Category: Interface Design and Usability

The Saturday Globe has a beg story on the Mac mini, Jobs and Apple, Globetechnology: We’re in the era of Jobs II (Saturday, Jan. 15, 2005, by David Akin). In a companion peice online, that is a “Globe and Mail Update” titled, Apple jabbed by price point, Jack Kapica makes the point that the price point of $499 that Apple is hitting in the US doesn’t work for Canada when it becomes $630 Canadian. He also complains about the price for Apples, though that’s another story.
What no one noticed is that Mac mini is not that far from an iPod. Could Apple adapt the mini by adding a small LCD and battery to turn it into a Mac response to something like the OQO? At some point of miniaturization I won’t be synching my iPod with my computer, my iPod will be the computer that I dock when at the office and listen to on the way home.

I found an interesting use of HTML and Javascript while browsing this site on the Russian Futurist designer El Lissitzky (1890-1941), “Monuments of the Future”: Designs by El Lissitzky (Getty Research Institute). For the catalogue of the Soviet Pavilion’s installation at the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928, Lissitzky designed an accordion foldout of photomontages. The Getty Research Institute page for this foldout lets you scroll right across the panels of the foldout.
I’m not sure about the rest of the design for the site with its use of frames, but the information and images make this a first rate research site.
An interesting feature of the site is that you can compare HTML (“Common Format”) and Flash (“Enhanced”) versions. To my mind the HTML is better; I’m not sure what is enhanced about the Flash version.

The OQO is a cute miniature full PC which may blow PDAs out. The oqo: video shows it off, but also has a neat little visual history of the computer from the ENIAC to the Mac. I’m ready to buy one.

This is thanks to Laue, just a text ª OH-cue-oh.

Sabine Scholl has a simple and interesting interface to her personal site which looks like a very tall book that you can scroll up and down. I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is a visual joke on flipping pages and scrolling up and down to the site. All the links are just to anchors further down the “page”. This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~mz34/helpdesk.WMV is a video clip in Danish that is a very funny look at the technology of the book. One of the funniest things I have seen in a while and I don’t understand Danish. This came via the TEI-L and Matthew Zimmerman. We need an English version.

Update: Philip sent me a link to a YouTube version with English subtitles. Somehow it isn’t quite as funny.

The Croquet Project is developing an architecture for educational 3D networked computing. The idea is an OS that supports multiuser 3D shared worlds. Could this be an architecture for game studies to use?

Croquet is a combination of computer software and network architecture that supports deep collaboration and resource sharing among large numbers of users within the context of a large-scale distributed information system. Along with its ability to deliver compelling 3D visualization and simulations, the Croquet system’s components are designed with a focus on enabling massively multi-user peer-to-peer collaboration and communication. (Introduction, http://croquetproject.org/About_Croquet/about.html)

Continue reading Croquet Project

Institute without Boundaries is a collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and George Brown College. The Massive Change project is one of their joint projects. (See previous entry on Massive Change and Overrated Sight.) I am not sure what to think about the hubris of their announced goal, “Change the world” and their suggestion that design is the way, “What if life itself became a design project?”. It is good they are audacious, but when you exaggerate design into a salvation project can you live up to your design? Does the project remain a sketch?
Continue reading Change the world: Institute without Boundaries

Hip meets HCI – a hip-hop song about the need for usability testing, from Audrey.

Eyetrack III – What You Most Need to Know is a summary article about where and how people look at websites based on eyetracking research. The site includes a number of short articles on eyetracking tests.

css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design is a site with one page and many different CSS designs. It is a great demonstration of how design can change content and how form and content can be separated and then manipulated independently. This is thanks to StÈfan Sinclair.