Today, the WorldWide Telescope was released as a public beta by Microsoft. It is now available for download at http://www.worldwidetelescope.org.
The WorldWide Telescope is virtual telescope software for browsing imagery of the universe from a variety of sources. This learning resource provides a smooth and seamless user experience that allows users to explore the sky, while understanding context and scale of what they are looking at. The exploration experience is enhanced by a highly visual interface for finding the good stuff in the sky and guided tours made by other users.
Over the last year Artefact collaborated with Microsoft researchers Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay on the design of this simple user interface that always provides a sense of context, scale, and direction. We consulted on the overall user experience design of the application as well as the WWT branding and website.
Congratulations to Curtis and Jonathan on releasing such a compelling experience that will captivate many people around the world!
Recently at Mix, I ran into a couple of UI folks from Netflix. We got into a over dinner conversation where we talked about some of the UI issues with their service. They asked at the end of dinner if I’d care to write a critique of the site. We conducted a brainstorm with about 8 Artefact people (all Netflix users) for a couple of hours and generated a list of maybe 30 big and small issues and opportunities for Netflix and their site. I wrote up the notes, then was about to hit Send when the Netflix team did a fairly significant update to their site rendering allot of the issues redundant. It took a week or two to re-do this list and Kudos to the Netflix team their site dramatically improved in this release. Overall their site UI is pretty good, we rate it an overall B, but there’s lots of small and large opportunities for them to make the Netflix site the best Movie authority destination on the internet. The picture above shows a concept featuring a movie preview on the home page, with the ability filter in the individual movie bands.
Once we sent the document, Netflix immediately responded with some very nice feedback answering many of the issues this document raises. They asked I keep thier feedback confidential. You can read the document here.
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.
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.
“Now there is a three step process. For the first step, over a period of 100 frames, the gravity orbs paint their cross-section onto the paper where it intersects it. The second step, also cumulative over 100 frames, has the particle orbs raining down a mist of ink. The third step is where it gets fun. Every 100 frames, all of the geometry collapses onto the paper. Voila! Instant chaotic hair balls.” [Vimeo]
