I am loving Newsmap – a flash visualisation of Google News I found via the equally dazzling angermann2

From Matthew Thomas’ post “Why Free Software usability tends to suck”:

“The practice of releasing early, releasing often frequently causes severe damage to the interface. When a feature is incomplete, buggy, or slow, people get used to the incompleteness, or introduce preferences to cope with the bugginess or slowness. Then when the feature is finished, people complain about the completeness or try to retain the preferences. Similarly, when something has an inefficient design, people get used to the inefficiency, and complain when it becomes efficient. As a result, more user preferences get added, making the interface worse.”

[Found via Phil]

Saul Steinberg‘s iconic image depicting a New Yorker‘s view of the world:

With Google Lab’s personalised search view of the world…

Well, it made me giggle anyway…

Maybe they’ll add the rest of the world to a vaguely-useful granularity once it gets out of beta.

Ben Hyde on the magic of hypercard:

“It never competed with the installed base of developers. Instead it generated this amazing bloom of new tiny little applications. Instead it illustrated what happens when you manage to hand a useful tool over to a large unserved population of amateurs. The tail of the power-law curve.

I wonder, if flash is the closest modern equivalent; maybe so.”

I really regret never playing with Hypercard that much. Back in around 1987 I suppose, I nagged for a copy back at the print shop I used to work at after school, but I never really had the time or the persistence to get into it. And now it’s gone… sniff

Technorati, the web service for monitoring links between websites has redesigned. And it’s a nice evolution: there are some good things like the clear technical writing, the progress indicators (good to have as the site can chug a while at times) and some incremental improvements to results layouts as far as I can tell.

There are two things however which are getting “on my wick” to use a UK industry term.
Read More »

Quinn rules. Read her post on Segusoland in its entirety:

“mistaking launchers for the capacity of a computer, either as a user or designer, is mistaking the map’s index for the territory.”

» Ambiguous.org: segusoland: the good and bad of jailing interfaces

Had a couple of conversations with Danny and Quinn in San Diego about why Open Source UIs generally aren’t… Erm… Well… They suck*.

Here’s a half-formed one that was the basis of my side of the discussion with them.

Design generally operates at a different clock-speed, and generally evolves best over time when certain strata of it’s basis are moving slowly, such as the requirements, the code base or the context of use cf. “How buildings learn”, “Adaptive Design” etc.

Does the speed and diversity of open source iteration leave a designer – if they are involved at all – building on shifting sands?

Segusoland – a novel file manager seems to buck this trend, or at least suggest a new way forward in working with UI design in an open-source-context by establishing and publishing open-source human interface guidelines, to co-evolve with the code.

» Segusoland: Human Interface Guidelines
[via the more.theory weblog, and NooFace]

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* I may just think Open-Source UIs suck due to my ignorance and lack of exposure to excellent open-source UIs. If you know of any, or wish to offer an alternative appreciation based on your wider experience – then please let me know in the comments!

James has been working with ‘autofill’ scripts which reference the taxonomy of a website:

“Bottom line, when used in the current site I’m working on, a user will be more likely to tag images with one of the site’s 500 known keywords instead of an unknown term.”

Very, very nice; and makes one think of other structured data spaces where this would be a very useful UI widget.

» Designweenie: Autofill

^ Seen on a platform crane, Covent Garden, London.

Ashley Highfield, head of BBC New Media:

“Our aspiration is to make it really simple – we have got to make the web as easy as just pressing the red button on interactive TV and I think that is something we can do.

“Clearly those people who have already got broadband are the early adopters and I am not sure they are the people who will tip it for the majority.”

The BBC is also working on other ways to increase consumer interest in broadband. Mr Highfield is considering “broadbanderising” the BBC website, which gets 10m visitors a month.”

“Broadbanderising?” Apart from it being an abomination of a word worthy of Dubya – has this man never heard of Loosemore’s Law? Make the web like TV? I know the BBC is meant to provide stuff the market cannot, but when the market walked away from interactive TV, they might have been on to something. Didn’t he learn anything at his previous companies?

Gah! Why am I letting the BBC still stress me out! I have no words. So I’ll take someone elses:

“He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the people want is creating a fictitious demand for lower standards which he will then satisfy.”

Lord Reith would have made people love the command line, bless ‘im.