The papers and presentations from IBM’s Make IT Easy conference are up. Among them are presentations by Marti Hearst, Nathan Shedroff, and Clifford Nass.
When I see reports like this wonderful study on the LCDs in the Space Shuttle, I want to abandon all this blathering web work, get my Ph.D, and be state of the art. Designing better medical device UIs might nicely combine my love of design and my idealist longings.
This iPod design article is an interesting look at the hardware challenges Apple faced. From a user interface perspective there’s only this: ‘ “First and foremost, the product was elegantly designed in classic Apple fashion,” says David Carey, president of Portelligent. “They did product design from the outside in.” Carey says the company had a vision of what the player should be and what it should look like. The subsequent design parameters were dictated by its appearance and form factor.‘
Link courtesy of David Wertheimer.
…might be a good slogan for a user-centered design firm.
Reminds me a little of Human Context’s Business = People
Like some crazy whirling vortex, Razorfish keeps sucking up talented folks. This time its Molly. Yay!
Winners of the Industrial Designers Society of America IDEA 2002 Awards (shamelessly ripped out of their frameset. Pfffft). My fav, the BMW Streetcarver skateboard. Ahh, to be a rich youth in Bavaria.
Here’s some wonderful sketches of the Macintosh interface evolution that span back to the Lisa prototypes. Those system 6 and 7 screen shots get me all misty-eyed…I used to live and breathe Macintosh in those days. Funny that the Lisa had multitasking and protected memory in 1984, I wonder how that was left out of the Mac? Really, back in 1984, it wasn’t needed in a personal computer. Grafting a user interface onto a free version of Unix probably wouldn’t struck them as pretty damn strange back then.
Thanks to Ben for the link.
Using the Help Viewer in Mac OS X I wondered in frustrated amazement that they didn’t include a back button to return to the search results list of documents. In fact, it is there, they just moved it from the top left to the bottom right…
Which is the right place for it. The two most frequently used interface widgets are the scroll bar and the back button. Usually we browse a page and move the scroll bar to the botton right. If we don’t find what we’re looking for it’s the antithesis of efficiency to go to the opposite corner to use the back button. Moving such a commonly used button takes balls on Apple’s part, but it’s a small and important step to improving browser navigation.
While we’re on the subject, the Help Viewer icon cracks me up…
What are zills? Thousands of dollars in musical education didn’t teach me this. When I wanted to know, it just made more sense to look for a picture than for a description.
Tolerance.org, for which I did the original IA and led the experience team, won a Webby for best Activism site. And Guggenheim.com, produced by some friends of mine, won for best broadband site. That’s nice.
I still think awards are stupid, somewhat opposed to the aims of user-centered design. But I slaved over that site, so I’ll be over here basking in the ‘congratulations’ emails for a while.
Speaking of Powerpoint, I think the common format sucks, but not in the usual way people say it sucks (too concise to be meaningful, or boring). I think communicating in presentation format is fine when the occasion calls for it. The problems I see are
So, I’m going to try a format that uses one big image next to a paragraph of text. The text will be at a typeface impossible to read from the audience, wherever that is, so people will be forced to either listen to me or daydream. And it will contain more information than the usual bullet points, so it’ll make sense without having to present it. And the image will serve to reinforce the words, or induce daydreaming. I will feed their ears and their eyes and they shall be satisfied.
Last year, I think, I did some work at an Ivory Tower consulting firm. They have a rich tradition of internal research; every consultant is required to pump out a certain minimum of work for internal use per year. In recent history though, instead of the old white papers, consultants have been contributing their Powerpoint slides to the pool of thought. And when searching for research internally (which they, in their elite position, prefer), the librarians there report they tend to read Powerpoint decks over other formats, as the information in that format is accessed more quickly. I have to wonder if they’ve found a more efficient way or if there’s details being lost in the shuffle in the interest of speed.
Remember n_gen (site’s down, or else I’d link there)? There’s an interview with its makers. Smart, sensible folks. My favorite bits:
By analyzing what we believe to be successful designs, is it possible to determine formulae for what is pleasing to the eye? What are the rules and principles that talented designers instinctively employ in their work and can these rules be simulated by a computer program? ….
We see a lot of software out there that is intended to streamline the production process, but it’s as if the design/conceptualizing process is a sacred cow that mustn’t be touched, as if creativity and hard work go hand in hand….
Graphic design virtuosity is not that rare or special and as much as we love beautiful design, applying a pretty skin to something structurally ordinary is not that interesting to us anymore. I suppose we’re just trying to wake people up a bit and suggest that maybe there’s more to design than throwing nice pictures on top of conventional information structures….
Designers need to realize that they’ve had a monopoly on digital visualization for some time now, and that time is coming to an end.
My two cents. In short, I agree with Adam, ‘it’s a big step in the right direction, for both parties.‘
Look there, in between the Oreos and the Pringles, it’s…an automatic teller machine!
The basic idea here is great: there are a million bodegas in New York that would like to have ATMs inside their tiny spaces. But why build all the cash-dispensing mechanics into the ATM when it’s sitting right near a machine that already does this – the cash register. It works like a normal ATM but dispenses a receipt at the end which you give to the cashier who gives you cash. Supermarkets can afford to retool their registers, but small shops can’t. It’s a little unnerving trusting your ATM card to this thing (at one point the display read ‘dialing‘, implying it had an actual modem inside), but when you need cash you’re desperate.
