Archive for the ‘Interface Research/Design’ Category
Monday, June 17th, 2013
Google Visual Assets Guidelines – Part 1 [Link to 2]
From the post:
Google’s brand is shaped in many ways; one of which is through maintaining the visual coherence of our visual assets.
In January 2012, expanding on the new iconography style started by Creative Lab, we began creating this solid, yet flexible, set of guidelines that have been helping Google’s designers and vendors to produce high quality work that helps strengthen Google’s identity.
What you see here is a visual summary of the guidelines, divided into two Behance projects:
Part 1: Product icons and logo lockups
Part 2: User interface icons and Illustrations
This is a real treasure for improving your visual design.
Enjoy!
I first saw this at: Google’s Visual Design Guidelines
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Usability | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 12th, 2013
Easy mapping with Map Stack by Nathan Yau.
Nathan writes:
It seems like the technical side of map-making, the part that requires code or complicated software installations, fades a little more every day. People get to focus more on actual map-making than on server setup. Map Stack by Stamen is the most recent tool to help you do this.
(…)
It’s completely web-based, and you edit your maps via a click interface. Pick what you want (or use Stamen’s own stylish themes) and save an image. For the time being, the service is open only from 11am to 5pm PST, so just come back later if it happens to be closed.
Over 3,000 maps have been made over the last four days! Examples.
Now to see semantic mapping interfaces improve.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Mapping, Maps, Usability | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Usability & User Experience Community
From the webpage:
This web site is a forum to share information and experiences on issues related to the usability and user-centered design. It is the home of the Usability and User Experience Community of the Society for Technical Communication.
Home of the Heuristic Evaluation – A System Checklist resource.
An abundance of usability resources, particularly under “New to Usability?”
Every hour you spend at this site may save users days of unproductive annoyance with your products.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, UX, Usability | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
Heuristic Evaluation – A System Checklist by Deniese Pierotti.
An interface review checklist, topic followed by # of questions:
- Visibility of System Status (29)
- Match Between System and the Real World (24)
- User Control and Freedom (23)
- Consistency and Standards (51)
- Help Users Recognize, Diagnose, and Recover from Errors (21)
- Error Prevention (15)
- Recognition Rather Than Recall (40)
- Flexibility and Minimalist Design (16)
- Aesthetic and Minimalist Design (12)
- Help and Documentation (23)
- Skills (22)
- Pleasurable and Respectful Interaction with the User (17)
- Privacy (3)
Almost three hundred (300) questions to make you think about your application and its interface.
A good basis for a web form populated with a history of prior ratings and comments, along with space for entry of new ratings and comments.
Being able to upload screen shots would be a nice touch as well.
I may be doing some UI evaluation soon so I will have to keep this in mind.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, UX, Usability | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, June 5th, 2013
crowdcrafting
Crowdcrafting is an instance of PyBossa:
From the about page:
PyBossa is a free, open-source crowd-sourcing and micro-tasking platform. It enables people to create and run projects that utilise online assistance in performing tasks that require human cognition such as image classification, transcription, geocoding and more. PyBossa is there to help researchers, civic hackers and developers to create projects where anyone around the world with some time, interest and an internet connection can contribute.
PyBossa is different to existing efforts:
- It’s a 100% open-source
- Unlike, say, “mechanical turk” style projects, PyBossa is not designed to handle payment or money — it is designed to support volunteer-driven projects.
- It’s designed as a platform and framework for developing deploying crowd-sourcing and microtasking apps rather than being a crowd-sourcing application itself. Individual crowd-sourcing apps are written as simple snippets of Javascript and HTML which are then deployed on a PyBossa instance \(such as_ CrowdCrafting.org). This way one can easily develop custom apps while using the PyBossa platform to store your data, manage users, and handle workflow.
You can read more about the architecture in the PyBossa Documentation and follow the step-by-step tutorial to create your own apps.
Are interfaces for volunteer projects better than for-hire projects?
Do they need to be?
How would you overcome the gap between “…this is how I see the interface (the developers)…” versus the interface that users prefer?
Hint: 20th century advertising discovered that secret decades ago. See: Predicting What People Want and especially the reference to Selling Blue Elephants.
Posted in Crowd Sourcing, Interface Research/Design, Usability | No Comments »
Monday, June 3rd, 2013
(Re)imagining the Future of Work by Tatiana.
From the post:
Here at CrowdFlower, our Product and Engineering teams are a few months into an ambitious project: building everything we’ve learned about crowdsourcing in the past five years as industry leaders into a new, powerful and intuitive platform.
