BASEMENT.ORG
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 30, 2007, 01:13PMArc90 Lab Flex Component : Shufflestack!
Arc90's very own Andy "Stacks" Lewisohn, Actionscript and Flex stud, has generously added a new tool to the beloved Arc90 Lab. It's a new container style called Shufflestack (you'll have to ask Andy why it's one word). It's an alternative approach to accordions and tabs that we've found works nicely in certain interfaces. You can check out the example and source code as well.
We hope to put out more Flex-related tools on the lab. We've got other things cooking that will hopefully come out of the kitchen soon. It's great to see a mix of Javascript, RSS and now Flex/Actionscript action on the Arc90 Lab.
Who knows what the kids at Arc90 will cook up next...
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 29, 2007, 09:30AMA Preview Of Flash CS3
Flash Magazine has a nice preview (with some racy screenshots) of Flash CS3. It's looking like a pretty significant, highly-integrated (think Photoshop and Illustrator integrated) release.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 28, 2007, 07:43PMNY Times : Double-Click Insanity
Here's a wacky little feature I never knew existed on NYTimes.com. If you're in any article (like this one), and double-click on any term, it'll bring up a dictionary or encylopedia view of that word. Pretty cool. It works in both web view and printer-friendly view.
Original Signal Releases Frontpage
Original Signal, that neat little pre-canned portal that aggregates a bunch of sites like Digg, Techcrunch, and such, has put out Frontpage - a summary of the hottest articles out there on any given day. It feels a lot like Techmeme.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 25, 2007, 02:11PMThe Boy Who Cried RSS
Take a quick glance at this snapshot of my Google Reader feed list. It's my "Shopping Deals" folder. If you look closely you'll notice I've all but abandoned reading all the other sites except one: Slickdeals. All the other shopping sites have over 100+ unread entries (Lord knows what the number really is). I'm really tempted to just unsubscribe from them altogether.
I'm gonna take a stab at an unwritten rule for RSS and information syndication:
The perceived importance and value of entries to readers is inversely proportional to the frequency of entries on any given day.
In other words, the more you post, the less I'm gonna care about any given post. I've only got a small, finite amount of "attention capital" to spend. I'd rather see bigger, more valuable posts than "penny posts."
Slickdeals still matters to me because implicit in the spareness of their postings (it's about 2-3 per day) is a care and selectiveness in deciding if something should go up at all. The other shopping sites spit out 30-40 entries a day. I tried keeping up but eventually gave up. Truth is, their posts were just one big blur. I'm sure there were some gems in there, but how am I supposed to know that? They've left the task of valuing their information to me, the reader. Big mistake.
Traditional blogs are really no different. I find myself valuing a blog far more if the author is careful about his or her topics and puts some real thought into them before posting. Contrast that with the mega-blogs Gizmodo and Engadget. They average about 50-80 posts per day. The result? Nothing is important. That's not a blog. That's a news wire service. The editorial duties have been left up to me.
Information is literally gushing out these days. We swim and paddle through it and are constantly searching for something worthwhile. What I appreciate about Slickdeals and sites like is that they still understand that their value lies not just the content of what they deliver but also the discretion they exercise in deciding what to publish at all.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 22, 2007, 09:38AMYahoo! Widgets Goes To Version 4
The Yahoo! Widget Blog reports that Yahoo! Widgets Goes To Version 4. A major new feature is the Widget Dock. Widges everywhere!
And Now For My Next Trick...
Dan Saffer of Adapative Path has an interesting write-up where he questions the need for user research in interaction design. Researching your users is pretty widely considered to be key ingredient to designing an effective user interface.
From the article:
Most experienced designers have enough expertise to get many products 80% designed without ever doing research, and sometimes that 80% is all that’s needed. Research can be a useful tool, but it can also be an ineffective waste of time. Good designers make good designs, not research. Even with good research, you can follow users (and time and money) down some serious rabbit holes, never to return.
If we step back and look at the predominant thinking around interaction design, user-centered design clearly dominates. And that's a good thing. For data gathering, it's good practice to research user profiles and needs, or at the very least, go through an inside-the-mind-of-the-user exercise to really get a good understanding of their goals.
While this is all well and good in terms of gatherng evidence, I think the breakdown occurs when it's time to go and build. That user data does not transfer over into a clear building strategy. That "magic" (and Dan himself calls it magic) happens in the designers mind. The role of user-centered design gives way at this point. It's already done its job: established the backdrop for the real building that's about to occur.
