Just to share a home-made video based on a digital hologram. The quality is not awesome but you can see how trough a piece o paper you can have “life” in your hands! (Youtube video, 1min):
If you´re curious about how this can be done, check this out: FLARToolkit.
Everytime we decide to watch a DVD film we always face the same problem: What surprises will give us the film´s menu to set up language, subtitles, extras…?
It´s like a strange disease: None of these menus are the same, navigation between items are always different and the resources they use to tell you where you are inside the menu change from one DVD to another. Some of them choose themselves what “they think” you want you, some not…
Why the hell a sooo simple navigation scheme has to be sooo difficult to use? I´m afraid that this is because the main objective is to make these menus visual, trendy, cool. But visual, trendy or cool should be the film not the elements to put that film to work… I bet you that lot of elderly people cannot set the way they want a simple film.
“The menus themselves suffer badly from lack of standardization”. I think one of these days I´ll try to work on some guidelines for this silly stuff the right way.
Further reading: DVD Menu Design: The Failures of Web Design Recreated Yet Again
Larry Tesler is a computer scientist with a strong background in Interaction Design. He´s been working for several decades at Xerox PARC, Yahoo!, Amazon and Apple Computer.
In 1985, while working for the MacApp object-oriented framework at Apple,Tesler came up with an interesting law called Conservation of Complexity. According to this statement every application have an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. Beyond a given point, simplification can´t be improved.
An example to understand Tesler´s law was given by Dan Shaffer in his book “Designing for Interaction“:
“For an e-mail message, two elements are required: your e-mail address and the address of the person to whom you are sending the mail. If either of these items is missing, the e-mail can´t be sent, and your e-mail client will tell you so. It´s a necessary complexity. But some of that burden has likely been shifted to your e-mail client. You don´t typically have to enter your e-mail address every time you send e-mail; the e-mail program handles that task for you (…). The complesity isn´t gone, thought – instead, some of it has been shifted to the software.”
But I think this complexity is just inherent to a period of time. Innovation technology is strong enough to overcome those complex situations we human are sometimes faced to. Complexity, when talking about technology, is just a question of time.
Bullet points, those little dots placed next to a sentence, are a powerful tool to communicate in digital environments.
Users unconsciously appreciate content organized in small slots of information. Bullet points (when used properly) give readers the joy of reading more efficiently.
From the side of the editor, writing content with bullet points force the writer to reduce the amount of information to be shown, forcing to re-think what is critical and what is less important.
Readers, on the other side, will pay more attention to content organized with this typographical resource. Our eyes are more willing to watch at this little dots than to the rest of the “straight” content. They seem to have the more important information.
Bullet points can be an important tool when launching a new product and explaining what is all about. Good examples of a well applied use of bullet points can be seen in FriendFeed´s homepage. Three “thumbnail bullets” explain what the service is about:
Tumblr is less explicit, and the hole service is explained using a block of text:
A different approach, using bullet points, could be this one:
No more than seven items:
According to George A. Miller´s “Magic 7″ article (1956), number “seven” is almost universally accepted as the human capacity limit for a wide range of issues. This “law” also applies to the use of bullets: more than seven items reduce the power of communication in digital screens.
No less than three:
If you only have two bullets, maybe the right approach would be (again) to reduce those two lines into one single line. While two bullets are meaningful, three bullets are the perfect number.
I love watching the activity of these working “Lemmings” when I am waiting for a flight connection at the airport. They just don´t stop working!
And, the more I see of them, the more I think they perfectly fit to this famous statement: “Form follows function“, one of the main principles of Bauhaus´s Design School.
They´re ugly, they look uncomfortable, they don´t leave any space for personal customization and, depending on the country you´re, they look a bit different, adapted to the local context they work with.
But, on the other side, their output is brilliant. They´re machines focused 100% on the activity. All the beautiful stuff has been forgotten. What remains is just for improving the outcome. They´re perfect for the work they´ve been designed for. To me they´re the best example of “just what you need and nothing else”.
Sometimes I like to think that one of these days digital products will be like these airport vehicles…
A few days ago Dan Saffer published his last book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. A friend of Dan, Rachel Glaves, from Adaptive Path, helped him drawing some of the most common gestures for gestual interaction: Tapping, sliding, pointing, dragging, pinching, and spreading.
These drawings are now available for everybody. You can get the stencils for Omnigraffe (.zip), Illustrator CS3 (.zip) and Photoshop (.zip).
The interesting making-of can be seen in the following picture:
Full screen on Flickr. Enjoy them!!
Next December is going to be white, white and cold.
Seisdeagosto.com is packing back again and moving to Helsinki to work on a challenging project with Fjord, a strong company focused 100% on something we love here: Simplicity.
BBC, HP, Nokia, Orange, Vodafone or Yahoo! are some of the clients this Nordic company has already worked with.
See you soon Xinoxano! Moikka!!
