home | blog archives | contact me
Saturday, March 31, 2001
Peterme linked to Fiona Raby's talk at Doors of Perception. I'm happy to link to it too since it was one of the talks that really excited me. Raby's idea (and the reason she was at Doors 6) was that wireless services should be as "light" as possible; they should understand what the user is doing, what she has done before, and where she is. The friendly cat application was really wonderful: a little animated kitty would arrive on your phone if you entered a certain region in the city. The more you come back to that place, the more the kitty gets to know you. The animated cat becomes more friendly and playful with each visit, and eventually will start meeting you in other places in the city.
Along those lines, Annotate Space sounds like a good idea for a useful service that follows the same principles: know where the user is and what kinds of things she might want to hear or read about a place. Hmm. It sounds a little like the "listening wands" you get at some museums to carry as you walk around.
Thanks, I believe I will steal some code from glish.com's CSS layouts soon.
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Hello Design has quite a nice Flash-based site, including some nifty Flash interface experiments.
Two things about OpenCola: 1) Their products sound amazingly cool. I sure hope there will be Mac versions. The graphic design of the product boxes alone makes me love them. 2) Their recipe for home-brew open-source cola (the drinkin' kind) is somewhat terrifying. I'm glad I gave up sodas.
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
I'm still finishing Alexander's The Timeless Way of Building. For some reason, all the examples of HCI patterns I've read, like Interaction Patterns in User Interfaces just seem...not right. Part of the reason, I think, is that Alexander is effectively saying: using good Patterns will Make Life Better, it will tend to nurture the Quality Without a Name that makes a Place Good. It has a clear sense of Good/Bad and Right/Wrong.
I think that the makers of HCI patterns, who tend to be academic authors, are wary of sounding so authoritarian. Postmodernism tells us that I can't know what "good" for you is. I can't really understand your intent, and certainly I can't impose my value system of good/bad on you. But of course Alexander's patterns do have explicit values throughout. That's why this pattern language for a Conservation Ecosystem seems so sucessful, evocative, and useful.
What would be a UI pattern language equivalent for the Conservation Economy pattern "Quality of Life?" It begins:
When resources are not fairly directed to meeting fundamental needs because of underlying social inequity, quality of life is eroded.
I know that UI patterns are also meant more to be mundane building blocks (like software patterns) than value statements, but does that mean that they never look beyond the interface?
Monday, March 26, 2001
I really enjoyed these two articles by Frode Hegland of the unfortunately evaporated LiquidInformation on The Mac OSX Dock and a follow-up called Going Glanceable. Well-written, terse, and dead-on criticisms of the Dock, including some excellent and specific ideas for improvement to it. Hegland has wonderful interface design writings and examples at his Implementations site as well. Hegland's work really shows the elegance and power of well thought-out design languages.
Friday, March 23, 2001
This article by JC Herz discusses how The Sims offers some lessons on how to run a business. She gets in a slam at IA, which is a little misplaced.
In the first flush of Internet excitement, companies spent a lot of money on "information architecture." Architecture, after all, was a great metaphor, full of modernist language about structure and engineering, clarity and navigation, form and function ....[but] This was not an architectural problem. This was an urban planning problem."
Tomato,tomato. The Sims is a rule-based system: little Sims get TVs, they dance, they're happy. No new products in the house, they get sad, stop interacting with each other, stop eating... it gets ugly. It's not a system of content organization, but it certainly is a kind of IA. Just as the system of producing the evolving Sims-product itself is--Maxis puts out a product that is extensible in ways govered by rules: you can create your own "products" for the Sims to buy and free them into the Sims universe for other people to add to their game, little modules of functionality that plug in to the main system.
Modular and rule-based systems of organization are, if anything, more effective ways of to classify and organize information (in some contexts) than the "Modernist" way of heirarchy building. Amazon has plenty of rules that govern its pages: ""show other stuff that people who bought this also bought," "show the last few things you looked at," "show lists of stuff made by people who liked this item," "show what's popular." It's not as if there's no IA here, but it's done by applying sets of rules to content with complex metadata, and building modular sections on the page.
Wednesday, March 21, 2001
Things that are painfully unusable today: version control systems (who can remember the difference between "current," "modified," "missing," and "not in view") and stick deodorant (its center of gravity gets higher the more it's used, so every day it's a little more likely to tip over and fall off the shelf)
Hey, I didn't know that patternlanguage.com was a website. It sure is a mess: bad images, bad navigation, useless Java applets, broken links (Google toolbar to the rescue again to find the page on discussions of generative sequences) but it seems to have the blessing of Alexander himself. Too bad the examples are under construction for members only.
I'm briefly quoted at goodexperience.com. My bit shows up in the entry for Monday, March 19, 2001 and you'll have to scroll down to March 15 to see what I'm responding to.
Saturday, March 17, 2001
Seems like everybody in the IA field is posting their thoughts on the sad closure of Argus. Argus was the Information Architecture Hall of Justice and the home of Lou Rosenfield and Peter Morville, the authors of The Book on IA.
I'm sure that many people's thoughts at first were along the lines of, "if they can't make it, who can?"
Of course the diaspora of Argonauts to other places can only help spread their expertise, which is good for us all. In a way, their closure is almost a good sign:
There's a tiny whole-and-organic foods place here in Austin, the Wheatsville Co-op. For years, it was the only such place in town. In the last five years or so, HEB's Central Market, the Super-global-mega-lo-mart of Food, has dominated my food world-view. They've not only got 100+ types of organic vegetables on display every day, but also a huge selection of wine, bulk food wonderfulness, bakery, and more. I worked there for a while and still shop there a couple of times a week.
I remember reading that the owners of Wheatsville, which has certainly suffered under the sucess of Central Market two blocks away, were in a way quite pleased with CM's sucess. Of course they want to see huge supermarket chains selling organic foods. That means healthier local foods are mainstream fare now. Same with Argus. If it weren't for the efforts of the little guys, I'm sure that Arthur Andersen's homepage wouldn't have references to Information Architecture and Experience Design plastered all over it. IA is (getting to be) mainstream fare now. A client at Cyberplex actually sent a bid we'd written up back to us becuase it had left IA out (hmm. note to self: read outgoing bids). My friends at Prodigy tell me that the CEO's made "customer experience" one of the company's highest priorities. When clients are asking for IAs at the start of projects, somebody did something right.
Thursday, March 15, 2001
Here's the building we're getting married in. I think I see an evil mad scientist peering out of one of the high tower windows. Maybe that's a JP?
