Category: Interface Design and Usability

Pathway – Wikipedia Visualization

Pathway ScreenPathway is a small custom application (just for Max OS X) that creates a visualization while you browse the Wikipedia. It is not a general pupose browser, it is just for the Wikipedia, but it includes some nice features for reflecting on the “path” you take through the wiki. I should note that paths are a feature Vannevar Bush talked about in “As We May Think” (Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.)

This comes from Matt.

Nielsen: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

Pattern in Reading Web PagesThere is an F-Shaped Pattern to the way users read the web according to one of Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns on usability. The Alertbox reports on a study that used eye tracking to see where users looked on a web page.

The study has implications for writing for the web if Nielsen is right that viewers typically scan a page in an “F” pattern where they scan a couple times horizontally and then vertically down.

RAMAC and Interactivity: Pictorial History of Media Technology

IBM 305 RAMACPictorial History of Media Technology is a slide show history of computing and media, especially video technology. It is on a site dedicated to “Capacitance Electronic Discs or CED’s, a consumer video format on grooved vinyl discs that was marketed by RCA in the 1980’s.” The slide show has pictures of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer with what was the first disk drive in production. What’s so important about the RAMAC?

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum in a blog entry on An Excerpt from Mechanisms, Professor RAMAC and in an article for Text Technology, Extreme Inscription: Towards a Grammatology of the Hard Drive, argues that,

Magnetic disk media, more specifically the hard disk drive, was to become that technology and, as much as bitmapped-GUIs and the mouse, usher in a new era of interactive, real-time computing.

Krischenbaum is right that interactivity wouldn’t be possible without random access memory and he takes this in an interesting direction around inscription. I look forward to his book.

Digital Ethnography: Know Ourselves

How can digital communication tools extend research? Digital Ethnography is a catchy idea for doing cheap ethnography where rather than embedding the researcher into the community, the participants use digital cameras, cell phones, and the web to document and send in their impressions. The idea, as described by Davis Masten and Tim Plowman of Cheskin
Strategic Consulting and Market Research, seems half fulfilled. The real potential of digital communication is for communities to understand themselves through ethnography. Suppose volunteers in a community documents facets of their experience AND interpreted it together?

Brenda Laurel: Design Research

Can research inform creativity? On Thursday I went to a talk by Brenda Laurel on Design Research. Some of what she says about design research is covered in the online paper, New Players, New Games. What I liked is the humanism and idealism of her approach, both for teaching and research/creation. “Market research tells you how to sell something. Design research shows you what to make” in the first place.
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