There’s something that’s been bugging me for the last few months and I think I understand it now.
Resistance to disruptive technologies is common. But why can’t we see progress more clearly? Paraphrasing a million conversations going on in 2011:
“Kindles are nice, but I’d never get one as I like the feel of a book in my hand.”
Then 6 months later:
“Kindles are so easy. I can’t believe I used to carry a heavy book to work every day.”
The new look BBC website homepage has it’s links as just gray text. Not blue, not underlined and with only the faintest of hover effects. As a result, tired and at the end of the day, I found myself reading the headlines as absurdist poetry:
Sarkozy warns of disintegration,
Inquiry into unfair exam advice,
Child killer Black gets 25 years,
Lodger quizzed on double killing,
Dying woman calls for law change,
Double decker destroyed by fire,
Twitter did not incite rioting.
Something I’ve been doing more recently is modelling user journeys as a conversation between the website and the user. I’m not sure if anyone else uses this technique, but I find it useful—it involves simple imagining the website can talk to the user:
“Hi”“Hi, I’d like to buy doodad”“Great, here are the doodads we stock, we think this one is especially good.”“Thanks, I’d like more details on that one”…. etc.
Recently I was asked to redesign the order journey where a customer had come to the site to make a specific change to their current service. The requirement was to up-sell the customer some additional services while they were making the change to their existing service. This has obvious potential to irritate the customer when all they want to do is what they came to the site to do.
I looked for it but couldn’t find it so I made it. Here’s an Axure library of callout widgets:
It’s not exactly rocket science but hopefully someone might find it useful. Callouts are probably an oddity in the Axure world, as Axure is more based on prototypes rather than wireframes. But at work we use Axure more for traditional wireframes than prototypes so need callouts for on-page documentation. In this environment Axure’s killer feature is it’s SVN based system for collaborating on a shared file. (Try getting three people to successfully update a 100+ page Visio document at the same time without errors…)
(Warning – rambling, fairly unstructured and inconclusive thoughts ahead.)
I was recently reminded of a thought that’s been knocking around in my head for a while: when will we stop learning to write? When will children stop being taught to write with a pen? Will, in the not-too-distant future, pens and pencils become quaint antiques, as we see cassette tapes or non-digital cameras? If you where a toddler today why would you bother learning to write? It’s hard, messy, frustrating, slow and largely irrelevant to everyday life. Signing my name is about the only time I write anything now. If I have to write something longer it takes a few lines for my fingers to remember what they’re doing—it’s surprisingly easy for us to forget even skills we take for granted.
Belated links and inspiration and stuff I found interesting this week, decorated with some thoughts:
..but this video, from last year, of Bill Buxton talking about touch interfaces is worth a look: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/TechTalk-NUI-Whats-in-a-Name
People asking for directions to location can be seen as a ‘vote’ for that venue: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-of-google-maps-directions-logs.html. There’s probably a lot in it but the semantics of “I need to get to … ” are quite different to “That place was great!”. Not least as one happens before the event and one after.
Links and inspiration and stuff I found interesting this week, decorated with some thoughts:
http://www.gta4.net/map is a nice use of Google Street View that allows you to explore the GTA world. It reminds me of these interesting uses of custom Google maps: http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2009/08/design-portfolios-on-google-maps.html I’d like to see this sort of stuff used more/pushed futher.
“Sickweather scans social networks for indicators of illness”: http://sickweather.com/#2 Sounds like a nice idea for networked hypochondriacs. Seems like a logical extension of http://www.google.org/flutrends
The Wisdom of Crowds effect get less when members of the crowd influence it: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/wisdom-of-crowds-decline (This makes me think we should ban all press once an general election has been announced.)
It’s time for another Interface of the Week (actually it’s well overdue). This is a simple one, but it’s a solution that I think creates ate a nice user experience.
Thisismykea.com is a nice website that sells designs on sticky-back plastic that you can add to your plain Ikea furniture. It’s a good idea, and the website is well designed but this article is not really interested in most of it.
The part that has the earned the accolade of IotW is the product listing images that, when moused over, changes to show the design on different Ikea products. Moving the mouse from left to right scans through the images, here’s a quick video to illustrate:
Everyone else is doing it, but I’ve only got the one. Well, one and a wish.
In 2011 websites will become more produced. By ‘produced’ I mean something like ‘using time based effects to engage the user’.
Two powerful and extreme examples of this trend are:
If you’re not amazed and entertained by the first and moved by the later, then you’re a cold hearted cynic. Both these websites show how strong the effects of using time based effects to engage the user can be.
In a vain attempt to try to get myself writing on this blog more regularly, I’m going to start a weekly series about interfaces that have caught my eye. It’ll be originally titled ‘Interface of the week’. I’m not going to look at things too deeply, but rather just point out the interesting, inspiring, or possibly, interestingly improvable bits.
This week’s interface of the week is the interface of a new mobile phone : First Else. (No, I’d not heard of it either—and don’t visit that link—they have a hugely long and dull Flash intro that proclaims, apparently without irony, “Technology was supposed to make our lives easier”, ho hum…) Do look here, on Behance.