Bumptop and User Experience: Creating new problems and solving them

This post has nothing to do with BizTalk or EAI/SOA/etc, but it’s interesting, so here it goes!

I’ve a thread with some colleagues about User Experience (something I see myself as an enthusiast). Somebody shared a video about Bumptop.

As the YouTube description states, “BumpTop is a fun, intuitive 3D desktop that keeps you organized and makes you more productive. Like a real desk, but better”.

Well, my point of view is quite different. The above picture shows all but organization. It’s a complete mess.

In my opinion, Bumptop is a huge effort to recreate the realworld™ desktop inside a Windows desktop. It’s a huge effort, and a huge step backwards: it has all lots of problems inherited from realworld™. In fact, in the picture abobe shows nothing but bad practices in tidiness. If only your mom saw this…

Lets take a feature, taken from the video, that will make your mom happier: it allows the user to tidy things by applying a mouse gesture over an untidy area, so everything inside the gesture get automatically organized in a small and nice pile.

Well, basically, this feature solves a problem that was created by Bumptop, which sounds funny to me! You can’t have the initial mess without Bumptop.

Even  more funny is a Media Love comment found in Bumptop home page. It states:

“Bumptop has become an indispensable tool for my company. Between stock imagery, fonts, plug-ins, or .pdfs, I am downloading anywhere between 12-25 files a day onto my desktop […]”

¿downloading 12-25 files a day onto the desktop? Well, I really recommend this person to go and attend to some kind of training such as “using a personal computer for dummies” or similar. I really can’t imagine a worse and less productive use of the desktop as a “download store”.

Here goes the video:

Also fun that some interesting features of Bumptop, shown in the video, has nothing to do with 3D or realworld™ metaphors, they are just some very clever use of drag and drop and file handlers.