Wordnik, the dictionary that I really should be using*, just launched a side-by-side word comparison feature to help you distinguish between similar words while browsing their thesaurus. It takes the window arranging, tab switching, or (god forbid) page flipping out of the equation.
* I typically just use Apple’s built in Cmd+Ctrl+D shortcut, which changed my life.
“The question was not how to further automate the teller, but rather how to humanize the machine.” writes IDEO, on redesigning the ATM for Spanish bank BBVA.
A picture of this redesigned ATM blew through my feeds earlier this week and I wasn’t impressed because it just looked so stylish, but after watching the video I’m blown away by the machine’s subtle logic. The killer innovation for me is the cash dispensing animation that bridges the virtual and physical. The effect is unreal.
See also: Take the Money and Stand Still by Khoi Vinh
ATM designers should abandon their strategy of intimidating customers through technologically imposing yet incomprehensible forms. Instead, they should focus on simple constructions, fewer planes, fewer parts, and a healthy dose of visual logic. New ATMs should be intuitive in the way that appliances and common tools are; the best designed of these forms communicate what they do at first glance and without ambiguity.
Should they be beautiful? It’s perhaps too much to ask banks to strive for aesthetic beauty in this endeavor because nearly everything they’ve ever produced in the past few decades has been blindingly ugly. The bar for success can be somewhat lower though: a new ATM design need only be simple and succinct enough in its form that it becomes difficult for a thief to attach something as flagrantly malicious as an ATM skimmer to it. It’s not much to ask, but it would be enough.
Brent Simmons, Flexibility and PowerFlexibility is the ability to change how software works; power is the ability to do more with less effort.
There’s a complicated relationship between the two things. Sometimes flexibility may add to power — if I could just make these things green, my eye could pick them out more easily, and I’d get my work done more quickly.
But flexibility detracts from power just as often — or more often. Flexibility is an invitation. It says, “Hey, futz with this. And this. And this. You’re not getting anything done, but at least you kind of have the illusion of doing something.”
The book was always fundamental to me. One of the things I really liked was that the original logo for Criterion, which we designed in 1984, was a book turning into a disc. It was central. When I was writing the paper for Britannica, I felt like I had to relate the idea of interactive media to books, and I was really wrestling with the question “What is a book?” What’s essential about a book? What happens when you move that essence into some other medium? And I just woke up one day and realized that if I thought about a book not in terms of its physical properties—ink on paper—but in terms of the way it’s used, that a book was the one medium where the user was in control of the sequence and the pace at which they accessed the material. I started calling books “user-driven media,” in contrast to movies, television, and radio, which were producer-driven. You were in control of a book, but with these other media you weren’t; you just sat in a chair and they happened to you. I realized that once microprocessors got into the mix, what we considered producer-driven was going to be transformed into something user-driven. And that, of course, is what you have today, whether it’s TiVo or the DVD.
Bob Stein, founder of the Criterion Collection and The Institute for the Future of the Book
(via Snarkmarket)
To the geeky or trained, the desktop is a fount of power and speed. Documents are side by side, text flies from here to there, IMs are answered and dismissed, mockups reloaded, batches processed, all with tiny movements of the fingers. For those of us who work all day on computers, touch interfaces are not an impending disruption.
Ryan Singer
(via stopdesign)
In a way, gestural user interfaces are a step back, a throwback to the command line. Gestures are often not obvious and hard to discover; the user interface doesn’t tell you what you can do with an object. Instead, you have to remember which gestures you can use, the same way you had to remember the commands you could use in a command line interface.
Lukas Mathis, Gestures from Ignore the Code
Possible solution: use complex gestures only as shortcuts:
Instead of forcing people to learn complex gestures, such gestures could be offered as optional shortcuts, offering quicker access to certain features for those people who are willing to learn the gestures.
An example of this can be seen on the iPhone, when deleting an element in a list view. You can either touch the «Edit» button to activate the «Edit list» mode, which allows you to delete list entries. Or you can swipe across an individual entry and delete it this way; the gesture is not obvious, but this doesn’t matter since it is not the primary way of deleting list entries, but merely a shortcut.