Today, we’re excited to kick off a monthly blog series that gives you an insider pass to our development process.
Here, we’ll cover the platform puzzles CrowdFlower wrestles with everyday:
- How do we process 4 million human judgments per day with a relatively small engineering team?
- Which UX will move crowdsourcing from the hands of early adopters into the hands of every business that requires repetitive, online work?
- What does talent management mean in an online crowd of millions?
- Can we become an ecosystem for developers who want to build crowdsourcing apps and tools for profit?
- Most of all: what’s it like to rebuild a platform that carries enormous load… a sort of pit-crewing of the car while it’s hurtling around the track, or multi-organ transplant.
Our first post next week will dive into one of our recent projects: the total rewrite of our worker interface. It’s common lore that engaging in a large code-rewrite project is risky at best, and a company-killer at worst. We’ll tell you how we made it through with only a few minor scrapes and bruises, and many happier workers.
Questions:
How is a crowd different from the people who work for your enterprise?
If you wanted to capture the institutional knowledge of your staff, would the interface look like a crowd-source UI?
Should capturing institutional knowledge be broken into small tasks?
Important lessons for interfaces may emerge from this series!
Posted in Crowd Sourcing, Interface Research/Design | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
JSME: a free molecule editor in JavaScript by Bruno Bienfait and Peter Ertl. (Journal of Cheminformatics 2013, 5:24 doi:10.1186/1758-2946-5-24)
Abstract:
Background
A molecule editor, i.e. a program facilitating graphical input and interactive editing of molecules, is an indispensable part of every cheminformatics or molecular processing system. Today, when a web browser has become the universal scientific user interface, a tool to edit molecules directly within the web browser is essential. One of the most popular tools for molecular structure input on the web is the JME applet. Since its release nearly 15 years ago, however the web environment has changed and Java applets are facing increasing implementation hurdles due to their maintenance and support requirements, as well as security issues. This prompted us to update the JME editor and port it to a modern Internet programming language – JavaScript.
Summary
The actual molecule editing Java code of the JME editor was translated into JavaScript with help of the Google Web Toolkit compiler and a custom library that emulates a subset of the GUI features of the Java runtime environment. In this process, the editor was enhanced by additional functionalities including a substituent menu, copy/paste, drag and drop and undo/redo capabilities and an integrated help. In addition to desktop computers, the editor supports molecule editing on touch devices, including iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets. In analogy to JME the new editor is named JSME. This new molecule editor is compact, easy to use and easy to incorporate into web pages.
Conclusions
A free molecule editor written in JavaScript was developed and is released under the terms of permissive BSD license. The editor is compatible with JME, has practically the same user interface as well as the web application programming interface. The JSME editor is available for download from the project web page http://peter-ertl.com/jsme/
Just in case you were having any doubts about using JavaScript to power an annotation editor.
Better now?
Posted in Cheminformatics, Editor, Interface Research/Design, Javascript | No Comments »
Sunday, May 19th, 2013
Visual Storytelling – a thing of the past by Michel Guillet.
From the post:
I spent quite a few summer vacations as a kid getting dragged around Europe visiting castles and churches. It is definitely an experience that I’m more thankful for now than I was at the time. One of the things that I loved most, even as a child, was seeing the stained glass windows. I have strong memories of being in Notre Dame in Paris and watching the light come in at dawn or staring at the Chartres Cathedral windows for minutes without moving.
As a boy, it wasn’t the history, the architecture or an admiration of the faith involved to build these churches. Those were concepts beyond my ability, knowledge or frankly interest at the time. What I have come to realize only in the past couple of years is that the windows were meant for me. At the base level, I needed something that could grab my attention and hold it. What I have discovered is that from this standpoint, I am no different than the illiterate masses of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. (emphasis in original)
Michel proceeds to make the art of Chartres Cathedral a lesson in data visualization and graphic presentation.
A very powerful lesson.
Does your interface treat communication with users as important?
Posted in Graphics, Interface Research/Design, Visualization | No Comments »
Sunday, May 19th, 2013
You Are Listening to The New York Times by Hugh Mandeville.
From the post:
When the San Francisco Giants won the 2010 World Series, the post-victory celebrations got out of control. Revelers smashed windows, got into fistfights and started fires. A Muni bus and the metaverse were both set alight.
To track the chaos, Eric Eberhardt, a techie from the Bay Area, tuned in to a San Francisco police scanner station on soma.fm — while also listening to music. Something about the combination of ambient music and live police chatter clicked for Eberhardt, and youarelistening.to was born.
