’s a difference.

Hunches are grounded in experience, common sense, logic, and all those other things considered good qualities for a person doing a job. Guesses are, well, guesses. They’re not grounded in anything. A guess is something you get from people who have no real idea what they’re doing.

Jakob’s third point is also problematic, because it implies that great designers don’t iterate. In my experience, all great designers iterate. It’s extremely rare that a perfect design (if there is such a thing) magically appears in a designer’s head so that he can simply document it and call it a day. What happens far more frequently (like, all the time) is that a designer starts with a hunch, turns it into a design, and iterates through it repeatedly until he’s able to sleep at night. He doesn’t stop until the design is as good as he thinks it can be. A great designer is obsesssed with making the design perfect, and he has an accute understanding that perfection is hard to come by. It’s not a given, it’s earned.

Yes, these designs can and should be validated somehow. But usability testing doesn’t always provide the answers, and it’s entirely unnecessary to run a usability study on every project. Great designers know when to rely on patterns and standards, and when to avoid them and do something new. They know how to create something makes sense in the first place. They know that the innovative stuff might benefit from some usability testing, but that the standard stuff is probably a safe bet as long as it’s implemented well. They apply good design principles and create things that solve most of the potential usability problems in the first place.

Jaokb is right that great designers get that way by studying the succeesses and failures of designs. They get that way by doing the work, learning from it, studying user behavior, and so on. And a great designer will continue doing this throughout her career. But she certainly doesn’t need to evaluate usability data on every project. That’s just a waste of time and money.

What Jakob is right about is that great designers are uncommon, and it’s unlikely one of them works for you. But if you have someone you believe would step up and become great if given the chance, make that person a design dictator for a while and see what happens.

You might be amazed. You might see a mediocre designer turn into a great one, simply by giving him ownership and getting out of his way. And you might get better designs with a great designer than you ever would with a rigorous process of usability evaluation.

Jakob isn’t always right.

This is from the ArgoUML User Manual.

What exactly does this image mean?

This is pretty amazing stuff. Some of the screens in this app are more confusing than a David Lynch movie.

It might be the worst interaction design work I’ve ever seen. My favorite quote from the manual:

“As you go through this tutorial you will be told what to do, and when to do it, but how to do it will often be left to the User Interface Reference.”

I was lucky enough to see Seth Godin in person this morning when he came to my neck of the woods to speak about his newest book, The Dip. (Strangely, this happened at 8:30 in the morning, at the Improv, which generally functions as a night club.)

Aside from learning all about “the dip” and getting a nice dose of inspiration, I also got to see one of the best speakers in the business doing his thing. Seth is unafraid to offend people. He says things that everyone else on the planet might think are bad, and he usually turns out to be right. He’s also very energetic, funny, and down-to-earth.

Fortunately, I got to steal a few seconds to introduce myself and say thanks. Seth contributed several quotes for Designing the Obvious, and wrote a single-sentence review of the book that gave it a great promotional boost when it was first released. It was nice to shake hands with the man himself.

If you get a shot to see him, I highly recommend it.

(The photos would be better, by the way, but all I had was a lousy camera-phone.)

From my temporarily-stopped-but-back-in-action-now in-house training page:

“So you’ve read the book. What happens now? Bring me in for a one-day training session, so we can talk about how to apply some of those pesky design principles to your own applications.

I’ll come to your offices, to talk about your products.”

Interested? Contact me to get started!