Above is “A Graphic Language For Touch” (Timo Arnall, 2005) which hopes to visually represent different interactions between information and physical objects or spaces. Using a universal set of symbols would be ideal, except the technologies are not yet standardized. If RFID were to become mainstream, imagine one of these graphics placed on an in-store object or in a taxi cab.
Yves Behar/fuseproject’s update to the One Laptop Per Child machine, the stunning XO-3, is a touchscreen tablet device slated for 2012 release with a surprising (and at this point, presumably theoretical) $75 price point.
Concept Video for Digital Magazine by BERG
This is quite well done. One thing I’d miss with an interface like this is the serendipity of connecting the left page layout and images with the right page. Sometimes those connections spark my interest in reading an article, or inspire me aesthetically. That said, BERG has created a mood with this video that is truly lifelike and an interface for the device that is as minimal as can be.
Lifehacker profiles a new netbook OS:
Chrome OS is a promising cloud-based operating system, but the big complaint most people have about it is that Chrome OS is entirely browser-based. New netbook OS Jolicloud is a lot like Chrome OS, but with the addition of killer desktop apps.
— Irish Times Skype interview with Don Norman
We are all librarians now. I’ll back that statement up over the course of this article, but if you’re already picturing a stern, bespectacled figure who might shush you at any moment, think again. Today, our lives represent a fusion of roles hitherto segregated to a minor piece of society- the author, the producer, the librarian. The libraries I’m talking about are networks of content on the web, and they’re run by ordinary users just like you and me. We create the content, using all kinds of simple yet powerful tools, with a prolificacy unheard of ever before. With those same tools, we can immediately package our content for distribution. And any content we find valuable—whether our own or someone else’s—we make sure to quickly share with others. Like librarians, we guide the reading of our contacts, and they perform the same function for us. We are personally doing the creating, the organizing, and the connecting- and this changes how the content is found and received.
In past articles, I’ve focused on creative strategies and helpful tools to enable you to plan effectively and execute professionally on the web. But I haven’t taken a close look at how we as users organize all this content and connect other users to it. This effort is much bigger than individual applications and has become such a natural part of our daily lives that it just hasn’t stood out much. But it is now clear that the way we organize online is having a profound effect upon the world of search.
Search has changed significantly, and just as we adapted to the algorithmic approach of search engines, we must also adapt to today’s crowded social environment. This month, I’d like to look at the ways that our use of social tools affects how we connect with content, and the practical ways we can apply this knowledge to improve websites.
More on Pentagram’s Litl from Fast Company (one new revelation that I didn’t realize- it has no hard drive!):
It’s baffling that no one’s really overhauling laptop design. They’re getting thinner and smaller, while capabilities and processing power swell, but the user interface stays exactly the same. Litl, a brand-new laptop, isn’t going to change the world—but it’s proof of what a set of excellent designers can do, if given a bit of breathing room.
The design pedigree is flagrantly high-caliber: One Laptop Per Child designer Yves Beharcreated the case; Abbott Miller designed the logo; and Lisa Strausfeld, our recent Master of Design, did the GUI, alongside Christian Marc Schmidt. There’s a joke about Voltron in there somewhere.
Tom Johnson applies this design principle to documentation:
But is less always more? I’m not sure. But if Apple’s minimalistic designs are any indicator of trends, minimalism in documentation is something to pay attention to. Here are five ideas for minimizing documentation…
I’m pretty impressed with the work Pentagram did developing the Litl computer. Very cool design for the machine itself, and very nice GUI.
I just finished reading an insightful post by John Hagel, which he titled Stupidity and the Internet as a response to Nicholas Carr’s much-discussed Atlantic piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I like the way that Hagel re-frames the discussion based upon form rather than effect. His idea seems to be that “the internet” (I’m going to use “the web” instead) can’t be assessed in simple either/or terms of stupifying or edifying, but aught to be considered based upon its currently evolving form. Here’s a quote:
The debate also largely took the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, in its current form as a given. This is a dangerous assumption given the speed of change in the underlying technology foundations of the Internet.
As one small example, we are seeing rapid evolution of both social network platforms and physical presence tools that will lead to a much more complex interweaving of physical and virtual environments. Sensors and imaging tools will give us much greater visibility into the world around us.
This point is pretty important, I think. I mentioned the “fractalization” of the web in Part 1 of my Future of the Web article, which speaks to his point about the increasing complexity and interwovenness of the web. In Part 2, I also thought about the shaping of the web by mobile and “web-enhanced” devices. These two concepts are going to have an extremely significant effect upon how the web is shaped and used in the very near future.
Then Hagel goes on to say something fascinating:
Tacit knowledge – that which cannot be readily expressed in published content of any length, whether snippets or books – has always been our most valuable knowledge. You can read all the books you want on brain surgery, but that alone will never qualify you to perform brain surgery. At an even simpler level, no book can teach you how to ride a bicycle.