Eberhardt’s site is a mash-up of three APIs: police scanner audio from RadioReference.com, ambient music from SoundCloud and images from Flickr. The outcome is like a real-time soundtrack to Michael Mann’s movie “Heat.” My colleague Chase Davis, interactive news assistant editor, describes it as “‘Hearts of Space’ meets ‘The Wire.’”
(…)
My explorations inspired me to create a page on youarelistening.to that takes New York Times headlines from the Times Newswire API and reads them aloud using TTS-API.com’s text-to-speech API. I also created a page that reads trending tweets, using Twitter’s Search API.
Definitely has potential to enrich a user experience.
Imagine studying early 21st century history and when George W. Bush or Dick Cheney show up on your ereader, War Pigs plays in the background.
Trivia: Did you know that War Pigs was one of 165 songs that Clear Channel suggested could be inappropriate to play after 9/11? 2001 Clear Channel Memorandum.
Cat Stevens with Peace Train also made the list.
Terrorism we can survive. Those trying to protect us, I’m not so sure.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Music, News | No Comments »
Sunday, May 19th, 2013
6 Golden Rules to Successful Dashboard Design
From the article:
Dashboards are often created on-the-fly with data being added simply because there is some white space not being used. Different people in the company ask for different data to be displayed and soon the dashboard becomes hard to read and full of meaningless non-related information. When this happens, the dashboard is no longer useful.
This article discusses the steps that need to be taken during the design phase in order to create a useful and actionable dashboard.
Topic maps can be expressed as dashboards as well as other types of interfaces.
Whatever your interface, it needs to be driven by good design principles.
Posted in Dashboard, Graphics, Interface Research/Design, Visualization | No Comments »
Friday, May 17th, 2013
Organizing Digital Information for Others by Maish Nichani. (ebook, no registration required)
From the description:
When we interact with web and intranet teams, we find many struggling to move beyond conceptual-level discussions on information organization. Hours on end are spent on discussing the meaning of “metadata”, “controlled vocabulary” and “taxonomy” without any strategic understanding of how everything fits together. Being so bogged down at this level they fail to look beyond to the main reason for their pursuit—organizing information for others (the end users) so that they can find the information easily.
Web and intranet teams are not the only ones facing this challenge. Staff in companies are finding themselves tasked with organizing, say, hundreds of project documents on their collaboration space. And they usually end up organizing it in the only way they know—for themselves. Team members then often struggle to locate the information that they thought should be in “this folder”!
In this short book, we explore how lists, categories, trees and facets can be better used to organize information for others. We also learn how metadata and taxonomies can connect different collections and increase the findability of information across the website or intranet.
But more than that we hope that this book can start a conversation around this important part of our digital lives.
So let the conversation begin!
The theme of delivering information to others cannot be emphasized enough.
Your notes, interface choices, etc., are just that, your notes, interface choices, etc.
Unless you are independently wealthy, that isn’t a very good marketing model.
Nor are users going to be “trained” to work, search, author, the “right way” in your view.
An introduction to be sure but this short (50 odd pages) work is entertaining and has additional references.
Very much worth the time to read.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, UX, Usability, Users | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013
I have commented on several papers from CHI2013 Enrico Bertini posted to his blog.
I wasn’t aware of the difficulty Enrico must have had done to come up with his short list!
Take a look at the day-by-day schedule for CHI2013.
You will gravitate to some papers more than others. But I haven’t seen any slots that don’t have interesting material.
May be oversight on my part but I did not see any obvious links for the presentations/papers.
Definitely a resource to return to over and over again.
Posted in CHI, HCIR, Interface Research/Design, UX, Usability, Users | No Comments »
Monday, May 13th, 2013
Motif Simplification: Improving Network Visualization Readability with Fan, Connector, and Clique Glyphs by Cody Dunne and Ben Shneiderman.
Abstract:
Analyzing networks involves understanding the complex relationships between entities, as well as any attributes they may have. The widely used node-link diagrams excel at this task, but many are difficult to extract meaning from because of the inherent complexity of the relationships and limited screen space. To help address this problem we introduce a technique called motif simplification, in which common patterns of nodes and links are replaced with compact and meaningful glyphs. Well-designed glyphs have several benefits: they (1) require less screen space and layout effort, (2) are easier to understand in the context of the network, (3) can reveal otherwise hidden relationships, and (4) preserve as much underlying information as possible. We tackle three frequently occurring and high-payoff motifs: fans of nodes with a single neighbor, connectors that link a set of anchor nodes, and cliques of completely connected nodes. We contribute design guidelines for motif glyphs; example glyphs for the fan, connector, and clique motifs; algorithms for detecting these motifs; a free and open source reference implementation; and results from a controlled study of 36 participants that demonstrates the effectiveness of motif simplification.
