Since get­ting a Touch Pro a cou­ple weeks ago, I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out to best to opti­mize the Touch­Flo inter­face. HTC has done some nice things with this device (the Touch Pro on Sprint or out­side the US, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, as well as all the vari­ants of HTC Dia­mond), and in a lot of ways they’ve brought the ease of use from Win­dows Mobile Standard’s slid­ing pan­els home screen and sim­ple Home and Back but­tons to Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional. It’s nice, but there’s one prob­lem. By default, the Start Menu is still up there in the upper left cor­ner, poten­tially con­fus­ing mat­ters by offer­ing a com­pletely dif­fer­ent and con­tra­dic­tory way to launch pro­grams and access sys­tem set­tings. For­tu­nately, you can get rid of it, sim­plify the user inter­face and get a nifty way to switch between run­ning pro­grams in the process. (While one of Win­dows Mobile’s strengths is that there’s more than one way to do almost every­thing, a design goal for an effi­cient user inter­face is to have as lit­tle over­lap in func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble; a place for every­thing and every­thing in its place.)

WkTask is a free shell util­ity that par­tially replaces your Win­dows Mobile Pro taskbar. By default, it leaves the Start Menu and noti­fi­ca­tion icons alone, and puts icons for your run­ning pro­grams where the win­dow title would nor­mally be. But for our pur­poses, since Touch­Flo 3D (or 2D, if you’re using an older device and can remap the Win­dows but­ton on the phone to show the Today screen instead of the Start Menu) dupli­cates and expands on the Start Menu func­tion­al­ity, we’re going to get rid of it.

In the set­tings, notice that the off­set from the left edge is set to 0 pix­els. This moves the run­ning pro­grams all the way to left, cov­er­ing the Start Menu com­pletely. With the clock changed to the ana­log clock (you have a huge dig­i­tal one on your home screen any­way), this also gives the entire taskbar a nice “all icons” uni­for­mity fit­ting to a phone user expe­ri­ence. You can enhance this effect by telling WkTask to dis­play only task icons in the Design tab of WkTask preferences.

So how can you use a Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional device with out ever touch­ing the Start Menu? Pretty eas­ily, as it turns out. Here’s how it breaks down.

There are a cou­ple of gotchas. For one, you’ll notice the run­ning apps area, from pix­els 0 to 225 on a VGA screen, com­pletely cov­ers the noti­fi­ca­tion icon if you have Blue­tooth turned on as well. I get around this by mak­ing sure all the noti­fi­ca­tions I have enabled dis­play a mes­sage onscreen in Win­dows Mobile’s love-​it-​or-​hate-​it pop up “toast”. That way I don’t have to tap the now-​hidden noti­fi­ca­tion icon in the taskbar to get clear an alarm. Also, on my screen I only have room to dis­play 5 run­ning tasks at a time. I can run more than that, but when I do, the fifth icon is replaced by a dou­ble right chevron ( » ) and the rest are dis­played in a lit­tle drop down menu.

Over­all, though, this has greatly improved my ease of use on the device, mak­ing it easy to switch between apps with­out going to the home screen, and mak­ing the home screen the one and only way to launch appli­ca­tions. This dra­mat­i­cally cuts down on con­fu­sion when it comes time to do some­thing, and makes Win­dows Mobile Pro­fes­sional feel more like Win­dows Mobile Stan­dard; that is, makes it feel more like a phone. Give it a try and let me know how it works in the comments.

Dri­ving home just now I noticed some­thing. When I’m straight­en­ing out of a turn, I’ll loosen my grip on the steer­ing wheel and let the wheel spin freely just enough to bring the tires back to straight, then tighten my grip again. It seems like an obvi­ous and effi­cient way to allow the laws of physics to straighten out the vehi­cle, but I have no mem­ory of ever actu­ally being taught to do this, either by my par­ents or my Driver’s Ed teacher.

So here’s my ques­tion. Does every­one do this? And if so, were you taught to do this, or does every dri­ver fig­ure this out inde­pen­dently through the daily act of dri­ving a car?