At the building phase, there's a lot less known or agreed upon about how good design comes to be. It just sort of...happens. All that research and thinking and debating boils down to a few gut moves by a designer. We take the puzzles in front of a us and assemble the solution. As Dan quotes Michael Bierut: Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic.
I'm curious to hear if anyone actually has a methodology (even a rough one) that they use to attack a design effort. Or do they just stroll around the ol' neighborhood waiting for the proverbial light bulb to go off.
In any case, I'm ok with this characterization. Heck, we're not just designers. We're magicians!
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 19, 2007, 09:05AMApollo Is Here
Apollo, Adobe's platform for running Flash/Flex, PDF and HTML/AJAX outstide of that gosh-darn browser is here (albeit in Alpha form). Ryan Stewart and many others are talking about it today.
It's an exciting time for both developers and interaction designers. That wall between stuff you "visit" and use on the Web and stuff you download, install and run on your desktop, is about to go away. Microsoft's coming at us with WPF (and its little brother WPF/E) and Adobe's got all sorts of plans with Apollo.
The kicker for Apollo is that it will run across OS's and will allow developers to quickly and easily migrate existing web and Flash/Flex apps to the desktop. More broadly speaking, this is part of a hole trend away from page-after-page and towards a sort of widget-ification of interfaces. Smaller, bite-size pieces of content and functionality. Portals sort of do that today. But they're still mostly confined to the walls of your browser.
Well, not no more. The browser is finally letting go. All told, it's an exciting time where we may well be at the cusp of something new and exciting.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 14, 2007, 09:53AMWill Wright at SXSW
Anyone who appreciates design, psychology, sociology, mass media, or how people interact with machines needs to read up on Will Wright. For the uninitiated, Wright is brains behind the Sim-series of games, including Sim City and The Sims. Beyond his game design skills, he's a fascinating person that almost always has interesting things to say.
The New Yorker published a nice writeup on him a few months ago and now, someone's been kind enough to roughly transcribe is SXSW keynote. Don't miss it.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 12, 2007, 09:41AMI Twitter, Therefore I Am
Months ago, I wrote a piece about the importance of space in information design. The moral of the post was pretty simple: if you've got a finite amount of canvas to work with (e.g. a web browser), don't cram all kinds of information tightly together. If there's too much stuff all packed together, the amount of "cognitive overhead" increases dramatically for the user. Instead, space out your elements and let people think. Eliminate clutter. Let people focus.
Well, "space" is not only important in web pages and print materials filled with information. Space is important in life as well. And we've got less and less of it these days. Instant messaging. Cell phones. Blackberries (is it plural with an "ies" or a "ys"?). We have very little cognitive "space" these days. Instead, we're constantly getting pinged from all directions.
And now we have...Twitter. It's essentially a status monitor for people. People, all day long, update their "status" (things like "eating cereal" or "ugh, gotta do tax forms!") and their friends can keep up to date on them.
Well, like it or not, it's starting to take off. At this point, people are probably just curious. It's already become in vogue to bash twitter. And rightfully so. It's inherently evil. It combines two things I despise: unnecessary noise and people who need to be acknowledged every three minutes. It's as if we didn't exist unless we twittered.
And so, for now at least, we continue to embrace clutter. And we continue to drift farther away from the virtues of giving each other space. With space comes opportunities for reflection, ideas, beyond shallow thinking.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 9, 2007, 09:08AMThe Semantic Web : One Mo' Time!
There's a bit of buzz today around a new startup called Metaweb. Metaweb is creating a new type of semantically-flavored version of Wikipedia called Freebase (heh).
In a nutshell, Freebase allows the community to contribute to facts about stuff, like Wikipedia, except with one key difference: the system wants the stuff in some semantically connected way.
We've actually chatted in the office here about how Wikipedia comes oh-so-close yet it's a near miss. There's all that great stuff yet, beyond a few hyperlinks, none if it is semantically connected. Tim Berners-Lee, has been introducing (and re-introducing, and re-introducing) the "next Web" or the Semantic Web for years now. And it still hasn't caught on. The eureka for me was FTrain's excellent semi-sci-fi scenario of how Google crushed everybody by capturing the semantic web.