When I read “replace,” “aggregation,” etc., I automatically think about merging in topic maps. 
After replacing “common patterns of nodes and links” I may still be interested in the original content of those nodes and links.
Or I may wish to partially unpack them based on some property in the original content.
Definitely a paper for a slow, deep read.
Not to mention research on the motifs in graph representations of your topic maps.
I first saw this in Visualization Papers at CHI 2013 by Enrico Bertini.
Posted in Graphics, Graphs, Interface Research/Design, Networks, Visualization | No Comments »
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
Contextifier: Automatic Generation of Annotated Stock Visualizations by Jessica Hullman, Nicholas Diakopoulos and Eytan Adar.
Abstract:
Online news tools—for aggregation, summarization and automatic generation—are an area of fruitful development as reading news online becomes increasingly commonplace. While textual tools have dominated these developments, annotated information visualizations are a promising way to complement articles based on their ability to add context. But the manual effort required for professional designers to create thoughtful annotations for contextualizing news visualizations is difficult to scale. We describe the design of Contextifier, a novel system that automatically produces custom, annotated visualizations of stock behavior given a news article about a company. Contextifier’s algorithms for choosing annotations is informed by a study of professionally created visualizations and takes into account visual salience, contextual relevance, and a detection of key events in the company’s history. In evaluating our system we find that Contextifier better balances graphical salience and relevance than the baseline.
The authors use a stock graph as the primary context in which to link in other news about a publicly traded company.
Other aspects of Contextifier were focused on enhancement of that primary context.
The lesson here is that a tool with a purpose is easier to hone than a tool that could be anything for just about anybody.
I first saw this at Visualization Papers at CHI 2013 by Enrico Bertini.
Posted in Annotation, Business Intelligence, Interface Research/Design, News | No Comments »
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
Visualization – Human-Computer Interaction Lab – University of Maryland
From the webpage:
We believe that the future of user interfaces is in the direction of larger, information-abundant displays. With such designs, the worrisome flood of information can be turned into a productive river of knowledge. Our experience during the past eight years has been that visual query formulation and visual display of results can be combined with the successful strategies of direct manipulation. Human perceptual skills are are quite remarkable and largely underutilized in current information and computing systems. Based on this insight, we developed dynamic queries, starfield displays, treemaps, treebrowsers, zoomable user interfaces, and a variety of widgets to present, search, browse, filter, and compare rich information spaces.
There are many visual alternatives but the basic principle for browsing and searching might be summarized as the Visual Information Seeking Mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. In several projects we rediscovered this principle and therefore wrote it down and highlighted it as a continuing reminder. If we can design systems with effective visual displays, direct manipulation interfaces, and dynamic queries then users will be able to responsibly and confidently take on even more ambitious tasks.
Projects and summaries of projects too numerous to list.
Working my way through them now.
Thought you might enjoy perusing the list for yourself.
Lots of very excellent work!
Posted in Graphics, Interface Research/Design, Visualization | No Comments »
Sunday, May 12th, 2013
Evaluating the Efficiency of Physical Visualizations by Yvonne Jansen, Pierre Dragicevic and Jean-Daniel Fekete.
Abstract:
Data sculptures are an increasingly popular form of physical visualization whose purposes are essentially artistic, communicative or educational. But can physical visualizations help carry out actual information visualization tasks? We present the first infovis study comparing physical to on-screen visualizations. We focus on 3D visualizations, as these are common among physical visualizations but known to be problematic on computers. Taking 3D bar charts as an example, we show that moving visualizations to the physical world can improve users’ efficiency at information retrieval tasks. In contrast, augmenting on-screen visualizations with stereoscopic rendering alone or with prop-based manipulation was of limited help. The efficiency of physical visualizations seems to stem from features that are unique to physical objects, such as their ability to be touched and their perfect visual realism. These findings provide empirical motivation for current research on fast digital fabrication and self-reconfiguring interfaces.
My first thought on reading this paper was a comparison of looking at a topographic map of an area and seeing it from the actual location.
May explain some of the disconnect between military planners looking at maps and troops looking at terrain.
I’m not current on the latest feedback research to simulate the sense of touch in VR.
Curious how good the simulation would need to be to approach the efficiency of physical visualizations?
While others struggle to deliver content to a 3″ to 5″ inch screen, you can work on the next generation of interfaces, which are as large as you can “see.”
