Category: Interface Design and Usability

The Charles Booth Online Archive has a neat interactive version of Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889 synchronized with a modern street map.

StrangeBanana: Computer-generated webpage design is “Just Another Website” with a twist. You can see a random new design for the site just by pressing “refresh”. They also show you how to use any design you like for your own page. I got this from the Biased History of Interactive Media site blogged before.

Hunting and killing online – Mouse Click Brings Home Thrill of the Hunt. Yes, now you can subscribe to an online hunting experience where you can control a gun and fire it remotely (you do need a valid Texas hunting license). What can I say.

Thanks to Matt Patey who pointed me to Greasemonkey which offers a Firefox extension that allows you control aspects of page’s design using DHTML.

There is a story on Wired News: Firefox Users Monkey With the Web about this.

If this catches on it will return some control over the interface back to the browser in the never ending see-saw between designer and user control over the interface.

After years of making fun of the arts, it turns out that design skills are the new IQ (Imagination Quotient) for business (and, for that matter, engineering.) From a meeting with Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) folks and from Audrey Carr I have heard about the new Rotman & OCAD collaboration, see The Business of Design.

Web Pages That Suck is a blog about mistakes of web design. I found the site looking at a site I rather liked, one art | design for use, which claims its readership went up when it got an honorable mention.
The idea of teasing bad design is a good one. This should be good to use and read for classes.

The Logitech Advanced io2 Digital Writing System is a pen which stores the paths that you write and draw for downloading to the computer. It works with special paper that has a pattern of tiny dots that are tracked by a sensor under the nib. (See LogitechÆ io‚Ñ¢ Digital Writing” href=”http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm?PATH=products/features/digitalwriting&PAGE=products/features/digitalwriting&CRID=1545&REF=CRID=1545&countryid=19&languageid=1″>Logitech Products >Logitech’s Digital Writing site.
The underlying technology is called Anoto and it is also being used in products like LeapFrog’s FLY pentop computer for kids. Fly lets kids draw out a piano keyboard and then lets you play the piano by pressing the pen to the keys. A sound synthesizer plays the note.
Such pen and voice systems suggest a whole new type of interface that is not screen or touch pad based. You could have a pen shaped phone where you just write the phone number down and it calls it. The trick is the paper that lets it tack its absolute position even if you raise the pen and move it. I’m sure we are going to see innovative uses for this technology that take advantage of what you can do when you don’t need a screen.
Continue reading Digital Pens (Anoto, io2, and Fly)

One of the best designed web magazines, the CBCRadio3.com Magazine site has “published” its last issue. An article in the Globe and Mail by Alexandra Gill, “CBC Radio Three’s lauded Web mag dies” (March 5, 2005, Page R5) nicely points out the irony of CBC killing this award winning radio site just when others are moving in.
I know from my students that the site had the attention of the youth demographic (or at least some of them.) It was an attempt to reach youth in a way that CBC Radio 1 and 2 didn’t. It was a multimedia magazine with music, arts, and essays rather than a radio show. The site lets you listen to music (and control it) as you read the mag – a bit like having the radio you listen to and the magazine you thumb through coordinated. The interface design was brilliant and immediately intriguing, even if difficult to figure out initially.
Why CBC is killing it is not clear. Perhaps not enough people want to watch radio off the screen or perhaps they want to get out of online media and stick to radio. Podcasts will be next.

Jef Raskin, arguably one of the pioneers of personal computer interfaces, has passed away. See his site, Jef Raskin – Welcome to JefRaskin.com.
For a notice on his passing see, Press Release, February 27, 2005 or TidBITS: In Memoriam: Jef Raskin, 1943-2005.
I became aware of Jef when reading about the Canon Cat (in Byte I think); I was pleased to see that the Canon Cat Manual is on the site.

Yet another cheap computer for the rest of the world initiative. This time a Linux box that around $100 USD. See The hundred-buck PC. This came to me from Matt Patey.