Month: February 2004

Don Norman’s Emotional Design

It looks like Don Norman, Mr. Design of Everyday Things, has another major hit book in his hand: Emotional Design.  I ordered my copy after reading first few paragraphs of the first chapter titled Attractive Things Work Better (245K PDF).

The core idea is this: if it looks good, you can use it more effectively with less confusion than if it didn't look good.  When you think about it, it's obvious.  Even if you are a talented musician, your performance will suffer if you hated playing music.  Of course, it can't be stretched too far.  I remember reading somewhere that, when a woman is too beautiful, one can have, er, physical difficulties.

Alternate News Reader UIs

Here are some alternative news reader UI ideas to consider.  First two are usuable as is, but the rest require quite a bit of polishing and crafting before they can be useful.  I came up with them while I was sitting at a recent workshop after hearing the speaker complain about how boring existing news readers are.

Flashcard UI

News item are displayed on flashcards.  Background color, font size, and number of items per card (1-7), and transition effect should be configurable.  User can navigate forward or backward to next or previous set of headline.  Up or escape to wider view (list of news or sources) should be available.  Fullscreen-mode is essential.

Movie Credit Screen UI

Similar to Flashcard-style UI but visual presentation effects seen commonly in movie opening or closing credit screens are used.  UI should not emphasize more than one news item at one time.  For example, if news items fade or blur in and out then current candidate for further reading should be most noticeable.  Background music and entertaining audio ads can be be used simultaneously.  Again fullscreen-mode is essential.  Screensaver-mode is optional.

Video Game UI

Wild array of UIs are possible here including using news items as prizes, gates, or monsters.

Multiplayer UI

You can see what others are interested in using various UI schemes such as footprints, ranking, etc.

A refined version of these UI might fade in a transparent headline over the screen or in some assigned space for a 'while' when user hasn't moved the mouse or typed anything for certain amount of time.  Since most news one might read using a news reader aren't urgent, you can spread hundreds of headlines over the entire day instead of flooding the reader with large number of popups simultaneously like SharpReader does.

These ideas are just branches off a single idea: news readers as boob tubes for couch potatos.  Instead of overwelming the user with long list of articles and folders, turn it into a linear experience like the TV.  Press the power button to turn it on and just sit back until you see something you like and then press another button to dive in.  Add another button for fast-forward or switch the channel.

Update:

Joe Gregorio points to Trevor Smith's Speed-Reader applet (I couldn't get the applet to run though) and the XFR project.  Interesting.

Update 2:

Finally got the applet working and tried it.  Well, it just doesn't work for me.  Individual words have several meanings which neighboring words help in narrowing down.  Using the Speed-Reader, each word touched off several trails of thoughts so a stream of words in sequence left me disoriented and exasperated because all the thought trails I launched got stranded as I was pulled along by the speed reader.  With my brain in a carefully balanced disarray, I don't want to risk messing it up further with this thing.  Frankly, it gives me the creeps.

XML 1.1 Recommendation

W3C finally put its seal of recommendation on XML 1.1 which is going to confuse a lot of people for the years to come.  In essence, it resyncs XML with latest Unicode standard and simplifies aspects of the XML affected by Unicode related changes.  I was one of the folks who called for some of the changes in XML 1.1 (seemingly ages ago), but even I have mixed feelings about the spec.  So it's not surprising that the release of XML 1.1 spec upset a lot of folks out there.

My recommendation for XML application developers is to ignore XML 1.1 until support for XML 1.1 in XML parser implementations is near ubiquitous.  I suspect it will take at least two years to approach that level of availability.  When will it be safe to consider dropping XML 1.0 support?  My optimistic answer is at least seven to ten years from now.  More realistic answer is never.

Another reason for not using XML 1.1 now is that next version of XML is likely to arrive before XML 1.1 is widely adopted.  Why?  Because engineers are like blacksmiths without a hobby.

So please don't panic and do ignore XML 1.1 unless:

  • you are an XML parser implementor.
  • your application requires use of XML 1.1.
  • you have a monopoly.