I first saw this at: Visualization Papers at CHI 2013 by Enrico Bertini.
Posted in Graphics, Interface Research/Design, Visualization | No Comments »
Saturday, May 11th, 2013
Weighted Graph Comparison Techniques for Brain Connectivity Analysis by Basak Alper, Benjamin Bach, Nathalie Henry Riche.
Abstract:
The analysis of brain connectivity is a vast field in neuroscience with a frequent use of visual representations and an increasing need for visual analysis tools. Based on an in-depth literature review and interviews with neuroscientists, we explore high-level brain connectivity analysis tasks that need to be supported by dedicated visual analysis tools. A significant example of such a task is the comparison of different connectivity data in the form of weighted graphs. Several approaches have been suggested for graph comparison within information visualization, but the comparison of weighted graphs has not been addressed. We explored the design space of applicable visual representations and present augmented adjacency matrix and node-link visualizations. To assess which representation best support weighted graph comparison tasks, we performed a controlled experiment. Our findings suggest that matrices support these tasks well, outperforming node-link diagrams. These results have significant implications for the design of brain connectivity analysis tools that require weighted graph comparisons. They can also inform the design of visual analysis tools in other domains, e.g. comparison of weighted social networks or biological pathways.
The study used only eleven (11) participants on tasks that are domain dependent, but the authors are to be lauded for noticing:
While weighted graphs are present in a plethora of domains: computer networks, social networks, biological pathways networks, air traffic networks, commercial trade net-works; very few tools currently exist to represent and compare them. As we used generic comparison tasks during the study, our results can also inform the design of general weighted graph comparison tools.
Rather than inventing yet another weighted graph comparison tool, the authors compared some of the options for visualizing a weighted graph with users.
Evidence based interface design?
I first saw this at: Visualization Papers at CHI 2013 by Enrico Bertini.
Posted in Graphics, Graphs, Interface Research/Design, Visualization | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 8th, 2013
Bacon.js Tutorial Part I : Hacking With jQuery
From the post:
This is the first part of a hopefully upcoming series of postings intended as a Bacon.js tutorial. I’ll be building a fully functional, however simplified, AJAX registration form for an imaginary web site.
This material is based on my presentation/hands-on session at Reaktor Dev Day 2012 where I had to squeeze a Bacon.js intro and a coding session into less than an hour. I didn’t have much time to discuss the problem and jumped into the solution a bit too fast. This time I’ll first try to explain the problem I’m trying to solve with Bacon. So bear with me. Or have a look at the Full Solution first if you like.
A functional programming example that doesn’t start with theory.
How very odd.
Other posts in this series:
Bacon.js Tutorial Part II: Get Started
Bacon.js Tutorial Part III : AJAX and Stuff
Posted in Functional Programming, Interface Research/Design | No Comments »
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
I just started reading Programming As If People Mattered by Nathaniel Borenstein.
To start chapter 5, Nathaniel relates this story about TECO, an “infamously powerful but hard-to-use line editor…”:
As you probably know, TECO is a line editor in which all of the commands are control characters. To enter some text you would type control-a, followed by the text, and a control-d to end the text. When I was first learning TECO I decided to type in a ten-page paper. I typed control-a, followed by all ten pages of text, followed by the control-d. Unfortunately, as I was typing in the paper I must have hit another control character. So when I typed the final control-d I received the message: ‘Unknown control character–input ignored.’ An hour of typing down the drain.
If that sounds like amusing but ancient history, recall in RSSOwl and Feed Validation a single errant control character in an RSS feed makes RSSOwl refuse the entire feed.
The date of the TECO story isn’t reported but TECO was invented in 1963. (Wikipedia has a nice article, TECO (text editor))
Fifty (50) years later we are still struggling with a sensible responses to errant control characters in data feeds?
Are you filtering non-valid control characters from RSS feeds?
Or are you still “current,” circa 1963?
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Usability, User Targeting, Users | No Comments »
Friday, May 3rd, 2013
Who nailed the principles of great UI design? Microsoft, that’s who by Andrew C. Oliver.
From the post:
One of the best articles I’ve ever read on user interface design is this 12-year-old classic — written by Microsoft, no less. Published long before smartphones and modern tablets emerged, it fully explains the essence of good UI design. Amazingly, it criticizes Microsoft’s own UIs and explains why they are bad, though it was written at a time when Microsoft was not known for its humility.
Because my company has a mobile application division — and increasingly does full application development in our enterprise open source division — I often have to explain what makes a good or bad UI to customers. I’ve frequently referred to this article by way of explanation.
