Victor points to the
Guggenheim.com website as a place where lots of lovely interface work has been put in to delivering a great learning experience – and it *has*.

Audio cued into zoomable pictorial information, novel image-led interfaces to complex online exhibits. It’s certainly cutting-edge.

For a CD-Rom around five years ago.

Don’t get me wrong Victor – it’s a great piece of design and content, and I’m sure achieves the client’s objectives and satisfies the audience.

I just can’t get over the feeling that it’s a CD-Rom delivered over the web.

To be sure, that’s an achievement in itself, and something that we only dreamed-of and evangelised with misty eyes about 5 years ago.

But the way we evangelised about it was by picking up a CD-Rom, showing someone it’s rich, immersive interface. We listened to them saying ‘yeah, so what it’s a CD-Rom, my kids have them… they’re fun i guess for five minutes’

And then we showed them the Web.

The clunky grey-paged, blue-linked web.

We showed them how you could GO. TO. THE. LOURVE. Yeah, THAT louvre. In Paris. Thousands of miles away. Just. Like. THAT.

Look around the whole place. Link from a piece there to an essay on perspective by a professor in San Diego, and link from his citations to the Bauhaus archive in Berlin.

And Leave a message. Or read other peoples messages. Email them. Email the professor.

Connect.

And their eyes shone.

We said – imagine, in 5 years time having the richness of that CD-Rom with the interconnectedness and human contact of what you just experienced on the web.

So what happened?

5 years on, we seem to have B.O.W.s- Browse Only Websites.

Rich experiences like the Guggenheim, or sites by Kioken like ClassicMotown, some pieces of the Smithsonian and more than I can’t think of right know – that undoubtedly are beautiful and enriching, but bury themselves in their own rulespace, creating their own rules and idioms – deigning to use the web and the browser only reluctantly as a delivery mechanism.

Why do we have rich media, innovative interface sites that don’t connect to the web, or it’s communities on one hand.

And on the other – innovative community, hypertextual, make-the-most-of-the-web, but not of interface or rich media sites on the other.

Never the twain shall meet?

Can anyone give me examples of sites that escape these stereotypes? Or have we spent 5 years in a big loop round to the begin where we left off at the end of the CD-Rom era?

Douglas Englebart, inventor of the computer Mouse, has been awarded The British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal. In the BBC News article about his award, he epsouses some of his personal working philosophy, and attitude to not having become spectacularly rich off the back of his inventions:

“It’s very different if your goal had been to get patents and be the first,” he says. “But the goal is; how do we change the world so that we are collectively more capable of dealing with complex and urgent problems?”

and

“I happen to feel that we could be more effective in the way we use the computer,” he says, developing “a whole different sort of language that could be a lot more efficient connecting to our minds.”

and finally

“…could a person invest their professional career to maximise their return to mankind?” he says. “If you really believe that, what kind of a citizen would you be if you didn’t try to do something about that,” he asks.

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Mouse inventor strives for more

How about you?

“Structuralists see the web as a vehicle for information: the web is a tool to simplify the lives of over-stressed human beings.”

A List Apart: Information vs. Experience

Signweb is my favourite site right now. For some reason, stuff that I’ve read a million times about visual design, usability or wayfinding just seems so much fresher when recontextualised by a site that’s also trying to sell me giant plastic-engraving machines.

This article has a great little colour-combos-for-legibility panel on page two:
Can’t Your Read the Signs?: Graphic layout effectiveness is measured in seconds

On a related tip:

“From small electronic objects to large airports, color plays a powerful role in helping you use the device or navigate the space. Unfortunately, color is only beginning to gain recognition as a critical component in “usability.” The following information presents a few of the many ways color can succeed or fail.”

http://www.colormatters.com/usability.html

BBC News Online has been named best news website for the fourth year in a row at the UK’s most prestigious interactive awards.
The website has won the best news prize at every Bafta Interactive Entertainment Awards since they were launched in 1998.

Well done guys!
BBC News | NEW MEDIA | BBC News Online wins fourth Bafta

A diagram that asks if “Terror” is an open system by a retired system designer.

It’s a little Yoda-esque* and high-level for my liking and as such not a successful for me as the previous diagram they published.

A nice little comment from the author, though, at the end of the piece; more widely applicable to our field, perhaps:

“As system designers, we are always designing systems for others to use. There is nothing worse than being on the end of the plank, with everyone telling you it’s great and it’s OK to jump. In other words, dissent produces a better system. Any comments or questions, please?”

* by Yoda-esque, I’m refering to the diminutive jedi-master’s riff on cycles of violence: “anger leads to fear, fear leads to hate, hate leads to suf-fer-ring…“

A little off-topic, but here’s some pictures of the town where I grew up I took with my lovely new camera when I went back there recently.

Just to tie it back into experience design… I think that maybe the grey skies, grey seas and grey rocks I grew up around may have had a lot of influence on the colour schemes of my later work…! 🙂

From the CHI-Web list, Kristen Truong, an IA for Covisint publishes a critique of “The Brain” from a usability standpoint. Interesting to see a real-world study of the few real-world applications of novel visualisation/navigation around.

CHI-WEB archives — October 2001, week 3 (#32)

Dunno if peter reads my blog, but in a spasm of synchronicity, he’s posted a big riff on ‘Information Ecology’; referencing a book called “Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart”.

It sounds fascinating, not directly mapping to my stab at defining an infomation ecology in the‘rulespace’ piece, and far more developed (let’s face it, nearly anything would be). But my “information powers of ten” still stands I think as a way to plug these perspectives together.

Go and read the piece on PeterMe: Biological metaphors for information processes? On peterme.com? “The hell,” you say!

Jakob Nielsen has a couple of nice things to say about BBC News Online in this week’s Sunday Times.

“BBC Online is a breathtaking website, much more integrated with its television and radio channels than, say, CNN. It is another good example of clean design, particularly the home page, which is well categorised, so it is easy to know where to look for breaking news. Where it fails is that it is hard to find things that have been archived. It fronts a huge quantity of rich content, and a vast archive, but lacks an efficient way of digging into it, or even listing what was there yesterday. The web puts out the latest information, which then builds to become a resource. Finding a means of dealing with accumulated content is a weakness of many websites.”

One of things we did concept work on back at BBC News in early 99 in the run up to producing the redesign (the present design) was an idea for ‘storytools’, that could have made use of the Autonomy technology that powers the BBC News search to create ad-hoc trails back into archived content.

Autonomy works by creating and matching the relevence of ‘concepts’ about the meaning of content from the content itself. The Storytools could lead you on a trail back to the origintion of a story by calculating and tracing relevance of the concept the story you were browsing from over time back through the BBC News corpus.

At any point, you would probably be presented with multiple path choices around personalities, stories, issues, places etc to trace your interest back through the archive. I guess the nearest experience to how we imagined it would be Amazon’s recommendations links: ‘other people who have bought this…’.

Again I find myself refering to Ellen Kampinsky’s awesome Amazoning The News

However, it wouldn’t be shaped by the community of users, but purely by the interelationships of content. It never got further than some mocked-up screens, but the tech guys from Autonomy expressed enthusiasm for the concept.

Does anyone know of any content sites that have done something similar in the last two years? E-commerce sites have pioneered innovative ways of encouraging ‘cross-sell’ and ‘up-sell’ but what about the equivalent for content?

If not maybe now I’m back at the BBC I can have another crack at it….