Children’s Menu
Great children’s menu from Ask restaurants. Interactive (paper based), colourful (add your own), pictures (what does the food look like, inviting. I don’t mind if more menus were like this for everyone.
Links, bookmarks, discoveries
Week ending 11 July
Profits before patients: Wendell Potter talks to Bill Moyers about 20 years inside the health care industry with perfect Dante quote “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality.”
Kosmix – semantic search engine – what’s happening on the web (well quite a lot really and it isn’t only conversations regarding the custody of MJ’s children.
Joshua Porter’s Designing with psychology in mind
Eventually discovered Tiltshift for the iPhone
Considering the somewhat different paths Great Designs Should Be Experienced and Not Seen and Disruption versus Usability: has UXD become TOO good? and Design With Intent: How designers can influence behavior
Started playing around with Mapumental
Fill up a page of your sketchbook a day – Pretty sketchy and its Flickr group
Walking Papers: Print maps, draw on them, scan them back in
User Experience Trading Cards – check the ones you didn’t manage to get at UXLondon
The 1kb CSS Grid and the Grid System Generator
From Adactio Revealing Design Treasures from The Amazon
Maps as service design: The Incidental
@craigmod – nice grid
AxLib – A robust design library of usable interaction patterns for Axure RP
ruiz+company – design inspiration
cortex – Xavier Encinas Studio personal visual library
@font-face: The potential of web typography
Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization
Abandoned Britain – Photographing ruins
Matt Webb and his opening presentation at reboot 11. Scope – Design and contributing to culture; ourselves as individuals and the big picture; taking action.
10 informative web design presentations
keep an eye on this – Luca De Rosso’s OTTO Beatslicing is more fun when you hold the sample in your hands
Best RSS feeds for information graphics
Design Ethnography & Mood Maps over at Semantic Foundry
and Hicks Design Icons for Interaction and a revisit to Old News about Icons
and finally The Best of French Cheeses
Proud of my Buck Rogers puzzles (here’s an example)
and
That I must complete my input for Russell Davies’ Speculative Modelling
Finish my cardboard camera
& finish my cardboard menagerie
Safari 4.0: better looking in beta
After downloading Safari 4, I am disappointed to see Apple not stick with some of the tab ideas they had in the Safari 4 beta. What they’ve returned to I find muddled and confusing. In the beta the tabs were above the address bar and this seemed quite radical for a number of people. I found it refreshing and ‘open’ – the pulling of tabs into new windows was clear and straightforward and the tools/arrows/buttons for adding a new tab, viewing the rest of your open tabs and viewing any other bookmarks in the bookmark bar were clearly positioned (see below). The beta, like Firefox, really felt like a ‘tool set’ rather than just a browser.
Now in the released version the tabs have come back to the traditional position and the position of the tools/arrows/buttons for adding a new tab, viewing the rest of your open tabs and viewing any other bookmarks in the bookmark bar are now close together, two with identical icon and, my small amount of testing, encourage mis-selection and confusion. And pulling a tab out into a window is not clear at all.
It would be interesting to know what occurred during any testing for Apple to step back from the some of the innovations of the beta.
Safari 4
Safari 4 beta
Watching digital readers
‘One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real‘ William Gibson
Somewhere between Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making us Stupid?‘ and Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World there is the issue of how we are viewed when we read. It has become increasingly evident that depending on how you are reading, what you are reading and upon what you are reading you are viewed very differently.
It is said that it is more acceptable to read a newspaper at the breakfast table than a paperback novel. Why? Is it because the viewer can see something of what the reader is reading and approximately where they are in their reading but with a paperback novel it is hard to establish exactly what is being read and where the reader is? Books can seem private and cut off.
Is reading a newspaper or magazine or book at the breakfast table more acceptable than reading from a Kindle (or like), laptop or iPhone (or like)? Why? Is it because the viewer can see something of what the reader is reading and approximately where they are in their reading – be it the title, the cover, the cover story or at very least that it is a book or a newspaper etc – but when the reader is using a digital device they can’t even be sure they are actually reading and if they are reading you have no way (apart from maybe facial expressions) what they are reading? Viewer feels no sense of engagement.
Of course in some circumstances (ie dinner party) it is frowned upon to read anything but especially a newspaper or a paperback novel but you might just be able to squeeze in reading a short summary of a sporting event on your mobile phone without too much objection (or risk of never being invited again).
Likewise when attending a lecture, panel event or roundtable it is perfectly acceptable to multi task reading connected and non connected stuff from a mobile phone or laptop – the feeling is that the reader is still engaged with their surroundings, involved with the event, in the conversation – but reading a newspaper or book in this environment would give the impression of non interest, non engagement, being separate from their surroundings (even though they may be reading something directly relevant).
Like the William Gibson quote describes, in time these differentiations will become quaint references to a time when individuals discussed the digital and non-digital/’real’.
