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November
30, 2000 November
29, 2000 More linka-dinka-love! The suggested reading page from the enarrative conference has a bunch of tasty books and websites to peruse on topics of hypertexts, narrative, design, etc. Among them is a link to Captain Low-Rez, who has a second pixelated-and-speech-synthesizered adventure for you!. Design, design, design. Jay Cross has put together an impressive and thoughtful page on various forms and principles of design (instruction, UI, graphic, information architecture, software, industrial), with lots of good quotes and links to worthwhile material. November
28, 2000 I'm leaving for simple reasons--I seek more freedom in my personal life. I want more than 2 weeks vacation a year. I don't want to feel obligated to sit in an office 40 hours a week. Etc. It's nothing about the company. I wish I could continue vesting! But these are the decisions we make. Smart little buggers. So I'm thoroughly enjoying The Best American Science Writing 2000, edited by James Gleick (which I bought because it features essays from Timothy Ferris and The Onion, among others), and I've just finished an article by entomologist Deborah M. Gordon on ant colonies, which she has found to exhibit principles of decentralized self-organization in their operation. Nifty stuff. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have published anything on the Web. However, asearch on Google turned up a number of results: The members of the Gordon Lab (who knew entomologist chicks could be so cute! Next thing you know, I'll discover that librarians are sexy!); an interview with Gordon on FEED; an article on her research, and differences with others in the field. November
27, 2000 So, yeah, email me if you got work! Two Americas? My dad posted a thoughtful note in the QuickTopic discussion on the county-by-county vote counts.
This statement is particularly trenchant given articles like this, which colors the red "Us" and the blue "Them". November
24, 2000 It turns out, it additionally showed his utter idiocy in calculating political benefit. Today's paper reports Cuban-Americans protesting Gore's request for recounts:
So not only did Gore's March statement cause him to lose favor with level-headed Americans sick of his political posturing. It did nothing to gain him support among the community he courted, whose collective memory is limited to "Democrats = Bad." And people call Gore intelligent? November
21, 2000 From the main information foraging page at PARC comes this definition:
One of the things I most love is the degree of ethnography which has gone into developing the theory. One of the things I least love is that the theory's developers seem to suffer from the "Social sciences are real sciences, too!" syndrome, wherein they load their otherwise informative articles with charts, graphs, and equations that don't really elucidate the concepts; seemingly, it's there just to make the research more 'solid.' Anyway, this 84-page report on information foraging (PDF) is probably the single best document on the subject. I'm interested in information foraging because it addresses the problems I've had in understanding how people use sites like Epinions. Typical user testing and GOMS-model analyses are fine for document-creation interfaces, but are insufficient when the interface is super simple (as it is for most Web sites), and where people's impetus for action is the content. Information foraging attempts to address this. The theory is still quite raw, and I'm not sold on its efficacy, but at least these folks are asking the right questions. The paper, "The Scent of a Site: A System for Analyzing and Predicting Information Scent, Usage, and Usability of a Web Site," (PDF) provides a thoughtful discussion on applying the theory to the Web. Alan Wexelblat's "Footprints: History-Rich Tools for Information Foraging," (PDF)discusses how time can be factored into the life of digital artifacts, and used to enhance finding quality information. I found the previous paper here, a page on ResearchIndex, a library that utilizes a number of interesting features, including 'similar documents', 'active bibliography', and 'users who viewed this document also viewed.', as well as a linked list of the works cited in the paper (wherein, when you click on a cited link, you can find other papers that cite that work). Lots of delightful wandering. Oh, and you'll see references to "the scent of information" all throughout information foraging discussions. This notion has been popularized by Jared Spool. However, it seems that Jared has so drastically oversimplified the notion that he's bastardized it into meaninglessness. And since he's the one that's made it popular, he's harmed the utility of the phrase. All for the sake of selling presentations with catchy titles about Smelly Web Sites. Sigh. November
20, 2000
November 16, 2000
