Category: Interface
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Design for discovery
One of the most interesting topics for information architecture is search. There are ways to find, explore, browse and discover things in digital domains. The value of information increases with the possibility of being found. So design for findability becomes the most important strategy to increase the value of information. One of the distinct experts…
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Naturalism vs. explicitness
There constantly is a discussion about making the computer feel more “natural” to the user. I do think that this approach led to the graphical user interface we are all used to today and it is philosophically the right approach to deal with technology. But I also do believe technology is not yet ready to…
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UI Design and market success
While researching some information about user interfaces for video sharing websites I stumbled over a statement in an article at news.com by Alonso Vera of NASA Ames Research: »Design is starting to change who succeeds and who fails. A few years ago that wasn’t true. If I had a better algorithm, I would win!« I…
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Multi-touch screens
Tobias Jordans pointed to a new astonishing video of a 8-by-3 inch two-panel multi-touch sensitive wall mounted screen: The video makes evident, that the interaction feels continuous and natural. And since Apple has shown with the iPhone that multi-touch can improve small interfaces as well, I think this technology could replace the mouse one day.…
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Leopard preview
Keynote presentations from the WWDC are always very entertaining to watch – even though the author of this Wired article thinks the presentation was uninspiring. I don’t think so. The business numbers were impressive. Apple sales and market share is growing. That is a change. Apple always had a small market share. The machines were…
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Mnemomap
Tim and Simon from send|recieve presented a verly early alpha version of Mnemomap one week ago on the Webmontag event in Cologne (which happened to be the first one in Cologne I couldn’t attend). I am sure they’d love anyone to try Mnemomap and drop some feedback about it. The About page states: mnemomap is…
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The JavaScript Accessibility Problem
James Edwards from Sitepoint.com looks at AJAX and Screenreaders: There doesn’t appear to be any reliable way to notify screen readers of an update in the DOM. There are piecemeal approaches that work for one or more devices, but no overall approach or combination that would cover them all. The Mozilla Developer Center offers some…
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Mighty Mouse not so mighty
Tim Bruysten forgot his »Apple Mighty Mouse« after his presentation on Web Monday meet-up. I took it with me to hand it back to him later. I am using it now. And I have to say: I don’t like it. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but generally the absence of physical…
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Consistency in Design is (part of) the right approach
Jared Spool points out that consistency is a matter of dealing with user’s current knowledge – not with formal elements of the visual design. Unfortunatly he uses a very misleading headline for is article which is really not in line with the point he is trying to make. The headline is »Consistency in Design is…
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Dynamic Speedometers
The Stanford HCI Group is working on car dashboards that discourage drivers from speedig. They’ve put some of their early brainstorming results online.
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DenkWerkzeug 2005
Actually I wanted to join the 2nd DenkWerkzeug meeting in Karlsruhe (organized by Heiko Haller) tomorrow but I can’t make it. I would have been glad to discuss strategies for knowledge tools and possible approaches for a PKM introductory course. Better luck next time…
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Updgrade to Tiger
I upgraded my PowerBook to the latest Tiger release. In 20 years of working with computers I never experienced a system upgrade that was so easy. After cloning the complete internal harddisk to an equally sized external one (with Carbon Copy Cloner) I did a clean re-install of MacOS X 10.4 Tiger. Tiger comes with…
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Delicious Library
This application simply rocks: Delicious Library You can hold a book with a barcode in front of your iSight camera and it automatically gets added to a virtual book shelf (with thumbnail, price tag and summary). You can then create and export sub-collections. I would have bought this application for $40 instantly – if only…
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2D interface for spacial design
One of the most challenging issues for software user interface design is to provide a 2D surface to a 3D design space. SketchUp is some kind of sketching tool that seems to be full of ideas of how to solve this problem (at least it appears to be from the training videos).
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Notebook conferences
I remember when there was a discussion about “Notebook universities” in and around some universities in my area. They were supposed to conceptualize how they would utilize notebooks. These concepts were evaluated to decide which universities get funding for WLAN and Laptop equipment. If I remember correctly the concepts were usually not very inspired. Few…
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Project Looking Glass fallacy
Sun released a public version of their 3D desktop Project Looking Glass. There is a demo video with Jonathan Schwartz (weblog), Executive Vice President of Software at Sun Microsystems, who claims: The dominant company that provides the desktop doesn’t want to show you that [innovation on the desktop] because they do not want to do…