I´ve been using Delicious as a tool for bookmarking since it was born, back in 2003, when it was a small project. Those times tagging was an emerging feature and users somehow weren´t really aware about how good would be if the www was tagged properly.
Delicious was only the beginning, more than a lab experiment, where we found deep intentions of introducing descriptions of information – in this case, when we were about to save them in our bookmark list- . Today, only 5 years later, we can see some interesting results while searching content on the web…
As we know, popular search engines use an algorithm to show users results based on their queries. These results aren´t “human oriented”: The answer we get from the system is a bunch of results based on something serveral servers evoke, showing you the results throughout a concrete interface, no matter if we´re talking about Google, Ask or Yahoo!: They all show you results from an algorithm perspective.
If I want to find out information about, let´s say, houses made of wood I can Google queries like “wood houses” getting the following SERP:
If you´re looking for specific slots of information probably you won´t know where to start (maybe you´ll click somewhere aroung Google´s Golden Triangle and depending on your expectations you´ll come back and try with another query or another search engine).
Typing the same queries in Delicious we get a different point of view, what I call the golden triangle of social search:
Summing up: Useful, human and simple, exactly the right approach we need to give to this huge growing amount of information we have flying online.
Curiously, since mid-2008 Google is trying to give Google SERP´s a more human/social approach, giving users the choice of voting and adding comments to search results. Although not everybody is happy enough with this idea, from my point of view soon or later we´ll need this kind of features to help us clicking on the right link, saving us time.
The interesting thing about Delicious is that users aren´t forced to put tags on their bookmarks, they do it because is something they get benefit from it: Having a neat and tidy bookmark list make scanning it less painful. And, extra ball, at the same time, they´re contributing to the rest of the community.
The more you use Delicious to find decent web results the more you realize you need it. Give it a try and you´ll see…
How many times have I dreamt about Tetri´s figures falling while sleeping?! Damn! Hundreds!! And I am sure I wasn´t the only one, lots of people have had the same experience: Addicted to this arcade videogame made of simple figures. Always thinking about how to erase lines to get to a harder level.
The person behind this game nightmare: Mr. Alexey Pajitnov, a computer engineer from Russia, who developed it in 1984 while working for the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, in Moscow.
Mr. Pajitnov was inspired by a popular game, Pentomino, played on an grid by two or three player where the figures were composed of five squares, connected orthogonally (The Pentaminoes. The ones with four squares were called Tetraminoes). The name “Tetris” was born by joining two of Mr. Pajitnov´s passions: Tetraminoes and tennis.
The history behind this game really deserves a film:
As he was a worker for the Soviet goverment the institution licensed and managed Tetris and he received no loyalties at all for it. Goverment advertised the game under the slogan “From Russia with Love”.
The first version was developed on an Elektronika 60 computer and after that ported to an IBM PC. This last version “made its way to Budapest, where it was ported to various platforms and was “discovered” by a British software house named Andromeda. They attempted to contact Pajitnov to secure the rights for the PC version, but before the deal was firmly settled, they had already sold the rights to Spectrum HoloByte. After failing to settle the deal with Pajitnov, Andromeda attempted to license it from the Hungarian programmers instead”.
And all this happened behind the Iron Curtain when the KGB was watching any activity in the USSR that was attracting foreign visitors…
The nex video explains a little bit how it all happened, the first attempt to sell the videogame (YouTube, 0:58min):
At the end, Pajitnov, together with Vladimir Pokhilko, and HCI academic who helped him in developing the videogame, moved to the United States and founded the Tetris Company in Hawaii with Henk Rogers, a video game designer and entrepreneur, who won the license for Nintendo’s handheld and console versions of the computer game Tetris.
A complex history for one of the simplest videogames ever created, one of the ones such addictive that even got a category in mental dissorders (The Tetris hallucination) and drove companies to see how workers were much more less productive because of this addiction.
Video games have been revolutionized from the simple yet complex Tetris to modern music video game tournaments on the next guitar hero.
Emerging ambient devices give users a unique way of giving information without having to be in front of a screen. This kind of devices use contextual environment as the front-end. Interaction between device and user is minimal and cognitive efforts to understand information falls dramatically.
The following image is just an example: Ambient Umbrella “tells you” when it´s going to rain by glowing a soft light in the handle:
The company behind this kind of state of the art gadgets is Ambient Devices, and having a look at the team we can see brilliant minds such us Nicholas Negroponte or Richard Saul Wurman.
To me, the richness of this kind of products lies in how they´re designed to give information without paying attention to them. We don´t need to stop and start to understand the inputs we are getting from these devices. And this is really important nowadays: As NYT says “Since the 1990s, we’ve accepted multitasking without question. Virtually all of us spend part or most of our day either rapidly switching from one task to another or juggling two or more things at the same time“.
The challenge for Environmental Interaction Design is obvious: You´re not designing something to be showed on a screen, you´re designing something that will be running contextually on a handle, hanging on a fridge or wherever and above all, with a low level of user´s attention, always in a hurry.