Data viz. Tpodd went one step further and combined visualizations of black and "hispanic" (census term, sorry) distributions with the county-by-county electoral map. It makes the case bloody obvious about voting along race lines. Interesting how African-Americans have collected along those highway swaths in the south. Snrf. Garden.com is closing down. Long-time petermeme readers know I've been a fan of the store's design--one of the few retail establishments that really 'got it' from the end-user perspective. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for how they operated the business. As you continue to hear tales of site closings and numerous layoffs, you start to think, "What happened?" From my perspective in this industry, it seems quite clear--companies hired too many people. A year ago this time, every startup was obsessed with ramping up and swelling their staff numbers. This lead to an extremely tight market, inflated salaries, and, frankly, a lack of focus. (It's hard to get your job done when you're recruiting all day.) But the companies hadn't figured out what to do with all these people. I mean, what on earth was Evite doing with 69 employees? Evite should be 5 folks with some PHP and a MySQL database. Evite is a glorified web page maker. It's a useful one, but not 69-employees useful. The same thing seemed to happen all over. It was as if the goal of the new economy were simply to hire as many people as possible--through sheer mass your company would dominate. (Dominate what? If companies had spent half the energy in defining a vision they spent in ramping up, this might have been averted.) Lucky companies have been able to shed their staff and survive. Unlucky companies have been sunk by the ballast of deadweight. Who to blame? Well, there was definitely a simple market hysteria--everyone else was doing it, so you should, too. But word is a lot of blame falls on VC's shoulders. VC's, in a desire to take companies public as quickly as possible, encouraged swelling staff numbers to suggest serious business. When the IPO thing soured, companies were filled with hundreds of people who really didn't have a whole lot to do. VC's, then, seem to have shrugged their shoulders and moved on. For all their talk of 'partnering' with their investments, there's a lot to suggest that's a load of hooey. November 14, 2000 November 13, 2000 Simply having highways in those areas doesn't explain why they voted Democratic... There are many interstate swaths that are decidedly Republican. But, clearly, like people have found one another gathered along these corridors. My favorite quote from the discussion comes from the irrepressible, incorrigible, Mike Monteiro: "Overlay it with a Starbucks map. It's all becomes clear." Oh, and if you're into design, and funny stuff, and stuff, you should check out his site. November 12, 2000 November 10, 2000 It saddens me that people are so distracted by the small issues to not get the bigger picture. It perplexes me that they don't get the bigger picture, because the bigger picture, at heart, is so simple. Money should not rule government. That's all that Nader was campaigning on. Does it make any sense that Bill Gates has more power than you or I simply because he's been able to sell more products? What kind of mandate is that? Money should let you buy nice things, sure. But it ought not let you sway politics, especially to the degree it does now. Yes, politics have always been entwined with money. But, at least 40-60 years ago, there was a recognition that the 'will of the people' was a valid concern, and often at odds with the will of the monied. That understanding seems to have vanished. To the point, I suspect, where people are so used to the system we're in, they can't see it's flaws--it just seems natural. That, simply, is Nader's message, and all of his platforms flow from there. It's not about the single issues. It's about the heart of the matter. In other news. One of the silly things about all this presidential hoo-hah is that it's overshadowing the elections that do matter--city, county, and state politics. We are all far more affected by local government than we ever will be by the White House. And, happily, in San Francisco and California we voted remarkably sensibly. In SF, we told King Willie and money-grubbing developers to go fuck themselves over Proposition K, we told the taxi lobbyists to go fuck themselves as they tried to grab more power, and our supervisor elections favored people not in King Willie's pockets. And never let them tell your vote doesn't count: remarkably, we have a proposition where the difference is 7 votes, or .002% of those who voted. In the state of California, we've voted to treat, not prosecute, drug users, and shot down the evil that is school vouchers. So, yeah, my guy might not have gotten his 5%, but I can't really be upset about this election. November 9, 2000 November 8, 2000 In explaining to the uninformed what a blog is, Mead writes, "Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates: you troll the Internet, and, when you find an article or a Website that grabs you, you link to it..." Though, she later acknowledges that "most of the new blogs are, like Megnut, intimate narratives rather than digests of links and commentary..." And, in so doing, points up the issue of defining blogs by way of analogy, or metaphor. Still, I've become increasingly of the mindset that blogs are an important new phenomenon. I think there is a new form of communication/publishing taking place. It's not necessarily about annotated links, or diary entries, or whatnot. It's simply about putting form to thought and getting it out there. The omnipresence of the internet allows for the publishing of thought pretty much *as it occurs*. This is new. This is exciting. People all over the world, going about their business, have something occur to them. In moments they can simply *put it out there*. Whatever "it" is. This is a notion that seems obvious when you look at it, but I don't think the blogging phenomenon has ever been discussed in this way. Many will grouse at this notion. "Oh great. The Web is a morass of unfiltered crap." True. But. It also allows for a delightfully raw dissemination of ideas, some of which could prove powerful. As always, readers need to figure out the landscape for themselves. Oh, and this week's The New Yorker, is