All too often, experts from all areas under-estimate the power of myths, thinking myths can be dispelled with information and education. Myths are not mists, but memes more powerful than facts. Even when people are informed or educated, myths persists still by interfering with memory and communication. In my opinion, counter-myths are often more effective than truth.
I have no idea where this bit of thought came from. Maybe this is just part of being an eccentric.
I think people are overlooking a very important medium for communication: slideshows. During the [second] Iraq war, I got used to looking at slideshows of the pictures from the war — I forget which online paper it was (either NY Times or Washington Post), but they don't have slideshows on the frontpage anymore, so I can't tell now. Looking at those slideshows, reminded me of the feelings I had while flipping through LIFE magazine long time ago. While words inform me, those pictures moved me.
Like Tim Bray's recent comparison between XML and sex, even a bad picture is still pretty good. Piecing them together in sequence creates a magical moment, a cusp of me out of time and place. An important factor is the size of the pictures. they should be big. How big, I am not too sure, but there seems to be a point where the edge of the picture becomes insignificant, a point of immersion.
In some way, I feel as though I am imagining things, but I really feel that there is magic here that will hit people harder than words can ever do. It is something that moving pictures often fails to capture, because there is no space for me between the frames. With slideshows, there is.
[Following is my recent reply to a comment on importance of permance in newspaper UI. I felt it deserved to be a post on its own.]
Regarding permanence, a particularly striking example is the way [we] remember articles in weekly or monthly magazines by the cover picture. Time, Scientific American, etc. I still remember BYTE Smalltalk articles by the multicolored baloons on the cover. On the other hand, I am disturbed by the fact that I can't recollect individual issues of Playboy by the cover. <g> I think its because I was focusing mostly on the body and not the face. I haven't asked Time magazine editors about it, but I'll bet FACES make the most effective cover materials for 'memory-stamping'.
[this is newly added]
What I liked about Wall Street Journal is the way they frequently include copperplate-engaving style headshot pictures. I think same thing came be done for bloggers. Frankly, I never liked the 'shot from the bottom of Chinese takeout box'-style pictures popular among bloggers.
According to this Washington Post story, SARS virus can:
Common detergents have no effect on SARS. No words on disinfectants. I used one of those pocket-size disinfectant jells while at Toronto. I have no idea if it was effective, but it was reassuring. I did run into a nurse at a party though. When she mentioned that she was a nurse, everyone sort of paused. Now the good news:
Note that this doesn't mean you should bathe in boiling water, because doing that will just get you a hospital, a place you want to avoid when in a SARS zone.
I want to allow people to act as editors, selecting and ranking/positioning stories and pictures, edit and mark stories to correct mistakes or classified them with keywords. Intelligent selection of images is especially important. Ultimately, I want to allow human editors to form some sort of collaboration network with workflow infrastructure. I am still trying to figure out how to achieve these goals while supporting both amateur and professional editors.
Professionally, I can see companies publishing newspaper sections dedicated to their industry sector. Large companies will have enough news to publish weekly or even daily newspaper sections for their customers. There will also be a large number of industry experts who would like to publish newsletters to be automatically inserted into people's newspapers on weekly or monthly basis. Schools and governments have their own particular needs as well.
This area is where I need the most help with. If you have ideas, suggestions, or comments on this area, I would appreciate it.
Permanence is an important part of the newspaper UI. By permanence, I mean like the pile of real world newspapers that gathers around our houses over a week until the garbage day comes around. Memories of what I read or scanned within last seven days are fresh in my mind and there is certain comfort in knowing that I can get at it and read it in same context.
In contrast, other aggregator UIs lets news articles flow by or gather out of context. Real world newspapers have a certain hard-to-describe orientating effect on its readers and I feel that its important to duplicate that effect in newspaper UI. If you know of some HCI reseach done in this area, I would appreciate knowing about them.
As Hugh points out, navigation is critical for effective newspaper UI. I am still working on this, but what I currently have is a 'flat' paper with two modes: Scanning and Reading. In Scanning mode, view is zoomed out to a point where headlines can easily be scanned. In Reading mode, view is zoomed in to allow articles to be easily read. Transition between the mode is a single mouse click. So you click to read the article under the mouse and then click to get back to scan. Mouse drag is used to scroll in both modes.
Page navigation is done by visual artifacts along the edges as well as a 'flick' (fast horizontal drag) in Scanning mode. I am still exploring other ways to navigate but I have yet to find an easier mechanism. The magic sauce in this UI is the 'instant' transition between modes, meaning less than .5 seconds of delay. Effects of such 'instant' transition has first been seen in Atari's Adventure game twenty years ago, but still remains true today.
A Side Note: To maintain the emotional effect of real newspaper, the newspaper UI does not support inline scrollable areas. You can scroll (actually you are moving the paper) the newspaper but you can not scroll its parts.
Others have already discussed the importance of chunking and scanning issues for news aggregator UI. What hasn't been discussed is how news chunking can be applied over time. While there is an over abundance of news everyday, enough to flood anyone's schedule, but this is not the case for many specialized topics. In the real world, this problem is dealt with special inserts in daily newspapers and weekly, monthly editions. Same mechanism can be applied for news aggregators.
When a user creates a special section, user has the option of selecting frequency. For example, I am not interested in baseball, but I try to follow news about Korean baseball players in MLB. So I create "Korean MLB News" newspaper section with names of the players as filters, point it to sports news feeds, and schedule it to be inserted into Sunday Morning editions of my newspaper. This way, I get a full page of news instead of one or two articles each day. I also like to read about PGP related news, so I create one and schedule it for delivery on 15th of each Month.
By chunking news over time, I gain the ability to look at the big picture at the cost of delay in receiving the news. For many news topics, this is a very appealing feature IMHO.
I am forty-one today. How am I coping with being forty-something? Well, I am learning to find joy in small things like walking with my wife and son around the wildness areas near my house. At first, we biked around but I found that scenery just moved too fast and there was no time to talk. Being flat-footed, I tend to avoid walking far, but the area around my house is great and filled with wildlife so I can stop frequently and watch the animals. The other day, I saw a swan eat a duckling. Kind of shocking, but there were six other ducklings to keep the mother duck busy. So, this is how I am being forty-something.
Today is my 41st birthday. I am still coping with being forty-something. Weird thing is that now I am more interested in health and drugs, you know, like Viagra and Ginko. Most of all, I want to zap the inside of my nose with laser to minimize allergy induced nasal problems. At this age, I need all the oxygen I can get to my brain. So I am thinking of Viagra, Ginko, and Laser, and Nose on my 41st birthday. I am looking forward to something else on my 42nd.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 