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.
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
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
Online Form Innovation Awards
Last year I was moved to create the Online Form Innovation Awards after the experience of too many bad experiences and grave disappointments with online forms (the tip over the edge was an appallingly laid out Microsoft Word document masquerading as a form for another online innovation awards).
The fact is that this isn’t a rare occurrence – we come up against bad online (and offline) forms pretty much every day – a day doesn’t seem to go by without me noticing someone in my network Twittering a moan/frustration about a form. It’s shocking that so many of them are quite as bad as they are (irrespective of the efforts of form gurus like Luke Wroblewski and Caroline Jarrett).
Most websites, whether they be transactional, service or community contain some type of form that requires filling in either to receive a service, join up to the site or buy something. And time and time again users are confronted with difficult and complex forms that often give them no idea about their progress, feedback if something has gone wrong or even a little ‘form furniture’ to offer helpful links. These forms test resolve, infuriate and often have a significant and long-lasting detrimental effect on the associated brand or website.
So. Rather than be negative and create some celebration of the bad I thought it would be much better to invite a list of respected practitioners to judge and celebrate the best examples of the online form with the intention of creating a valuable resource centre for the many aspects, requirements, examples, best practices, and professional guidance for the online form.
The Online Form Innovation Awards have two purposes:
A to yearly hold an ‘Online Form Innovation Awards’ to highlight current innovation, style, usability, accessibility and strong conversion in online forms such as signup, application, or purchase.
B to build a reference library and forum of best practice for anyone online looking to understand, learn, discover, and share knowledge regarding the many variations of the online form.
The idea is to invite anyone to put forward or nominate any online form on their or any other website that they think deserves reference (ie signup, application, purchase) before a selection of judges with the intention of highlighting present innovation, style, usability, accessibility and strong conversion.
The judges in 2009 are a varied selection of web professionals, media consultants, online entrepreneurs and writers working in design, technology, theory, interaction, usability and accessibility:
Nico Macdonald writer, researcher and consultant working in media, technology and society. Spy
Lisa Halabi head of usability at Webcredible, one of the leading usability and accessibility consultancies in London. She’s a founding member of the UK Usability Professionals Association and an advocate for all things user-centered. She’s appeared on BBC Radio and ZD Net and contributes regularly to magazines like Marketing Week, Internet World, Computer Weekly, NMA and Travolution.
Richard Sedley Director of the cScape Customer Engagement Unit (CEU), a collective of online specialists drawn from multiple companies and offering clients a single source for the best in online marketing. Richard is also a columnist for Customer Magazine and Course Director in Social Media for the Chartered Institute of Marketing. In February 2008 he co-authored the book Winners and Losers in a Troubled Economy which looks at how companies can engage customers online to gain competitive advantage during a recession.
Luke Wroblewski Principal/Founder, LukeW Ideation & Design
Sid Yadav is a web entrepreneur based out of Queenstown, New Zealand. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Nincha, a stealth startup, and creator of Memiary, an easy-to-use online pocket diary. Previously, Sid founded and edited Rev2.org, a blog covering web apps and services.
Oliver Reichenstein is a Swiss interaction designer living in Tokyo. iA
Caroline Jarratt is a usability consultant who specialises in forms, surveys, and tuning content of government and non-profit web sites. She is co-author of Forms that work: designing web forms for usability (foreword by Steve Krug). Effortmark
Joshua Kaufman is an interaction designer and user experience consultant living in San Francisco. He can be found at unraveled.
The first awards are open for entry now and will close on the 31 March 2009. The winners will be selected and notified on 24 April 2009. Rosenfeld Media have kindly supplied three copies of Luke Wroblewski’s book Filling in the Blanks to be given to three selected winners.
Please visit the site and make a suggestion. Feel free to make suggestions of further resources, links and relevant websites. If you would like to write something or offer up any research paper it would be gratefully received.