To give you an idea of my assessment of the “12-year-old classic,” I have saved the page and converted it to PDF for local reading/printing.
It is worth re-reading every month or so if you are interested in user interfaces.
Or should I say if you are interested in successful user interfaces.
Read Andrew’s post as well. It updates us on the continuing releance of IUI (Inductive User Interface) for desktop, web and mobile interfaces.
I first saw this at DZone.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Usability, User Targeting, Users | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 30th, 2013
Patterns of information use and exchange: case studies of researchers in the life sciences
From the post:
A report of research patterns in life sciences revealing that researcher practices diverge from policies promoted by funders and information service providers
This report by the RIN and the British Library provides a unique insight into how information is used by researchers across life sciences. Undertaken by the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation, and the UK Digital Curation Centre and the University of Edinburgh?s Information Services, the report concludes that one-size-fits-all information and data sharing policies are not achieving scientifically productive and cost-efficient information use in life sciences.
The report was developed using an innovative approach to capture the day-to-day patterns of information use in seven research teams from a wide range of disciplines, from botany to clinical neuroscience. The study undertaken over 11 months and involving 56 participants found that there is a significant gap between how researchers behave and the policies and strategies of funders and service providers. This suggests that the attempts to implement such strategies have had only a limited impact. Key findings from the report include:
- Researchers use informal and trusted sources of advice from colleagues, rather than institutional service teams, to help identify information sources and resources
- The use of social networking tools for scientific research purposes is far more limited than expected
- Data and information sharing activities are mainly driven by needs and benefits perceived as most important by life scientists rather than top-down policies and strategies
- There are marked differences in the patterns of information use and exchange between research groups active in different areas of the life sciences, reinforcing the need to avoid standardised policy approaches
Not the most recent research in the area but a good reminder that users do as users do, not as system/software/ontology architects would have them do.
What approach does your software take?
Does it make users perform their tasks the “right” way?
Or does it help users do their tasks “their” way?
Posted in Design, Interface Research/Design, Marketing, Usability, Users | No Comments »
Monday, April 29th, 2013
Atlas of Design by Caitlin Dempsey.
From the post:
Do you love beautiful maps? The Atlas of Design has been reprinted and is now available for purchase. Published by the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), this compendium showcases cartography at some of its finest. The atlas was originally published in 2012 and features the work of 27 cartographers. In early 2012, a call for contributions was sent out and 140 entries from 90 different individuals and groups submitted their work. A panel of eight volunteer judges plus the book’s editors evaluated the entries and selected the finalists.
The focus of the Atlas of Design is on the aesthetics and design involved in mapmaking. Tim Wallace and Daniel Huffman, the editors of Atlas of Design explain the book’s introduction about the focus of the book:
Aesthetics separate workable maps from elegant ones.
This book is about the latter category.
My personal suspicion is that aesthetics separate legible topic maps from those that attract repeat users.
The only way to teach aesthetics (which varies by culture and social group) is by experience.
This is a great starting point for your aesthetics education.
Posted in Design, Graphics, Interface Research/Design, Mapping, Maps, Visualization | No Comments »
Saturday, April 27th, 2013
Designing Search: Displaying Results by Tony Russell-Rose.
From the post:
Search is a conversation: a dialogue between user and system that can be every bit as rich as human conversation. Like human dialogue, it is bidirectional: on one side is the user with their information need, which they articulate as some form of query.
On the other is the system and its response, which it expresses a set of search results. Together, these two elements lie at the heart of the search experience, defining and shaping much of the information seeking dialogue. In this piece, we examine the most universal of elements within that response: the search result.
Basic Principles
Search results play a vital role in the search experience, communicating the richness and diversity of the overall result set, while at the same time conveying the detail of each individual item. This dual purpose creates the primary tension in the design: results that are too detailed risk wasting valuable screen space while those that are too succinct risk omitting vital information.
Suppose you’re looking for a new job, and you browse to the 40 or so open positions listed on UsabilityNews. The results are displayed in concise groups of ten, occupying minimal screen space. But can you tell which ones might be worth pursuing?
As always a great post by Tony but a little over the top with:
“…a dialogue between user and system that can be every bit as rich as human conversation.”
Not in my experience but that’s not everyone’s experience.
Has anyone tested the thesis that dialogue between a user and search engine is as rich as between user and reference librarian?
Posted in Interface Research/Design, Search Interface, Searching | No Comments »
Friday, April 26th, 2013
Why Most People Don’t Follow Best Practices by Kendra Little.
