Annabel Else, who worked as project manager and content strategist on the BBCi homepage redesign, has unfortunately had to leave us and is looking for pastures new.
If you need an editorial person with skills in project management, copywriting, editing, usability, content-strategy, metadata, CMS and other workflow related stuff; then go visit her homepage.
Filed under: Misc.
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“>This is amazing [requires Flash] Make sure you don’t skip anything, and stick around for the sneeze.
[thanks Ben!]
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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James Spahr’s beautiiful, spline-tastic visualisation of apache webserver traffic as feedback mechanism for information architects
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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(very) raw notes… my murmurings are in the [square brackets]
(more…)
Filed under: Conferences and events
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(very) raw notes… my murmurings are in the [square brackets]
(more…)
Filed under: Conferences and events
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File under “Ammo”: a Saul Bass anecdote with which to buttress brand-experience design:
“When my NatWest business cheque book finally did arrive with its tweaked logo and grown-up colours I was reminded of a Saul Bass story which might interest those responsible for the bank’s new look.When the design legend was invited to refresh the livery and visual identity for a chain of gas stations he drove into one of them to check out the customer experience. The forecourts were filthy, the attendants sloppy and the service virtually non-existent. When he called the client to find out what plans they had to address these issues, he was told not to worry because all that was expected from him was a bright new look and feel. He walked away from the job.”
» FT.com: Creative Business: Don’t bank on the brand
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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What are your absolute favourite pieces of web-native typography? Not flash, graphics text or anything other than CSS.
My current favourite is the Tufte-esque restraint of http://tesugen.com/irrational, closely followed by Venusburg and Interconnected.
Suggestions below please!
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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Since I’ve started running iChatStatus a week ago, 3 people 4 people (Hi Euan!) so far have IM’d me in response to the “now playing in iTunes” status I’ve asked it to display. They reponses have been ones of
Expression by proxy of the media I consume, ambient, trickling, clouding around me. To my friends, to my buddylist, while I’m busy doing other kinds of nothing.
Should it up-sticks with me and follow me round, this cloud? Just as iTunes never leaves me, pouring itself regularly into it’s iPod EVA suit. If I had a bluetooth cloud of ID3 tags around me would I like strangers to be able to sniff them?
What social advantage would there be to activating this SongGetty?
We often wear the t-shirts of the bands we want people to think we like while we secretly listen to deeply loved but unhip esoteria. Guilty pleasures contradicting our projected persona.
Also, I would ordinarily never play music to myself while in the physical proximity of my buddylist friends – I’d be talking with them I’d hope.
Some edge-cases and markets present themselves – long journeys in the company of friends maybe, opting to broadcast your playlists to others and seize upon coincidences as socially-acceptable interruptions of the natural (and hopefully comfortable) together-alone silences. Or the t-shirt metaphor transfigured: younger folk looking to find common ground in public settings around their media choices.
Betteridj likens it to active-badge tech/concepts pursued by the world and his wife for donkey’s years.
It’s here after a fashion in the form of iChatStatus: scriptable, personal and extensible.
—[n.b. must finish reading Byron and Nass]
Filed under: Interface innovations
5 Comments
Fabulous post from WDavies in iSociety’s continuing quest to examine the reliance of the networked society on emergent GoogleTruth. He attended a seminar/discussion about the influence of the kind of knowledge and ideas produced by policy thinktanks on society, which includes this fascinating list of characteristics:
“The type of knowledge produced by LSE and Demos is defined as:
- vehicular not ultimate [particularly interesting idea: this knowledge is not expected to remain valid, but to be a useful way of producing further knowledge by drawing interesting people together; its constantly snowballing and fragmenting]
- diagnostic not predictive
- meaning rich/information poor
- communicative not representational
- transient not timeless
- inclusive not polarising“
All it ever takes is a view well-placed /stutter/edit/ a few well-placed, finely-crafted, meaning-rich/info-poor Oblaat-shielded memebullets… The world is slicked with the vaz, and everything slides. Goodnight, United Nations.
» iSociety blog: “The university of chat”
Filed under: Society and culture
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Sounds like a great name for a pulp-fiction character. A UI Engineer that by night, uses his uncanny Fitts-lawhoned reflexes to FIGHT CRIME.
Alternatively, it could be something Stefan cares about a lot in his user-experiences.
FWIW, I agree with Stef. Tabs have mutated as to create such wildy different expectations in people using interfaces that feature them; but showing different modes or views of data based around a central point of departure or query seems to have emerged as the default understanding.
In 1999, Jakob Neilsen was bemoaning the fact that tabs where moving away from this meaning:
“I still think that less than 50% of sites use tabs in the (erroneous) meaning of navigating to the main sections of the site. Thus, I still think that the correct use of tabs is preferred and I recommend using different techniques to visualize the main areas of the site. But this may be a losing battle and I may have to revise this recommendation in a year or so if more and more sites adopt a misguided use of tabs.”
