maphew

App idea - Tasks by time boxes

October 30, 2018

What if we could view our tasks by nested boxes, similar to Space Monger, Space Sniffer, et al?

Article Image

Predicted vs Actual?

By Effort size?

By budget?

Importance?

Time left in day/month/year?

etc.

This style is called a ZUI - Zooming User Interface.

 

The visual overviews that ZUIs offer for free by zooming out may seem like a solution to the load on human memory, but in practice it doesn’t because visual overviews of any complexity require significant scanning and visual search in order to find anything. If there are just a small number of objects, then the visual search task is not hard – but of course, for a small number of objects, you don’t need a ZUI to solve your organizational problems.

From <https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98911/why-zuis-zoom-user-interfaces-are-not-popular>

Jef Raskin’s zoomable interface makes the most sense in a document/object-centric context. Application-centric environments are conceptually at odds with such interfaces. Raskin’s ZUI is good for organizing large amounts of information in a way that makes applications obsolete; but the current computing landscape is all about “apps”

From <https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98911/why-zuis-zoom-user-interfaces-are-not-popular>

…most of maps UIs use ZUI pretty well. The challenge is to apply ZUI to more generic apps.

However, I believe that there are some constraints when you design a Zoomable interface:

  • it is difficult to put huge amounts of content inside.
  • you have to design the interface thinking like a map: trying to figure how the current zoom level could give clues to the deeper one. I mean, in A level the zoomable view may have information of next zoom level, like “you have 6 notifications” and when you deeper you’ll see the details of each.

From <https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/98911/why-zuis-zoom-user-interfaces-are-not-popular>

In these designs, there are several questions and design problems I was trying to solve. How do we prevent the problem of ‘too many tabs’? How do we design a zoomable interface around the Web? How do we design an entire operating system around the web?

From <https://medium.com/david-regev-on-ux/browser-design-experiments-731f97eb8e5e>