Posted in a MS SQL Server context but the lesson applies to software, systems, and processes alike:
Unfortunately, human nature makes people persist all sorts of bad practices. I find everything in the wild from weekly reboots to crazy settings in Windows and SQL Server that damage performance and can cause outages. When I ask why the settings are in place, I usually hear a story that goes like this:
- Once upon a time, in a land far far away there was a problem
- The people of the land were very unhappy
- A bunch of changes were made
- Some of the changes were recommended by someone on the internet. We think.
- The problem went away
- The people of the land were happier
- We hunkered down and just hoped the problem would never come back
- The people of the land have been growing more and more unhappy over time again
Most of the time “best practices” are implemented to try and avoid pain rather than to configure things well. And most of the time they aren’t thought out in terms of long term performance. Most people haven’t really implemented any best practices, they’ve just reacted to situations.
How are the people of the land near you?
Posted in Design, Interface Research/Design, Programming | No Comments »
Saturday, April 20th, 2013
PhenoMiner: quantitative phenotype curation at the rat genome database by Stanley J. F. Laulederkind, et.al. (Database (2013) 2013 : bat015 doi: 10.1093/database/bat015)
Abstract:
The Rat Genome Database (RGD) is the premier repository of rat genomic and genetic data and currently houses >40 000 rat gene records as well as human and mouse orthologs, >2000 rat and 1900 human quantitative trait loci (QTLs) records and >2900 rat strain records. Biological information curated for these data objects includes disease associations, phenotypes, pathways, molecular functions, biological processes and cellular components. Recently, a project was initiated at RGD to incorporate quantitative phenotype data for rat strains, in addition to the currently existing qualitative phenotype data for rat strains, QTLs and genes. A specialized curation tool was designed to generate manual annotations with up to six different ontologies/vocabularies used simultaneously to describe a single experimental value from the literature. Concurrently, three of those ontologies needed extensive addition of new terms to move the curation forward. The curation interface development, as well as ontology development, was an ongoing process during the early stages of the PhenoMiner curation project.
Database URL: http://rgd.mcw.edu
The line:
A specialized curation tool was designed to generate manual annotations with up to six different ontologies/vocabularies used simultaneously to describe a single experimental value from the literature.
sounded relevant to topic maps.
Turns out to be five ontologies and the article reports:
The ‘Create Record’ page (Figure 4) is where the rest of the data for a single record is entered. It consists of a series of autocomplete text boxes, drop-down text boxes and editable plain text boxes. All of the data entered are associated with terms from five ontologies/vocabularies: RS, CMO, MMO, XCO and the optional MA (Mouse Adult Gross Anatomy Dictionary) (13)
Important to note that authoring does not require the user to make explicit the properties underlying any of the terms from the different ontologies.
Some users probably know that level of detail but what is important is the capturing of their knowledge of subject sameness.
A topic map extension/add-on to such a system could flesh out those bare terms to provide a basis for treating terms from different ontologies as terms for the same subjects.
That merging/mapping detail need not bother an author or casual user.
But it increases the odds that future data sets can be reliably integrated with this one.
And issues with the correctness of a mapping can be meaningfully investigated.
If it helps, think of correctness of mappping as accountability, for someone else.
Posted in Authoring Topic Maps, Bioinformatics, Biology, Genomics, Interface Research/Design | No Comments »
Sunday, April 14th, 2013
Let Them Pee: Avoiding the Sign-Up/Sign-In Mobile Antipattern by Greg Nudelman.
From the post:
The application SitOrSquat is a brilliant little piece of social engineering software that enables people to find bathrooms on the go, when they gotta go. Obviously, the basic use case implies a, shall we say, certain sense of urgency. This urgency is all but unfelt by the company that acquired the app, Procter and Gamble (P&G), as it would appear for the express purposes of marketing the Charmin brand of toilet paper. (It’s truly a match made in heaven—but I digress.)
Not content with the business of simply “Squeezing the Charmin” (that is, simple advertising), P&G executives decided for some unfathomable reason to force people to sign up for the app in multiple ways. First, as you can see in Figure 1, the app forces the customer (who is urgently looking for a place to relieve himself, let’s not forget) to use the awkward picker control to select his birthday to allegedly find out if he has been “potty trained.” This requirement would be torture on a normal day, but—I think you’ll agree—it’s excruciating when you really gotta go.
The horror of SitOrSquat doesn’t stop there.
Greg’s telling of the story is masterful. You owe it to yourself to read it more than once.
Relevant for mobile apps but also to “free” whitepapers, demo software or the other crap that requires name/email/phone details.
Name/email/phone details support marketing people who drain funds away from development and induce potential customers to look elsewhere.
