User Experience, Human Computer Interaction, and Things That Are Truly Great
Steven Johnson responding to a New Yorker column by George Packer:
Sure, companies went public or sold for staggering sums, but companies have been going public or selling out for generations without creating tens of thousands of millionaires along the way. The defining difference between Silicon Valley companies and almost every other industry in the U.S. is the virtually universal practice among tech companies of distributing meaningful equity (usually in the form of stock options) to ordinary employees. Before companies like Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard began the practice fifty years ago, distributing stock options to anyone other than top management was virtually unheard of. But the engineering tradition that spawned Silicon Valley was much more egalitarian than traditional corporate culture.
Many great points here.
Drawing With Computers
The Artist’s Guide To Computer Graphics
1985 book by Mark Wilson scanned + PDF freely available from the author, with interesting examples of computer graphic history.
You can download it here
Allison Fass reporting on Peter Thiel’s talk at SXSW this year where he recounted the time in 2006 that Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer to buy Facebook:
His only partial rationalization at the time was that in the history of Yahoo, it had made two $1 billion offers that were also turned down. And those were to eBay and Google. “At least I could actually make a pseudo-scientific argument that in every case Yahoo offered $1 billion and it was rejected, it was the correct thing to do,” said Thiel.
I should say that I know absolutely nothing about any sort of talks/deals between Tumblr and Yahoo. And I’m not sharing this to suggest that Tumblr should turn down such a supposed offer (my initial gut feeling is actually that such a partnership would make a lot of sense). I just found it fascinating given how closely the reported number is to the key number repeated in Thiel’s story.
… most people visit a .gov site once or twice a year—if that. So designing a dynamic, fresh interface is irrelevant—rather, the idea was to make the user experience as simple and static as possible.
There’s only one typeface on Gov.uk, and a somber color palette of black and white gradients and classic blue links. There are no Pinterest logos, no blog content, and precious few images. “You shouldn’t come to the website and say ‘wow, look at the graphic design!,’” Terrett says. “You should come to the website to find out what the minimum wage is.”
(Source: erinlynnyoung, via rio-ux)
Pixel Perfect Precision: UsTwo updates it’s popular UI / web design handbook.
This would have made a perfect pairing with my Principles of Interaction Design class.
The Grammar of Interactivity
Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of throwing it away.
(Source: longnow.org, via sprmario)
Prototype Real / Digital Info Interface System
Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.
“We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology.”
Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.
More at DigInfo here
RELATED: This is very similar to a concept developed in 1991 called ‘The Digital Desk’ [link]
Always give customers something to do. Anthropologie does a terrific job of bolstering its site maintenance with a helpful 1-800 number. Sure, this doesn’t allow people to browse awesome clothes or furniture that cost more than a year’s worth of car payments, but it does give customers the options to call about customer service issues. It also sets expectations that the site will eventually be back up, so me and their legions of customers know to check back later.
Back in the late 90s, in the process of reading for my MA dissertation, I put together a collection of hundreds of sentence stems that I felt could help me with my academic writing later on. And they did. Immensely. After the course was over, I stacked my sentences away, but kept wondering if I…
(Source: luizotaviobarros.com)
Want to make people run? Don’t give them a badge for running. Give them a ball and shove four sticks in the ground. They’ll run around the field chasing the ball (and each other) for ages. The experience is intrinsically challenging and amusing, and the running is a by-product. Games rely on dynamics like these and rules to generate the conditions for positive engagement.
Linked on Daring Fireball yesterday, this is a set of videos (and Quora/Branch stuff) showing how to build Facebook Home’s interface with Quartz Composer. Prototyping interfaces is one of those areas where the tools all have clear pros and cons - QC is what the Facebook team use, and given the fluidity of what they can build quickly, you can see why.
Truly powerful stuff.
Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then
describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice
(Source: djordjesavic, via courtneybolton)
Computer program can learn how to play and beat classic NES games
Classic NES games could be insanely difficult, but there was generally a pattern to the entire game, to the boss levels, etc. Straightforward and predictable, even if beating the game sometimes took superhuman reflexes. But if you take the human out of it and teach a program how to recognize those patterns, you would have this— a program that can learn how to play and beat the crap out of those difficult NES titles.
