Deliverables:
- Interaction Design
- UI Specifications
- Information Architecture
- Functional Prototypes
Team Composition:
- Marketing
- Development
- Visual Design
Java SE Deployment
Involved: 2005 - present
Java SE is the mass market deployment of Java. It is downloaded and used by a large and very disparate population of users -everyone from seasoned computer users to grandma and grandpa back home. Over the last couple of releases the focus on deploying the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) has been to get the JRE out of the way and focus the experience on the application the user wants to run. This is a big change in the way Java and the JRE have been traditionally positioned.
My current focus as interaction design lead for Java Web Start and other deployment technologies is to make sure the complete user experience communicates the Java and Sun brand values. From the web experience on Java.com to the installation wizard and desktop experiences when updating the JRE, I am focusing on the hand off between technologies and environments.
My involvement started by focusing on cleaning up the Java Web Start experience. I reduced the number of interruptions by organizing and prioritizing information. Where in the past each warning was presented with equal weight, I designed a framework to present the most urgent warning prominently while leaving access to additional warnings through progressive disclosure. The design aggregates security warnings and presents warning text as a crisp 'sound bite' that explains the situation in terms of what the user wants out of the experience. The overriding goal here is to be understood but not remembered -the layout of the dialogs needs to leverage layout and visual design already present on end user's computers to communicate security and trust.
More Information
More information on Java can be found at java.com and java.sun.com -the former link is targeted at consumers and the latter at developers and technologists.
Screenshots
The following images provide an idea of how much the Web Start experience has improved with better visual design, information design and interaction design.
Web Start experience video (7.1 MB, .mov): This video shows the current Java SE 5.0 user experience followed by the improvements worked into Java SE 6. All of the dialogs in the critical path in 5.0 were condensed to a single dialog and a non-critical-path More Information dialog. In Java SE 5.0 the number of clicks it takes to run the application is three and in Java SE 6 it is one.
Masthead image derived from: Stairs In Memory © Severin Koller for openphoto.net CC:Attribution