So, he was keeping his eye on whether the consensus/convention had shifted. With UI changes in 800lb convention-setting gorrilas like Hotmail and Amazon in the meantime, has it?
What’s your experience?
» Whitelabel.org: “Search engines and maintained keyword state”
Filed under: search and findability
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...it’s all about scriptable dancing bluetooth robots performing West Side Story round the watercooler:
“so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it’s a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots!”
Oh, and before I forget, I must thank Matt Webb for his nice words about the underlying concepts of BBCi Search.
» Interconnected.org: “slipping gently into the age of ubicomp…”
Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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Telempathics in keitai-culture:
“It seems girls just wanna find common ground, even if it’s designer handbags or the right pair of shoes. For 17-year-old Ayaka Sasaki, who lives on a farm in northern Japan, “Girls Walker gives me a heads up on what’s popular in Tokyo, so I don’t feel like such a hick.”
Meanwhile, Adam V-2 starts planning a moblogging conference, and the telempathics I really want to access today are only available via the googlecache.
» WiReD 11.03: Play: Blog Party
»
“>Girlswalker.com
[via Chris and Keitai-l]
Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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Haaaa-lle-lujah!
Halle-lu-jah, Halle-lu-jah,
Ha-lle-e-elujah.
» Usability News: The Impact of Paging vs. Scrolling on Reading Online Text Passages
[via Oskar van Rijswijk]
Filed under: Visual and graphic design
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Martin Belam from the BBCi search team is thinking about how ‘word bursts’ could help improve the performance of our “best links” recommendations:
“...what I set out to do was to capture these ‘bursts’ of words from day-to-day on the service. That in itself isn’t hard, my principle of comparing snapshots of the service usage and calculating the differences works fine for this, but there is no context to the individual words.Because it is nearly comic relief day, there were bursts in the use of ‘red’, ‘nose’ and ‘day’ as individual words within search – but on their own, without a human eye over them, they don’t logically group themselves together.
I wanted to find a way to put them into their context automatically for our editorial team – so they can concentrate on finding the best sites for our users, and not have to second-guess how they are going to look for them.”
» Currybet.net: “word bursts within BBC search log”
Filed under: search and findability
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From photomatt’s notes of SXSW panel “The Future: User-Centered Design Goes Mainstream” which featured Marc Rettig, JJG and Molly Steenson:
“...we make too big a deal of our prototype. A good story can be a prototype. Some film directors prototype their movies by telling people the story on a best. Be wise in how you apply those techniques. Iteration is at the heart of this. You can spend as much time as you want, you?re still going to be wrong. Three times around the wheel gets you pretty far.”
More on storytelling today from the barefoot doctor:
“What’s important and of real value, as opposed to relative, is not the myth you may feel tempted to use to justify yourself, but your own authority in terms of you being the one and only author of your own life story. You don’t need to draw on any higher authority to justify the story you’re creating – your very presence here is justification in itself.”
And finally, Belle and Sebastian:
“Now you’re a storyteller you might think you are without responsability
But in directions, actions and words
Cause and effect
You need consistency”
Filed under: Strategy and process
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Right then. If you had to get someone of guru-status to both introduce and inspire a group of about 100 designers from various backgrounds about the field of interaction design, who would you pick?
[Rule – you’re only allowed to nominate yourself, if you’re, like, Alan Kay or The Coop.]
Filed under: Conferences and events
18 Comments
Was down-in-the-dumps on Wednesday, so went and bought a p800.
It’s lovely.
Mini-review: camera not as good as Nokia7650, pda/pim stuff not fully explored by me yet, limited bluetooth fiddling due to lack-of-dongle atm; but the phone-UI is the biggest surprise: it’s great. One hand Jog-dial access to everything you need to do.
Filed under: Ubiquitous computing
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The Demos Greenhouse blog is warming up nicely, and has a RSS feed here (not full posts unfortunately)
Filed under: Blog watch
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Matt Locke has uncovered some wonderful stuff looking into slow networks:
“Googling on information for the slow networks post below, I came across this excellent paper from Princeton about communication networks in 18th Century Paris. The article gives an analysis of ‘Laffaire des Quatorze’ – an investigation by Parisian police into the author of some seditious poetry that had been circulating amongst students, clerks and priests. The interesting thing was that when they started tracing the route of the poetry, there was not the straight line back to an author that they expected, but a complex network of alterations, repurposing and adaptions that criss-crossed between 14 main protagonists (hence ‘The Affair of the Fourteen’). Its almost like a political combination of slow networks and a ‘rip.mix.burn’ philosophy, where the adaptation is part of the condition of a slow network. Very interesting…”
» Test.org.uk: More slowness – “L’affaire des Quatorze”
Filed under: Social Software
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