Update:

Read Dare Obasanjo's post XML 1.1: The W3C Gets It Wrong.  I wonder if Jean Paoli has a blog?

Social Software for the Deads

Yesterday, I dreamt that my father died.  So I woke up upset and disturbed.  Disturbed because my father is going to Paris today, a trip I have a bad foreboding about.  Chewing bad mojo all morning led me to think about using blogs as a memorial of sort and then spilled out into thinking about dead people in social networks.  Here are some notable pieces from that trail:

Rewinding a blog back in time

I thought it might be neat to have a blog that moves backward in time with posts sorted in reverse order.  So when I die, my blog will show posts from the day before I died and then the day before that and so on.  There will be blog comments by visitors before and after I died.  There are problems with this idea but is worth savoring to look for hidden passages to new ideas.

Blogging from the Grave

It would also be interesting to turn my blog into a wiki-ish blog after I died so that my friends can post to my blog for one reason or another.  In a sense, 'I' continue to live within the mind of my friends so 'I' am still blogging from the grave.

The Dead as a Party Host

I mentioned before that a 'center' of a social network doesn't have to coordinate or even be aware of the synergy he or she creates.  Come to think of it, the center doesn't even have to be alive.  For example, people who met each other at a funeral forms a social network around a dead person.

Zombies in Orkut

What should happen when a member of Orkut or LinkedIn dies?  It's bound to happen or have happened already.  Should his node disappear?  That doesn't make sense.  Two people having a friend in common is relevant even if the friend happens to be dead.  But if the node is left within the network, what are the downsides other than having to add a gravestone icon to the profile?

Groovy Social Clubs and Clients

As I try to look ahead of the social networking service market, I see following three trends emerging:

  • Specialization – Who's Who in X, Y, and Z.
  • Segregation – Invitation-only
  • Decentralization – Rich clients (i.e. Groovy) supporting multiple social networking services and richer integration with other social tools such as e-mail and IM.

How to Capitalize on Blogging

I'll be attending How to Capitalize on Blogging, a Fastlane Ventures Workshop, this Thursday.  I am not lacking knowledge nor ideas on the subject but I need to see where others are and what they are thinking about.

Update:

The workshop was in a less than ideal setting, had equipment problems, and was slow going in the morning, but it eventually lead to some interesting discussions on advertising and branded news aggregators.  It was also refreshing to see people go from ground level questions like 'what is a blog?' to 'how can I use RSS to integrate information spanning applications and companies?' in a few hours.

Adam Kalsey, Judith Meskill, and Bill French were excellent speakers too.  Bill, in particular, showed me how to turn a generic technology tutorial into a product presentation in an enjoyable and seamless way.  If he could write, he could be dangerous. 

e-SuperBowl?

e-Sport is taking off in broadband-happy Korea.  On January 30th, 20 thousand screaming teens packed a stadium in Pusan to watch…two guys play StarCraft.  Close to two hundred professional game tournaments like this were held in Korea last year with prize totalling $5 million.  While the prize money is still small, professional game players in Korea are now gaining idol status enjoyed by singers, actors, and major sports stars.

Friendship Circle

One of the common weaknesses of existing social network services is the lack of easy flexible ways to differentiate types or depth of friendship.  Orkut, for example, allows one to group friends but also requires one to name each group.  While this requirement seems trivial and makes sense logically, it deters users from using the feature in practice.

Friendship Circle is a way to express types and depths of friendship with minimal effort.  A Friendship Circle is basically a nested rings of people (represented by icons with miniture photo and name) around a person.  To use the Friendship Circle, the user drag and drops icons from a palette of friends to the circle.  Note that this can be done using DHTML+CSS.

Distance away from the center represent depth of friendship.  So the innermost ring is populated by family members, relatives, and best friends.  The outermost ring is populated by people whom you don't really care about (i.e. connection-addicts).

Angle of placement on a ring is used to express types of friendship.  To help the user, the rings are divided into four lightly colored quadrants: red, blue, green, and yellow.  Red and blue quadrants will most likely be used to hold people with personal and business relationships.

Update:

I drew up a mockup of Friendship Circle for those having trouble visualizing from my description.