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Tuesday, May 29, 2001
Back from Seattle, and my immersion in the world of "management theory." Wow, and I thought I loved me some diagrams. These folks just crank those things out; everything's a "process" or a "model" or a "framework." They literally couldn't understand what each other was saying for all of the abstractions floating around. I gave a talk on user-centered design, which they seemed to like, although I think I went under their heads talking about real people and real goals like: "I need to finish my stupid self-evaluation form quickly and correctly so my boss doesn't get annoyed and I can go back to real work."
Peterme points to webmap, which purports to be a zooming interface along the lines of what Raskin proposes. But it's not. The contours of the zoomable regions look arbitrary (but tell me if I'm wrong). Also, when you zoom in, you lose the context of the larger regions. And what's that colored contour-lines area mean? I think zooming interfaces would be the greatest, if only someone would do it right. IA tool idea using a zoomable interface: zoomed out it's a site map of lines and boxes, zoomed in it's a wysiwyg editor for individual pages. Maybe for OSX?
Thursday, May 17, 2001
Hey suddenly it's a week later. It's amazing how busy it can be when you're out of work. Actually, a really excellent, but very short, project fell into my lap (thanks, Rob!). I'm going to be guiding a group in a two-day user-centered design session to help them come up with a new sevice for their site.
Thursday, May 10, 2001
Blah. No job now. rumor? Um...
Tuesday, May 01, 2001
If you've got the bandwidth, look at this Taking the best from a company history
-designing with Interaction Styles (6MB .pdf). This is the first time I've seen a decent discussion of "style" in the context of interaction design. "Style" is one of those words that we throw around: you've got style, I love the style of that dress, that style is so dated. It's almost always shorthand for a complex set of assumptions, shared knowledge, value judgements, and aesthetic descriptions.
The authors of this paper specify a definition of style and show how a historical study of a set of similar products (thermostats) is useful in understanding assumptions and design decisions in the products. How has the representation of time changed in the thermostats over 20 years? What ramifications do technological constraints have on interaction style over the years? The best thing is the solution that they come up with reverts aspects of the interface to decade-old interaction styles, but in a way that is in keeping with its contemporary visual and interaction styles.
