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.
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.
Here’s a quick design case study that recounts our experience building a dashboard for drivers that collects, aggregates, and invites exploration of driving data (each trip, each press of the accelerator, or twist of the wheel, along with GPS and car-computer data). Two of my favorite slides from the talk are below:
When I attended the University of Chicago, I used to live directly across the street from the “Robie” House (in Woodward dorm, which is no longer). I’ve toured the house inside a couple times, but I used to walk by the front door all the time, and I think it’s *the* best example of his work. I like it even better than Falling Water.
Prediction: The Wacom Inkling pen is going to be good for illustrators but it’s going to be GREAT for IAs (Information Architects) and IxDs (Interaction Designers). We don’t care about things like perfect registration, the levels of sensitivity, and the “feel” of the pen. We care about documenting our sketches and experiments and this thing will be great for that.
Dear Apple, this would be an actual reason to have have a glass back on your phone models. Please consider adding a simlar grid of LEDs behind the glass for ambient updates (click on the ‘illumination demo’), notifications, and even ambient depictions of our activity and the activity of others. Thanks, Zach.
‘YEKPARE’ (monolithic) from nerdworking on Vimeo.
This kinda beats the crap out of the Coca-Cola building wrap.