Please comment below with any other references on the subject.
Thanks newhousedesign for Ladybird picture
CV format – is it broken? Does it need fixing
Recently I have been playing around with my CV frustrated with the standard format. I have tried out various ideas including a persona style and one based on a grid but am still scratching my chin not quite sure if I have solved a problem that as one recruiter recently offered maybe ‘doesn’t need fixing’.
There is no doubt that a growing number of design types (especially those more at the beginning and development of careers – where ultimately a strong CV is most relevant) have realised that they have got to increase chances of being ‘noticed’ whatever it might be for and the starting point is obviously been to visually enhance their CVs.
The conversation has picked up with the growing interest and spread of infographics. Fine examples are Michael Anderson’s and Greg Dizzia’s. Web Designer Depot added to the discussion with a recent post 30 Artistic and Creative Résumés that garned plenty of discussion regarding readability and inappropriateness of overkill design – ‘a CV is meant to be a document not a poster’ ‘a CV is meant to convey information… your portfolio is for showing off your creativity’. And as one creative director writes quite scathingly ‘I mostly ignore these types of vanity projects when I get them. They look like some school assignment. I want to know about you in 5 seconds. And, that comes from the text.’
There’s no doubt that hiring folk when looking through CVs look for well organised and easily skimmable documents that a decision can be quickly made on.
So what to do? How do you create a balance?
The discussion has also started to appear on Twitter where some good ideas have cropped up such as Bob van Vliet and Clement Boutignon’s innovative use of Daytum.
My advice is pull out a grid and ensure that the written words describing your successes, experiences and deeds are easily readable. If you feel you can add some visual accoutrement to it without obscuring the main information then go ahead though a good barometer is to get as much feedback as you can from recruiters and HR professionals. Some will love innovation, some will be more than non plussed.
This week’s tabs/links/bookmarks
LegiStyles LegiStyles™ are a series of custom styles for the award-winning RSS reader NetNewsWire.
Studio Gelardi sustainable product design
6 Web Apps to Instantly Capture, Share, Display and Meet
Twazzup search Twitter
Fantastico (web hosting)
10 free SEO tools you should bookmark
Ricardo Baeza-Yates “People don’t want to search”
Priorsmart Free worldwide patent search
Liminal Existence Blaine Cook
A List Apart (for mobile)
Todd Warfel’s Persona Templates
Usability Testing = a good user experience
25 great free resources for making charts
The Best Ways to Discover Music Through Twitter
Improving the transition from paper to Photoshop
Inline Multiscale Image Replacement
Using mental models in learning
User-centred Design for sustainable Behaviour
Setting Web type to a baseline grid
Multivariate testing
Time to revisit econsultancy’s list of multivariate testing tools written by Ashley Friedlein in 2007.
Checking over Ashley’s list to see who’s still in business with a relevant offering (and who’s been snapped up by a competitor):
Specific multivariate / multivariable / split testing tools and services:
Adlucent – a variety of testing tools including landing page optimisation
Google Website Optimizer – Google has kindly released a 26 page Techie Guide to Google Website Optimizer which everyone has no excuse not to take a look at to get you started
Memetrics – is now part of Accenture’s Digital Optimization Marketing Sciences
Offermatica – is now Omniture’s Test & Target
Optimost – is now Interwoven Optimost offering a wide range of testing services
SiteSpect – a variety of testing tools
SplitAnalyzer – $129, online demo available, immediate download
TaguchiNow – free webinar available
Vertster – free demo available
Site conversion optimisation solutions (typically continuous learning approach):
[x+1] – with its Predictive Optimization Engine
Kefta – recently purchased by Acxiom
Maxymiser – selection of products
Touch Clarity (Omniture)
Wunderloop – international offering
And from the article’s comments:
Amadesa – range of tools including form and cart optimisation
Clickdensity – more of a usability toolkit including heatmaps (see my data visualisation round up)
Sokel Choicepoints (site itself looks like it needs ‘optimising’)
Mixpanel – a range of tools
Plenty there to choose from. Obviously anyone new to this who wants to get their hands dirty should start off with Google’s Optimiser tool.
naming and shaming
here begins the naming and shaming of organisations that after you enter extensive personal details etc on their website they immediately email back to you the password you have just entered (and confirmed) unencrypted for anyone to see.
Passwords look pretty damn scary in plain text.
First up (and many more to follow):
1. StepStone Solutions with responsibility for Channel 4’s recruitment are the first guilty party (appalling, they even sent a reminder with the naked password repeated a week later)
2. Lastminute
3. Be
4. EventBrite
5. Live Nation
6. Grazr
7. Sky News
8. AddThis
10. Harringey Library (in regard to wi-fi)
11. British Library (in regard to wi-fi)
12. Daily Star
13. Serph
14. Newscred
15. Days Out Guide
16. Fused Network
17. Wired.com
leave a comment