DESPITE ITS INFLUENCE, THE FACEBOOK USER INTERFACE DOES NOT GRACEFULLY COLLAPSE

DESPITE ITS INFLUENCE, THE FACEBOOK USER INTERFACE DOES NOT GRACEFULLY COLLAPSE ONTO PHONES AND TABLETS – AND THE SOLUTION?

We all know this of course. We also know that this presents a terrible problem for companies that seek to make their revenue from advertising – which decidedly doesn’t work well on phones.

But then again, the windowed desktop UI model doesn’t work that well any longer either – even on the desktop – and it certainly doesn’t collapse to handheld devices. The web v1 and v2 UI model doesn’t collapse that well either. The newer reflexive UI model, with iPhone controls collapses fairly well – that is, until you try to do anything terribly complicated. Because it’s pretty hard to convey a lot of context, when we’re used to space consuming navigation controls providing all that context, and we don’t have space to work with.

So it’s a lot of fun to take a few choice elements from FB’s edit-in-place document model, and incorporate them into a reflexive ‘box’ model, and then try to eliminate all the navigation that’s possible while retaining context. Then hopefully allow the graceful re-expansion of the user interface back to a rich desktop, adding just the right amount of context along with the information density.

And in doing so, make what is essentially an enormous pile of financial software appear like it was downloaded from the Apple store on one hand, and forged in an accounting department on the other.

When hiring the staff, I told them, “I really wish that I could tell you that we’re building something sexy like a social media music and dating site. But we’re not. We’re building a piece of business management software. And the only thing sexy about it, is that it doesn’t look like it was written in 1992, along with all the rest of financial management software.” And for some reason they still took the job. 🙂

Somehow it all just works.

🙂