(very) raw notes… my murmurings are in the [square brackets]
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Sweep the forecourt
File under “Ammo”: a Saul Bass anecdote with which to buttress brand-experience design:
“When my NatWest business cheque book finally did arrive with its tweaked logo and grown-up colours I was reminded of a Saul Bass story which might interest those responsible for the bank’s new look.
When the design legend was invited to refresh the livery and visual identity for a chain of gas stations he drove into one of them to check out the customer experience. The forecourts were filthy, the attendants sloppy and the service virtually non-existent. When he called the client to find out what plans they had to address these issues, he was told not to worry because all that was expected from him was a bright new look and feel. He walked away from the job.”
Type
What are your absolute favourite pieces of web-native typography? Not flash, graphics text or anything other than CSS.
My current favourite is the Tufte-esque restraint of http://tesugen.com/irrational, closely followed by Venusburg and Interconnected.
Suggestions below please!
iChatStatus
Since I’ve started running iChatStatus a week ago, 3 people 4 people (Hi Euan!) so far have IM’d me in response to the “now playing in iTunes” status I’ve asked it to display. They reponses have been ones of
- identification: “Hey! I’ve got that song! / I love that! / I was just listening to that”
- mood-divining: “aaah… Queens of the Stone Age, eh? Working? / Beach Boys! Happy about something are we?”
Expression by proxy of the media I consume, ambient, trickling, clouding around me. To my friends, to my buddylist, while I’m busy doing other kinds of nothing.
Should it up-sticks with me and follow me round, this cloud? Just as iTunes never leaves me, pouring itself regularly into it’s iPod EVA suit. If I had a bluetooth cloud of ID3 tags around me would I like strangers to be able to sniff them?
What social advantage would there be to activating this SongGetty?
We often wear the t-shirts of the bands we want people to think we like while we secretly listen to deeply loved but unhip esoteria. Guilty pleasures contradicting our projected persona.
Also, I would ordinarily never play music to myself while in the physical proximity of my buddylist friends – I’d be talking with them I’d hope.
Some edge-cases and markets present themselves – long journeys in the company of friends maybe, opting to broadcast your playlists to others and seize upon coincidences as socially-acceptable interruptions of the natural (and hopefully comfortable) together-alone silences. Or the t-shirt metaphor transfigured: younger folk looking to find common ground in public settings around their media choices.
Betteridj likens it to active-badge tech/concepts pursued by the world and his wife for donkey’s years.
It’s here after a fashion in the form of iChatStatus: scriptable, personal and extensible.
—
[n.b. must finish reading Byron and Nass]
Vehicular not ultimate
Fabulous post from WDavies in iSociety‘s continuing quest to examine the reliance of the networked society on emergent GoogleTruth. He attended a seminar/discussion about the influence of the kind of knowledge and ideas produced by policy thinktanks on society, which includes this fascinating list of characteristics:
“The type of knowledge produced by LSE and Demos is defined as:
- vehicular not ultimate [particularly interesting idea: this knowledge is not expected to remain valid, but to be a useful way of producing further knowledge by drawing interesting people together; its constantly snowballing and fragmenting]
- diagnostic not predictive
- meaning rich/information poor
- communicative not representational
- transient not timeless
- inclusive not polarising“
All it ever takes is a view well-placed /stutter/edit/ a few well-placed, finely-crafted, meaning-rich/info-poor Oblaat-shielded memebullets… The world is slicked with the vaz, and everything slides. Goodnight, United Nations.
Tab Context
Sounds like a great name for a pulp-fiction character. A UI Engineer that by night, uses his uncanny Fitts-law-honed reflexes to FIGHT CRIME.
Alternatively, it could be something Stefan cares about a lot in his user-experiences.
FWIW, I agree with Stef. Tabs have mutated as to create such wildy different expectations in people using interfaces that feature them; but showing different modes or views of data based around a central point of departure or query seems to have emerged as the default understanding.
In 1999, Jakob Neilsen was bemoaning the fact that tabs where moving away from this meaning:
“I still think that less than 50% of sites use tabs in the (erroneous) meaning of navigating to the main sections of the site. Thus, I still think that the correct use of tabs is preferred and I recommend using different techniques to visualize the main areas of the site. But this may be a losing battle and I may have to revise this recommendation in a year or so if more and more sites adopt a misguided use of tabs.”
So, he was keeping his eye on whether the consensus/convention had shifted. With UI changes in 800lb convention-setting gorrilas like Hotmail and Amazon in the meantime, has it?
What’s your experience?
» Whitelabel.org: “Search engines and maintained keyword state”
Forget “Hamlet on the holodeck”
…it’s all about scriptable dancing bluetooth robots performing West Side Story round the watercooler:
“so damn cool, so damn script them to dance when I get email, so damn walk around my desk and stand by my diary when it’s a birthday and eat that you closed garden SPOTwatch, so all of that that it needs to be said again: Dancing Bluetooth robots!”
Oh, and before I forget, I must thank Matt Webb for his nice words about the underlying concepts of BBCi Search.
» Interconnected.org: “slipping gently into the age of ubicomp…”
Fashion telemetry, fading telempathics.
Telempathics in keitai-culture:
“It seems girls just wanna find common ground, even if it’s designer handbags or the right pair of shoes. For 17-year-old Ayaka Sasaki, who lives on a farm in northern Japan, “Girls Walker gives me a heads up on what’s popular in Tokyo, so I don’t feel like such a hick.”
Meanwhile, Adam V-2 starts planning a moblogging conference, and the telempathics I really want to access today are only available via the googlecache.
» WiReD 11.03: Play: Blog Party
» Girlswalker.com
[via Chris and Keitai-l]
Haaaaa-lle-lujah!
Haaaa-lle-lujah!
Halle-lu-jah, Halle-lu-jah,
Ha-lle-e-elujah.
» Usability News: The Impact of Paging vs. Scrolling on Reading Online Text Passages
[via Oskar van Rijswijk]
Fit to burst
Martin Belam from the BBCi search team is thinking about how ‘word bursts’ could help improve the performance of our “best links” recommendations:
“…what I set out to do was to capture these ‘bursts’ of words from day-to-day on the service. That in itself isn’t hard, my principle of comparing snapshots of the service usage and calculating the differences works fine for this, but there is no context to the individual words.
Because it is nearly comic relief day, there were bursts in the use of ‘red’, ‘nose’ and ‘day’ as individual words within search – but on their own, without a human eye over them, they don’t logically group themselves together.
I wanted to find a way to put them into their context automatically for our editorial team – so they can concentrate on finding the best sites for our users, and not have to second-guess how they are going to look for them.”
Petafloptimism 