Posted in Interface Research/Design, UX, Usability | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013
The Elm Programming Language
From the webpage:
Elm is a functional reactive programming (FRP) language that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JS. FRP is a concise and elegant way to create highly interactive applications and avoid callbacks.
The hyperlinks for “create,” “highly,” “interactive,” and “applictions,” all lead to examples using Elm.
I never was much of a Pong player. More of a Missile Command and Boulder Dash fan. Still, it is an interesting demonstration. (Wasn’t working when I tried it.)
Yes, another programming language.
But, it does look lite enough to encourage experimentation with interfaces.
Whether it is lite enough to keep people from feeling “invested” in prior interface choices only time will tell.
Not for everyone but I can imagine a topic map interface that offers design patterns in UML notation which are extended/completed by a user.
Or interfaces that are drawing kits of nodes and edges. Some predefined, some you define.
Or interfaces with text boxes and reasonable names for their contents.
Or other variations I cannot imagine.
Could be “lite” or “feature rich,” although I lean towards the “lite” side.
Wherever you come down on that continuum, topic maps need interfaces as varied as its users.
Posted in Elm, Interface Research/Design, Programming | No Comments »
Saturday, March 30th, 2013
HCIR site gets publication page by Gene Golovchinsky.
From the post:
Over the past six years of the HCIR series of meetings, we’ve accumulated a number of publications. We’ve had a series of reports about the meetings, papers published in the ACM Digital Library, and an up-coming Special Issue of IP&M. In the run-up to this year’s event (stay tuned!), I decided it might be useful to consolidate these publications in one place. Hence, we now have the HCIR Publications page.
Human-Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) if the lingo is unfamiliar.
Will ease access to a great set of papers, at least in one respect.
One small improvement:
Do no rely upon the ACM Digital Library as the sole repository for these papers.
Access isn’t an issue for me but I suspect it may be for a number of others.
Hiding information behind a paywall diminishes its impact.
Posted in Information Retrieval, Interface Research/Design, Searching | No Comments »
Friday, March 29th, 2013
Writing Effective Requirement Documents – An Overview
From the post:
In every UX Design project, the most important part is the requirements gathering process. This is an overview of some of the possible methods of requirements gathering.
Good design will take into consideration all business, user and functional requirements and even sometimes inform new functionality & generate new requirements, based on user comments and feedback. Without watertight requirements specification to work from, much of the design is left to assumptions and subjectivity. Requirements put a project on track & provide a basis for the design. A robust design always ties back to its requirements at every step of the design process.
Although there are many ways to translate project requirements, Use cases, User Stories and Scenarios are the most frequently used methods to capture them. Some elaborate projects may have a comprehensive Business Requirements Document (BRD), which forms the absolute basis for all deliverables for that project.
I will get a bit deeper into what each of this is and in which context each one is used…
Requirements are useful for any project. Especially useful for software projects. But critical for a successful topic map project.
Topic maps can represent or omit any subject of conversation, any relationship between subjects or any other information about a subject.
Not a good practice to assume others will make the same assumptions as you about the subjects to include or what information to include about them.
They might and they might not.
For any topic maps project, insist on a requirements document.
A good requirements document results in accountability for both sides.
The client for specifying what was desired and being responsible for changes and their impacts. The topic map author for delivering on the terms and detail specified in the requirements document.
Posted in Design, Interface Research/Design, Requirements, Use Cases | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
Articulating Your Content Strategy Like A Child’s Story Book by Michael Brito.
From the post:
I used to read “Love You Forever” to both of my girls when they were little. Even thinking about it today, I still get choked up. It’s really a heartfelt story. What I remember the most about it is that it uses imagery to tell a very significant story (as with most children’s books). The story is about a mother’s unconditional love for her son; and then chronicles her son’s life growing to an adult and starting his own family. The sad conclusion shows how he reciprocates his love to his mother who has grown to be an elderly woman. There are just a few sentences on each page but the story and illustration is powerful and you can even follow along without even reading the text.
Michael makes a great case for visual storytelling and includes a Slideshare presentation by Stefanos Karagos to underline his point.
Before you view the slides!
Ask yourself what percent of users have a great experience with your product?
The slides reveal what percent of users share your opinion.
I doubt you have noticed that I am really a “text” sort of person.
The lesson here isn’t any more foreign to you than it is to me.
But I think the author has a very good point, assuming our goal is to communicate with others.
Can’t communicate with others as we would like for them to be.
At least not successfully.
Posted in Communication, Interface Research/Design, Users | No Comments »