I’m fas­ci­nated by the idea that user inter­faces can be self-​teaching, rather than “intu­itive.” Not some­thing that you can pick up and instantly feel a nat­ural mas­ter of, which is what intu­itive usu­ally implies, but rather some­thing that teaches you how to use it by using it.

I’ve been work­ing on a three part arti­cle for the last few days called “Pimp my Treo” but now I’m not sure I’ll post it. In short, it’s how to use Kinoma Play, Sky­fire and Win­ter­face to “mod­ern­ize” a Treo or sim­i­lar device to look and feel more like the “new hot­ness” devices from HTC and Sam­sung. It all works pretty well, but I’m doubt­ing now if it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve talked many times before about the Zen of Palm, the com­mit­ment going back to Jeff Hawkins to make Palm devices as easy to use as pos­si­ble. As it turns out, this is impor­tant not just in hand­helds, but all kinds of com­put­ers. Paul Thur­rott of the Win­dows Super­site had an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion on this recently (expanded a bit in this week’s Win­dows Weekly podcast):

Read­ing Mr. Carr’s arti­cle, it occurred to me that the prob­lem with Win­dows 7 is the same thing that’s the prob­lem with Mac OS X. That is, Microsoft is con­fus­ing “easy” with “simple.”

For exam­ple, Mac users have claimed for years that Mac OS X is “easy to use,” when in fact it is any­thing but. Mac OS X is sim­ple. As noted above, sim­ple is hard [to engi­neer]. And we should all give Apple credit for that. But sim­ple is not the same as easy. One basic exam­ple: The Mac OS X desk­top is a bar­ren place with no obvi­ous start­ing point. And the peo­ple who feel that it is easy are fooled because they are sim­ply used to it. Things that are famil­iar seem easy. But they’re not nec­es­sar­ily easy to those who are unfa­mil­iar with that thing or, in the case of poten­tial Switch­ers, are famil­iar with some­thing else. The Mac OS X desk­top is sim­ple. But it is not easy.

By con­trast, the Win­dows desk­top is easy in that it pro­vides an obvi­ous start­ing point (a Start but­ton) and because Microsoft and its PC maker part­ners go a bit over the top pre­sent­ing infor­ma­tion to the user on first boot. Crit­ics will argue that this also makes Win­dows con­vo­luted. And they’re right, as it turns out. It’s hard to get the right mix of sim­ple and easy. Apple errs to much on the side of sim­ple, in my opin­ion. But Microsoft errs some­where else: They over­whelm the user with func­tion­al­ity in a bid to make sure it works for every­one. All too often, the result is some­thing that works for very few people.

Sim­ple is not the same thing as easy. Jeff Hawkins under­stood this, and made the orig­i­nal Palm devices easy to use. But as many of us Palm vet­er­ans know, there was a lot of power in those early devices, too.

Thanks in large part to the iPhone, we’ve seen a flood of “sim­ple” user inter­faces on Win­dows Mobile devices recently. TouchFlo3D on the new HTC devices is only one, Sam­sung and O2 and Veloc­ity and many oth­ers have fol­lowed suit with their own spins on how to sim­plify the Win­dows Mobile expe­ri­ence. But are they right?

One of the exam­ples Thur­rott men­tioned in the pod­cast was old school com­mand line Unix. Here we have a sys­tem that was sim­ple, but not easy. Most Unix com­mands do only one thing, it doesn’t get much sim­pler than that. Grep finds text match­ing a search term, noth­ing more. But you had to know what they were, how they worked, and what kind of out­put they’d give you before you could string them together in shell scripts to do com­plex things. Def­i­nitely not easy.

The more I tweaked my Treo to work more like the new devices on the mar­ket, the more some­thing started to bug me. It seemed slower. It seemed a lot slower. And it was, because I was dis­card­ing fea­tures designed for ease of use for things that made the expe­ri­ence “sim­ple”. It was sim­pler to have con­tacts mixed in with my appli­ca­tions in Win­ter­face, but it was actu­ally eas­ier to get to them by typ­ing directly on the Today screen. I’ll bet my Treo can do any­thing a Touch Pro can do in a frac­tion of the time, even with a slower proces­sor. Because it’s easy to use, not simple.