breadcrumb.me twitter | linkedin | friendfeed | flickr | last.fm | tumblr | wordpress | delicious | mybloglog | dopplr | google reader | dipity | slideshare
Visualising data – a catalogue of resources
visualisation-wordle-graphic
There’s a continuing stream of tools and resources for visualising all kinds of data. After coming across quite a few sources myself and from other sources (including Journadism’s excellent list, the extensive article – Data Visualisation: Modern Approaches from Smashing Magazine and a recent presentation by Max Gadney of the BBC for the Information Design Association) I thought it would be useful for anyone who reads this post (and myself) to make another list. Please feel free to add to it:
Online tools
Doodlebuzz – create typographic maps of news stories
Wordle – popular tool for generating word clouds
Wordcount – tracking the use of words and language across the web
IBM’s Many Eyes – data visualisation tools
New York Times Visualisation Labs – tools for visualisation of New York Times data (powered by IBM’s Many Eyes)
retrievr – search Flickr by sketching
Xtimeline – Explore and create timelines
RSS Voyage: Visualise your RSS feeds (beautiful & graceful)
Quintura: visual search engine by way of clouds and explanations
Twitter visualisation with screensaver: Twistori
Pachube – monitor and share real-time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet
Visual Thesaurus: Interactive dictionary and thesaurus (costs but free trial available)
Swivel: making data useful. Upload, share, explore
TreeViz – fast interactive visualization of large data structures organized in a tree
Dabble DB – create and manage online databases
FeedVis – an interactive tag cloud tool for RSS feeds
Gapminder - tools for viewing a fact-based world
Revealicious - graphic visualisations of your Delicious account
Offline tools
Touchgraph – work with Excel data or visualise Google search results
The R Project for Statistical Computing – statistical computing and graphics
Prefuse – download the software toolkit to create complex data visualisations
Processing – open source programming language to produce images, animation and interaction
Inspiration: People
Information Architect’s Web Trend’s map – seminal ‘map of web movers and shakers’ updating every year
Shan Carter’s work at the New York Times
Feltron – creator of the Feltron Annual Reports and for Penguin, We Tell Stories: Hard Times
Chris Jordan – His photography project over the last few year’s Running the Numbers
Ben Fry – author of Visualising Data for O’Reilly and creator of an excellent portfolio (associated with Processing above)
Karl Hartig: Data Visualisation – charts, diagrams, information graphics
Mandelbrot on Twitpic – finance-related visualisations
Well Formed Data (Elastic Lists) – Moritz Stefaner’s work
Munterbund – graphical visualisations of text
Concept Maps from Dubberly Design Office. Including visualisation maps of the creative process, a model of play and a model of innovation.
Inspiration: Websites
Silobreaker – news aggregator
Maptube - a free resource for viewing, sharing, mixing and mashing maps online
Daylife Labs – news aggregator
GPS Drawing – Drawing with Global Position System technology
Digg Labs - various ways of visualising high level of activity on Digg
World Mapper – a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest
Getty Images’ Moodstream – images still and moving tuned to your mood (based on what you select)
Newsmap – visualisation of world news by country (similar in layout to Oursignal)
Oursignal – visualisation of data from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Hackernews, Yahoo Buzz
Stamen Design’s Travel Time Maps for MySociety
Financial Times Global Micromaps Track global market indices and global currencies on an interactive world map.
Threat Meter on Newsweek (powered by Daylife) is an intelligent content services platform, is a brilliant interactive tool that allows you to assess and rate the ‘heat’ of a list of issues.
Breathing Earth – real-time simulation of CO2 emissions, birth & death rates by country
Twitter Venn – the relationship between words on Twitter
Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard
Helsinki live bus monitor – check where the bus is, what time it’s going to arrive (hopefully coming to a city near you soon)
Online news and resources
Flowing Data – data visualisation and statistics
Visual Complexity - “intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks”.
Periodic Table of Visualisation Methods
References
Smashing Magazine Diagrams: Tools and Tutorials – a list of tools for drawing diagrams, charts and chart-flows
(thanks to Cameron Chapman) Web traffic visualisation - Click Density, Click Tale, Click Heat, Crazy Egg
Read Sarah Perez’s article from ReadWriteWeb last year for a great list of ways to visualise your social network data including Amazon, Last.fm, Flickr, music, search engines, web traffic: The Best Tools for Visualisation
Here’s a couple of examples:
Last.forward – An open source software for analyzing and visualizing social networks (good with Last.fm).
Fidg’t Visualise: Play around with data from your network whether that be Flickr or Last.fm tags.
Excellent article from Semantic Foundry – Dynamic Visualisation: Introduction & Theory
breadcrumb.me twitter | linkedin | friendfeed | flickr | last.fm | tumblr | wordpress | delicious | mybloglog | dopplr | google reader | dipity | slideshare
leave a comment