another stellar issue. Apart from the blog piece, there's an informative look at fibromyalgia, and a revealing feature on George Kennan, the 'architect' of Cold War containment. I'm in the middle of a report on teaching Shakespeare to Chinese students, and there are many pages left to go. This magazine floors me. November 6, 2000 Of particular note to folks in SF and NY (or those willing to travel there for work): Y'all should register for the fantabulous "Synonyms and Taxonomies" one-day seminar. It's surprising how little those of us who call ourselves information architects actually know about very basic methods for structuring information. Pump up the volume! The Nov 1 petermeme on volume controls spurred a few emails. (God, I need to switch to Blogger so I can have people make comments...) Jesse made an argument in support of horizontal sliders--the anatomy of a human wrist means it's physically easier to move a mouse left-to-right than up-and-down. He wonders if our linguistic and visual metaphors are necessarily linked. Stephen Judd wrote in to say, "Possibly another benefit to physical volume knobs is that they evoke taps (or faucets, if you're American :). Gushing flow = loud volume." In thinking about this further, I remembered what is perhaps the most important volume-control interface--the mixing board. Unlike a stereo, there's no limit to the space devoted to manipulating the interface for optimal effect. And, lo and behold, we've got vertical sliders, which, on a mixing board, can be as precisely set as a volume knob on a stereo. And which, I argue, map better to how we think about loudness. Stop and listen. So, thanks to Napster, I've discovered the song "I'll Come Running," off of Brian Eno's Another Green World. It's an amazing track. I can't stop singing it. I'm listening to it endlessly. It's compositionally lush, lyrically oblique, and the refrain ("I'll come running to tie your shoes") makes me smile. And now it's peterme.com's first MP3 offering. "I'll Come Running" (3.6 MB) Dude, I see trails! Scott McCloud's latest "I Can't Stop Thinking" column discusses the use of 'trails,' the graphic elements he uses to connect panels in the new ZOT! comic. It's perhaps the best piece so far in his series. Double Dutch. DeLijst
is a nifty collection of UI and IA resources. Though in Dutch, it's
not too hard to make one's way around. Patterns patterns
everywhere. Nadav has a post
about his frustration with multiple pattern languages for UIs.
(tangent: This
is my fave link for UI pattern languages: ) November 3, 2000 Volume knobs have obsessed me since I learned about conceptual metaphor in reading Metaphors We Live By. A common conceptual metaphor is that the Future is Ahead and the Past is Behind. We "look ahead" to tomorrow and we "put behind" what happened yesterday. It seems so natural to say so, it's not obvious that it doesn't have to be that way. These conceptual metaphors can play a powerful role in interface design, where we're often trying to give form to the abstract. Following are four volume-setting interfaces. Which is most appropriate?
Quicktime has that delightful thumbwheel. WinAmp and MediaPlayer feature left to right sliders. The Windows control panel offers a vertical slider. Which makes the most sense? Clues: Volume is Up or Down. Only one of the widgets allows you to interact with volume in that fashion. The Media Player is clever with the inset triangle being higher to the right, suggesting louder. WinAmp's slider changes color (from green (soft) to red (loud), I think), but those colors are pretty meaningless outside the system. And let's not even bother going on about the Quicktime debacle, shall we? An interesting point raised in the talk is how we think of *interacting* with volume as crank or turn. This is a legacy with volume knobs. Why do stereos have knobs? Not because knobs make sense in a metaphorical way--why does clockwise mean 'loud'? Knobs make sense in an ergonomic way--it's the input device that allows for the highest degree of precision. I've used stereos with vertical slider controls, and you spend a lot of time lightly tap-tapping them up and down to get them just right. Maybe that's an excuse for the Quicktime thumbwheel? Uh, no. The interaction with
the thumbwheel is so awkward (click and hold and drag up a bit and
let go and roll back down to the buttom and click and hold and drag
up a bit again, etc. etc.) that the designer responsible should
be put in stocks and have RSI-preventive devices tossed at him/her. Verrry scarrry stuff! So, a search on Google for "scare quotes" turned up this delightful link: About Scare Quotes, from The Dialectics of Scare Quotes and Hyperlinks. Lots on philosophy, philosophers (Hegel, Derrida, Wittgenstein), and, of course, "scare quotes." Presentation MADNESS! So, I was asked to give a talk on "What Makes an Interface Communicate?" for Web2000. At first I didn't think I was going to do anything particularly interesting, but somehow (lots of coffee and the benefit of good books on interface design lying around the house) I put something together that doesn't suck. Like the previous presentation I posted, there's a Powerpoint and HTML version, but the HTML is no doubt IE-specific. Anyway, since I was taking someone else's title (I was subbing for another presenter), the talk ended up being more of a riff on what makes an interface communicate (as opposed to some thought out, reasoned discourse on the topic). Lots of sources cited, and a nifty slide comparing volume knobs. Really. Volume knobs are fascinating. Maybe I'll talk about them more someday.
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