For me, here's the thing with the semantic web: it's like Communism. It's really great on paper. But in practice, it's rife with problems half-filled promises. I think the crux of it, ironically, is usability. For something to take off, it must provide some sort of immediate, conceivable value to the masses upon touching it. Yeh, it can sound really cool in a white paper, but guess what? Nobody reads white papers. People are willing to do stuff that makes sense to them in an immediate way.
The most popular RSS reader in the world isn't an RSS reader and makes no mention of being one: My Yahoo! collects articles and puts them in one place. It's convenient and can easily be understood. Who cares about the inner workings of RSS?
For the semantic web to become real, we need to get the data in first. And that's a somewhat daunting task. All the evangelizing in the world won't galvanize people to get started. Instead, tools like Freebase and Google Base bring it down to earth for the average user. Recipes. Used cars. Stuff that may be worthwhile. Why else would be people contribute to the semantic web?
And there lies the rub: if you look at Google Base today, it's just plain...weird. It's essentially a collection of smaller database-style apps that don't seem very connected at all. Can I be perusing their personals section and find a recipe from one of the dating candidates? Or a used car they're trying to sell? Maybe the better question is: do I really want to?
For the general population, it feels kind of, well, half-baked. How do we get the masses to pitch in not only on the "data entry" side but on the creation of the semantic structure as a whole? Considering the usability challenges of making the semantic web take off as it is, maybe this is too lofty a goal.
Either way, like RSS, the barrier to adoption isn't technology or the capabilities of systems (though there are some interesting puzzles). The barrier is people. Like Berners-Lee's other invention, HTML, we need a killer app. For the masses, the browser was the invention, even though an underlying hyperlinked web was the real magic. The Semantic Web is in need of its own killer app.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 6, 2007, 09:09AMTotal Recall
Did you ever stumble on a song that you haven't heard in 10 or 15 years? A weird, reflective grin creeps into your face. Within seconds, you're singing along (maybe just in your head, but still...). Not only are you singing along, but somehow your brain reconnects all the pieces instantly and you recall the entire song nearly perfectly. Right down to the subtle note hits and vocal intonations.
Throughout our lives, we are in a perpetual state of taking in and filing away information. It's a near constant flow. As we age, the "storage area" where all this stuff is kept gets more and more cluttered. Eventually, we start reaching a point where pulling any one bit of information becomes tricky. Stuff gets buried here or there and unless some event forces us to recall it, we may never contemplate it again. Someone's name from years ago. Old phone numbers. Lessons learned in 4th or 5th grade. It's all there. It's just buried.
But when some event does occur that triggers a recall, it's amazing how thoroughly we appreciate the details of the recalled data. Music in particular seems to be a special case. The unique characteristics of music seems to lead to more reliable storage. But generally speaking, we once we call the information up, it's pretty thoroughly accessible.
As we design interfaces around information and controls, we should appreciate the difference between our mediocre ability to recall, and our impressive ability to have all the data at hand once we do recall. I use 37 Signals' Backpack pretty extensively. All day long I jot down reminders of things to do later, tomorrow, or next Monday. Lately, I've reduced my reminder text to one or two words. That's all I need to "trigger" all the information behind them. "Call Debbie" translates into all kinds of details almost instantly.
So as you think about your information designs, ask yourself how much information the user really needs to get going. After all, the less clutter the more impressive and digestible an interface becomes. Note that this has one key requirement: the user had to have had a hand in creating that data in the first place. That creation process "saves" the data into the person's brain and all that's often needed is a reference.
As a side note, I'd argue that people get a certain pleasure out of flexing those recall abilities. It feels really good to quickly piece together information you thought you'd forgetten way back when.
As designers, we should keep an eye out for opportunities to leverage this shared unique ability. With apologies to the Tuftes of the world, sometimes we don't need all that data at hand. We just need the spark.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 5, 2007, 01:39PMCool Distorted World Maps
Here are some cool world maps that have been distorted by superimposing certain statistics to inflate and deflate nations. It's a great example of how much we can communicate very rapidly by displaying data in visually understandable ways.
Posted by Richard Ziade on March 2, 2007, 10:44AMFree Vector Goodness
Somebody send whoevers behind Bittbox a cheese basket. There's a great set of vector assets that are pretty high quality that he's sharing. I'm liking the Free Vector Web Page Elements parts one, two and three.