The ultimate impact of the Internet on our intelligence will hinge on its ability to support the creation and sharing of tacit knowledge. Again, we are at the earliest stages of tapping into this potential.
This is where my skepticism tends to kick in. I often lament the real experiences I’m not having when I’m spending the majority of my time in front of a screen. Granted, I think what Hagel has in mind is that the potential to create and share tacit knowledge over the internet is contingent upon a post-screen web. In other words, a web that can be experienced and shaped away from the desk or handheld device. While such a web would enable tacit knowledge, it will also narrow the divide between the real and the virtual to such a degree that discerning between the two will be a matter of perspective or opinion. This could be frightening, or… something else.
This image comes from a pretty fascinating post from Information Architects, who participated in a paid pitch to redesign the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They lost the pitch, but evaluate the pros and cons of their approach in a thorough and truly humble way in this post.
They had some interesting ideas coming from the perspective of online user interface design, most of which I think would be wonderful to see put into practice. In particular, their idea of using blue text to highlight keywords within the text and both make the articles more scannable and “linked” to the Tages-Anzeiger website was wonderful. Here’s their description:
What’s that blue stuff? The idea is making the pages more scannable by using key words in blue. If you speak German you can actually read the front page in 20 seconds by flying over the blue key words. The idea is that if you type any of those key words on the website search, you will get a lit of articles in a chronological order about that subject. Links in print obviously doesn’t mean that you can click it, it means linking the paper to the online edition.
In the case of user-centered design, we do well at coming up with the right technology and features that perform in a way that meets the needs or behaviors we observe in our users. But we often neglect to consider the story that’s told through the interactions people have with the things we make. For this story to be apparent to people, let alone meaningful, those involved with the design of a product should have a shared sense of the kind of experience they are trying to create. In the domain of digital products the story comes from asking the big questions: What’s the product or service about? What will it do for the customer? Where does it fit into their lives? In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with?
How does a good story get built? With a theme, of course. Writers and filmmakers have been using themes to build stories for a very long time. They’re also not shy about designing explicitly for emotion and meaning. So why not designers? For us, a definition of the core value of experience can function as the theme that helps teams collectively build a more meaningful product. It’s the thing that can serve as a coordinating force behind the design. When the tangible elements of a product are all working together for the same purpose the product has a stronger story to tell. The theme is merely the thing that helps us deliver that story in the form of an experience.
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Cindy Chastain, in Experiencing Themes for Boxes and Arrows. A good article for sure. Here was my comment:
You had my interest immediately when I realized that you were both a designer and screenwriter (I got my BFA in film/video at RISD, but now work in web development). I completely get the idea of making the “story” the unifying element that brings together each individual discipline represented in the development process.
We’ve been exploring the concept of personas, who, as characters in the overall “story,” represent the goals of a site as well as the challenges of succeeding at those goals. By creating specific personas for each project, we can anticipate some of the barriers to communication, as well as identify new ways to articulate messages through copy and design that are most appropriate to the end user.
I’m with @Giles- there is much to enjoy in your article. I’m going to have our Project Management team read this as part of our professional enrichment program.
Good post from Boxes and Arrows- really worth checking out. Here was my comment:
This was a great overview. I completely agree with you that the point to emphasize about prototyping is not the tool itself, but the way that prototyping allows the team to focus on particular decisions related to information architecture without being distracted by issues of visual design. We’ve been prototyping in this way, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” way, for almost a decade now. We created a proprietary ‘grayscreen’ prototyping tool that we use to quickly build clickable, HTML prototype sites. Each page can be assembled either with stock generic content, like formatted lists, images, etc., or can have custom HTML placed in the content area. We use the latter approach most, which at first glance seems pretty low-fi. However, I’ve found that the simple HTML approach keeps us (not the client) focused on the basics rather than getting caught up in an unnecessary focus on ‘elegance’ and styling. Also, having the page layouts and functionality created with HTML allows us to make quick changes on the fly while we meet with our clients, rather than having to conclude our reviews, make changes, and then reconvene at a later time. All in all, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” approach enables a faster and more efficient process.
There are some cases, though, in which a higher visual fidelity has been necessary. We usually won’t go beyond the “grayscreen” visual scheme, but we might get pretty specific with things like relative text sizes if the particular project might benefit. For example, in designing a business news site, we employed very specific type styles in the prototype so our designers could understand how the extremely dense news landing pages’ content was organized.
I wrote a blog post (http://www.newfangled.com/newfangleds_iterative_website_p…) back in April in response to watching a video of David Kelly, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development, who said about prototyping that “You don’t find anything out until you start showing it to people.” One point that I emphasized was how important capturing feedback is. We have a commenting system built in that allows clients, project managers, designers and developers to contribute direction and feedback in context on a page by page basis. This is often essential for any one of our team members being able to properly interpret the prototype.
From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.