Gestures may be harder to discover than elements of a GUI, but they are also a lot more fun to discover. In time, as we internalize all the potential ways that we are able to touch interfaces, complex gestures will become more easily discoverable.
A project to digitally catalog the 13,000 book library of artist Donald Judd has recently been completed and the results are pretty phenomenal. Behind the scenes there is an ordinary database which can be accessed through the standard interface of input fields and a search button. However, unlike a boring old library catalog, the Judd Library is best viewed through a custom augmented reality style interface akin to Google Street View.
Starting with the library’s top-down floor plan, you can click on various rectangles representing each bookcase. They’re unlabeled, so pick one at random and you are presented with a photograph of the bookcase overlaid with catalog information. Click again to zoom to a particular shelf, then mouseover to reveal information about each book. As a huge proponent of not overdoing the interface metaphor, I was surprised by how much I didn’t hate this interface. In fact, I love it.
One reason that it works so well is because it preserves—and honors—the aspects of a library that are lost in the conversion to a database. Artinfo has an excellent interview with the Judd Foundation’s executive director Barbara Hunt Lanahan, who expands on this:
Touring the library online, it’s interesting to note the different objects placed here and there on the shelves.
Isn’t that the case for everyone? Don’t you have objects placed on your bookshelf? When you go to someone’s home, it’s always intriguing to look at somebody’s bookshelf and see what books they have and also the small objects they’ve collected from different travels around the world. It gives an incredibly interesting portrait of the owner. On Judd’s shelves, there’s a piece of volcanic rock, there are little wooden objects, there’s a beautiful magnifying glass. There are lots of rocks, since Judd often used them as paperweights.
These bits and bobs don’t show up in the search, so chancing upon them is like finding little pieces of treasure. You’ll also see lots of empty spaces, piles of horizontally stacked books, and other idiosyncratic forms of organization (all consistently linked to individual book pages).
While the order may be less logical than the Dewey Decimal system, Judd arranged his books with meticulous intention:
Rainer [Judd, the artist’s daughter] tells a story about seeing her dad carrying these boxes of books stacked high across the courtyard and telling him, ‘You know, Dad, you could have one of your studio assistants do that for you.’ And he would say, ‘Absolutely not.’ He personally arranged those books on the shelves, he didn’t want somebody else to be organizing his books there.
Browsing through the photographs and floor plan of Judd’s library is like stepping into his memory palace. “If you go to the library I think you start to understand how thorough and complex and interesting an artist he was. You get it,” says Lanahan. It reveals how he dealt with information. For example, he arranged his art books by the birth date of the artist as opposed to their names but never completed filing them in this way. Another treat is that you can look through the empty space in one shelf onto further rows, giving a sense of the organizational logic as it exists in three-dimensions.
I can’t imagine a more perfect and faithful posthumous digitization effort.
Touching on Judd’s sometimes contentious relationship with museums and galleries, Lanahan concludes:
I think the art world doesn’t necessarily want to hear from an artist who has very strong views about how their work should be presented, and so perhaps that’s a view that the art world’s had for whatever reasons because he was an artist who was standing up for himself and defending his rights.
Props to the Judd Foundation staff and programmer Ryan Tainter on this site. There is (of course) lots of room to improve the browsing experience and to experiment with new possibilities, but in a time where Google is reducing libraries to a database of scanned pages, it’s absolutely heartening to come across this site.
Summarize after entering details — blink design library
In our usability studies, we often see users pause when they are asked to give something a title as the first step in a data-entry task. The problem seems to be that they are being asked to summarize something they haven’t yet created. I suspect the folks at Get Satisfaction also observed this, and therefore created their form with the title after the description entry.
(via slantback)
At the end of every computer is a real person, a lot like you, whose birthday was last week, who has three best friends but nobody to spoon at night, and is personally affected by what you say.
Derek Sivers — A real person, a lot like you
Freakishly easy to forget. This essay is like an internet-oriented version of DFW’s Kenyon commencement speech.
The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.
Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current «complex» interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.
The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it.
Dominique Leca — The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover
(via catbird)