Arstechnica recently wrote a preview article on AT&T’s desktop web browser. It’s an interesting development considering the changing habits of web browsing (see: snacking, RSS, social media) and the advancements in web page implementations (see: RIA, Silverlight, AIR, etc). The web space is becoming more of a place than a collection of documents serving up bits. Behind that content are consumer goods, social relationships and answers to research questions. As they become more engaging, more advanced controls will be necessary to manage emerging habits.
While it is still in private beta – aka broken – it toys with the idea of a changing browsing experience. Instead of making something more efficient, it introduces functionality that helps organize pages, and collection of pages (which they call “cells”) for user’s to manage as opposed to favorites and hierarchy of favorites. Another component to Pogo is the notion of a visual history. While I haven’t personally experienced how this feature interacts, I’m curious how this is realized and why they see this as a large unmet need. I mean, they made it 3-D and extremely visual. AT&T is really experimenting with the market new ways we as consumers will potential engage with our online world.
Flock is another interesting implementation of web browsing in that it exposes the practices in the context of social media and interactions. It is still a rather traditional web browser, with similar metaphors, but it is built around the embedded access points into social web sites like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook. Shiira is another emerging web browser (based on the Webkit foundation, like Safari). These browser are introducing new ways to manage multiple pages at once and visualizing them in ways other than tabs.
The question this raises is how this will impact the relationship between client side (browser) functionality and server side (RIAs) functionality. Do I Digg to bookmark? Or do I bookmark within my browser? Benefits? Drawbacks? Anyways, just food for thought.
We were working on a project recently where we were researching different ways to visualize structured data sets and we came across this gem of a site called Visual Complexity whose purpose is to “be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks.” Currently they have over 560 different visualizations catalogued on their site visualizing topics from art to the web. Those of particular interest were the “shape of song” (pictured) and the “business network” visualization showing the relationship between board members of different businesses. Often visualizations of this sort are just good at analysis of large complex data sets. What makes some of these especially interesting is their ability to simplify things down to an understandable and interactive software UI.
Microsoft recently unveiled a revolutionary piece of software called WorldWide Telescope which gives anyone the ability to explore the universe in ways never before possible. Artefact assisted Microsoft Research in crafting a user experience that is truly engaging and we are very excited to see it become available.
“The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.” - Microsoft
WorldWide Telescope will be available this spring as a free download from worldwidetelescope.org.
This concept shows a compelling vision of the promise of Augmented reality systems, which overlay digital data onto normal photographic views of the world. This looking glass concept has enormous potential for taking the huge amount of digital data currently locked away in map based mash-ups and revealing it in situe.
A friend told us about an exhibit he saw during a recent visit to New York’s Moma called Design and the Elastic Mind. He mentioned that the show seemed to be influenced by the Eames studio and process and that it is worth heading over to NY to take a look. Thanks Rodney for the recommendation!
“Over the past twenty-five years, people have weathered dramatic changes in their experience of time, space, matter, and identity. Individuals cope daily with a multitude of changes in scale and pace—working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, and being inundated with information. Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of intelligence, but today’s instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity, the product of adaptability plus acceleration. Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use. This Web site presents over three hundred of these works, including fifty projects that are not featured in the gallery exhibition. “ - moma
We’re inspired to build one of these using dry ice mist instead of water. Also, some sort of digital display would be cool in place of the static letter/lights. Perhaps combining this type of display with a real-time visualization of web usage stats.
Some article I ran into that I thought were interesting. The first is a neat, albeit simple, visualization of stated deliverables and their respective groundwork for a designer.5 Competencies of UX DesignThis article speaks to the evolution of Information Design into the paradigm of User Experience. He argues that user experience is more than just making a product/service/good better. Instead, it is a matter of composing an experience that is the key differentiator to these higher experiences.What’s more interesting is this quote about the success of User Experience in practice thus far:
What’s remarkable is that the success rate of designed user experiences, even those informed by ethnography, is anecdotally reported to be a sparse five to ten percent. It might even be less. The vast majority of products and services designed according to the tenets of user experience, supported by ethnographic findings, do not achieve their goals.
My feeling is we should aim to be above the five percent. This should be an internal maxim.
