Thinky.org is the personal blog of Zach Pousman. I am a designer, researcher, and strategist at the intersection of people and technology. Here you'll find a collection of stuff from my travels around the internet. I like info graphics & visualizations, well-designed goods and services, effective advertising, and novel interaction techniques.
David Garcia, a dev lead at Facebook, got a chance to hack the NASDAQ button, using a cellphone and a few things from RadioShack (including what must have been gator clips since I don’t think he took apart the guts, just flipped a switch when the main circuit was completed… I’m totally assuming on that part). Neato. Result:
Nice new blog from an NYT graphics department reporter and data-journalist, Kevin Quealy. Lots of cool ‘behind the scenes’ work on how data gets into a graphic that gets onto nytimes.com or the paper version.
I can’t wait to turn my kitchen table into a skatepark. Literal bowls. Whoa.
Introduction
I got my Nike+ Fuelband more than a month ago. Nike, after their smashing success with the Nike+ hardware-and-software platform for running has developed ‘Nike+ Fuel’ and the Nike+ Fuelband. Nike’s product design department (I assume that this is a continuing collaboration with R/GA on their service design, and Apple for iPod integration) has designed the three-part system. First, there is NikeFuel, which is a points system that claims to work across a ton of different exercise activities, allowing individuals to compare their workouts even if they’re different. Second, there is the band itself, which measures exercise activity and is worn like a bracelet. Third, there is the Nike+ dashboard which allows a user to track and analyze his behavior, reviewing daily and weekly statistics, receiving badges and achievements, and also tracking social features.
This review covers my experiences thus far.
Pros:
Cons:
It’s a pretty subtle economics joke. Hint: Check out the card.
One of the best things about the show Mad Men is how accurate the show is to it’s source cultural moment of the ‘golden age of advertising’ in New York. Unlike other period shows like The Playboy Club and Pan Am, Mad Men’s costuming, sets, styling, and even speech attempt to accurately reflect some deep aspects of culture of New York in the 1960s. Here’s an analysis of real 1960s speech (the ratio of modern usage to period usage) as used on the Season 5 premiere. Ben Schmidt is a historian of language and has two blogs (Sapping Attention and Prochronism) which are insightful if you’re into this kind of thing.
You’ll probably want to click to zoom in.
People in the 1960s didn’t say ‘status meeting’ or ‘dinner reservations’ and also note the outlier status of ‘need to’, ‘want to’, and ‘used to’. Or at least they didn’t write it as much. Note that the comparison is shifted somewhat because the corpus Ben’s using from the 1960s is google books and the language on Mad Men is almost exclusively spoken. Even with that caveat, it’s still a really interesting analysis.
Here’s the article from the Atlantic, with further interesting tidbits on this topic.
Sisyphus! Tantulus! Zeno’s Paradox! Play them all…
This is really nice to-do list app for the iPhone. You can see that there is barely any UI at all — it’s completely gestural. Or nearly so. The app is still in development and ’coming soon’ so the video you see here is faked. But I like it.
Where are we watching video content? TV is still the juggernaut.
And here’s a different source, but platform matters when it comes to watching video too. People love a big screen, but they also love the iPad screen.
Check this out: Rappers. Wrapping. (See more at rapperswrapping.tumblr.com) Next year, I want to recruit Atlanta’s hip hop royalty and get them to help us collect and distribute toys for kids. But for this year, we just had to photoshop ‘em!
Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night!
There’s rhetorical uses of information visualization, and then there’s this. Just look at the scale on the left and then look at how well and poorly the values line up on the line chart. Especially over there at the end (9.1, 9.0, 8.6). Can’t. Make. The. Line. Go. Down.
What a gem.
I’m a sucker for this kind of project: I love art and design that uses (and abuses) currency. And I love rhetorical uses of information visualization and infographics. “Occupy George” is a plan to print out (on your own dollar bills) statistics which are at least reflective of the goals of the Occupy Wall Street protestors. Hat tip to Infosthetics.com.
One really nice little piece of UI I saw this morning: Google Chrome’s print dialog. It displays, directly on top of the print button, a simple calculation of how many pages are to be printed. The team knew that pages mean two different things, so Chrome calculates both how many pages are being printed, but also (and more importantly from a sustainability standpoint), how many sheets of paper are going to come out.
Thanks Google, for at least giving people some subtle motivation to print double-sided (though I’ll note that, in terms of nudges to better behavior, checking this box by default would be even better). There is also the matter of 2-up prints, which print two pages, rotated and shrunken, on the same side of a page. Which saves paper if not one’s eyesight. However, I’ll note that this dialog is not available in Chrome… a user would have to go to their OS print dialog to find these options and therefore lose the ability to see the calculated page and sheets of paper data.
Google’s got a new visualization of activity on Google+ and it’s called Ripples. The intent is to visualize how (public) posts are passed inside of google’s network. Really nice to look at and very fast rendering. The only examples I’ve played with so far are confirmatory analysis: the people I already know are ‘big’ and influential, are in fact, big on the Google too.
Many of the rumors about the iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 included a claim that Apple was planning to increase the size of the screen, from its current 3.5 inches to 4 inches. And, while it wasn’t clear if there would be both a larger-screen and the standard size, or whether the newest iteration would come only in that larger size.
The design of the iPhone is certainly a hot topic, and of course, all of design is navigating the trade-offs, but the quick analysis and comparison that Dustin Curtis did is quite nice. The green shading indicates the area covered by the thumb of the hand holding the device (I’m not sure, but I bet it’s estimated with Dustin’s hand, and not the 95% percentile used in ergonomics; still quite telling though).
But what’s even nicer is this claim by John Gruber at Daring Fireball:
But I do think there’s a ‘Pepsi Challenge’ type effect going on here. The thing with the Pepsi Challenge was that most people preferred (and prefer today) the taste of Coke over Pepsi, when drinking a full serving. But, when you only take a sip or two of each, people tend to prefer whichever is sweeter, and that was Pepsi. Some people really do prefer Pepsi, of course. But I think there are a bunch of people buying big-ass Android phones after taking just a sip or two in the store.
This seems very right to me. And then just over the weekend, I read an academic paper which includes a framework to explain long-term product use and appreciation [PDF]. It also coincidentally includes a study about smartphone features and what design elements are salient under different time-spans. During the lifespan of a product, the user’s feelings, attitudes and conceptions change, but so do the very metrics that they use to measure and qualify their experiences. Below is a visual representation of the model that the authors use in the paper (and in a system they’ve built to collect these kinds of data), but I highly recommend reading the whole thing if you’re interested in long-term issues in designing the “right” thing, be it physical or virtual.
[PDF] at Dr. Karapanos’ site. Citation: Karapanos, E., Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J., & Martens, J. (2010). Measuring the Dynamics of Remembered Experience Over Time. Interacting with Computers. Volume 22, Issue 5, September 2010, Pages 328-335.
