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Everytime we decide to watch a DVD film we always face the same problem: What surprises will give us the film´s menu to set up language, subtitles, extras…?

It´s like a strange disease: None of these menus are the same, navigation between items are always different and the resources they use to tell you where you are inside the menu change from one DVD to another. Some of them choose themselves what “they think” you want you, some not…

Why the hell a sooo simple navigation scheme has to be sooo difficult to use? I´m afraid that this is because the main objective is to make these menus visual, trendy, cool. But visual, trendy or cool should be the film not the elements to put that film to work… I bet you that lot of elderly people cannot set the way they want a simple film.

“The menus themselves suffer badly from lack of standardization”. I think one of these days I´ll try to work on some guidelines for this silly stuff the right way.

Further reading: DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again

Larry Tesler is a computer scientist with a strong background in Interaction Design. He´s been working for several decades at Xerox PARC, Yahoo!, Amazon and Apple Computer.

In 1985, while working for the MacApp object-oriented framework at Apple,Tesler came up with an interesting law called Conservation of Complexity. According to this statement every application have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. Beyond a given point, simplification can´t be improved.

An example to understand Tesler´s law was given by Dan Shaffer in his book “Designing for Interaction“:

“For an e-mail message, two elements are required: your e-mail address and the address of the person to whom you are sending the mail. If either of these items is missing, the e-mail can´t be sent, and your e-mail client will tell you so. It´s a necessary complexity. But some of that burden has likely been shifted to your e-mail client. You don´t typically have to enter your e-mail address every time you send e-mail; the e-mail program handles that task for you (…). The complesity isn´t gone, thought – instead, some of it has been shifted to the software.”

But I think this complexity is just inherent to a period of time. Innovation technology is strong enough to overcome those complex situations we human are sometimes faced to. Complexity, when talking about technology, is just a question of time.

Bullet points, those little dots placed next to a sentence, are a powerful tool to communicate in digital environments.

Users unconsciously appreciate content organized in small slots of information. Bullet points (when used properly) give readers the joy of reading more efficiently.

From the side of the editor, writing content with bullet points force the writer to reduce the amount of information to be shown, forcing to re-think what is critical and what is less important.

Readers, on the other side, will pay more attention to content organized with this typographical resource. Our eyes are more willing to watch at this little dots than to the rest of the “straight” content. They seem to have the more important information.

Bullet points can be an important tool when launching a new product and explaining what is all about. Good examples of a well applied use of bullet points can be seen in FriendFeed´s homepage. Three “thumbnail bullets” explain what the service is about:

Tumblr is less explicit, and the hole service is explained using a block of text:

A different approach, using bullet points, could be this one:

No more than seven items:
According to George A. Miller´s “Magic 7″ article (1956), number “seven” is almost universally accepted as the human capacity limit for a wide range of issues. This “law” also applies to the use of bullets: more than seven items reduce the power of communication in digital screens.

No less than three:
If you only have two bullets, maybe the right approach would be (again) to reduce those two lines into one single line. While two bullets are meaningful, three bullets are the perfect number.

I love watching the activity of these working “Lemmings” when I am waiting for a flight connection at the airport. They just don´t stop working!

And, the more I see of them, the more I think they perfectly fit to this famous statement: “Form follows function“, one of the main principles of Bauhaus´s Design School.

They´re ugly, they look uncomfortable, they don´t leave any space for personal customization and, depending on the country you´re, they look a bit different, adapted to the local context they work with.

But, on the other side, their output is brilliant. They´re machines focused 100% on the activity. All the beautiful stuff has been forgotten. What remains is just for improving the outcome. They´re perfect for the work they´ve been designed for. To me they´re the best example of “just what you need and nothing else”.

Sometimes I like to think that one of these days digital products will be like these airport vehicles…

A few days ago Dan Saffer published his last book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. A friend of Dan, Rachel Glaves, from Adaptive Path, helped him drawing some of the most common gestures for gestual interaction: Tapping, sliding, pointing, dragging, pinching, and spreading.

These drawings are now available for everybody. You can get the stencils for Omnigraffe (.zip), Illustrator CS3 (.zip) and Photoshop (.zip).

The interesting making-of can be seen in the following picture:

Full screen on Flickr. Enjoy them!!