Drone music

‘Drone music is a minimalist musical style that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones.’

Wikipedia

Kranzberg’s laws of technology

Melvin Kranzberg’s six laws of technology state:

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
6. Technology is a very human activity – and so is the history of technology.

From Wikipedia

The most annoying OS X UX failure

For years and years the same frustration. Why is it so difficult to tell me WHAT TO DO in order to release the item? Even more annoying if you close every single application and the error persists.

Wave ahhoi

Google will stop developing Wave. Wasn’t it a bit 90ies anyway? Why converging different communication applications into one while the Web appears to disintegrate into discrete apps (and a walled garden called facebook)? It appears that people prefer using dedicated channels depending on recipients, contexts, topics … One person alone might already have many personas with different communication needs. So not really a surprise that people considered Wave to be clumsy, incomprehensible, and rather pointless.

Simplifying sensibly

Simplicity is a prime user experience principle. Making simple things, however, is actually quite difficult. Particularly because most clients usually are not willing to compromise on features and functionality. Instead of building simple things from scratch, more often than not, I find myself making things difficult first. Then I simplify carefully and (to the best of my knowledge) sensibly. This gives me sufficient control over trade-offs and design decisions to be made. Also, a simplified version can easily be scaled back to its original size, if necessary (there is still a client).

This is how it works for me:

1. Get a complete picture of business requirements, user needs, context, specified functionality, given dependencies, and core content/data objects.
2. Establish priorities for user experience, functionality, and content. Find out what users consider as ‘simple’ for this particular product.
3. Design a high level model that fully accommodates the needs. Quickly prototype the application.
4. Review the prototype. Identify potential for simplifying things: secondary content/data/functionality; unnecessary hierarchies; competing calls to action and interaction paradigms. Then get out your tools:

• Discard: Remove irrelevant content, functionality, menus, items.
• Consolidate: Merge content, calls to action, sections. Be careful not to create unwanted new hierarchies.
• Streamline: Declare primary mission of a product/section/screen and make everything support this mission.
• Flatten: Remove doorsteps, speed bumps, and stairs. Example: Navigation tabs are only necessary, if you have more than three navigation items. If it’s two, use a toggle button.

BBC news redesign – the verdict

Ok, I’ve used the site for a couple of weeks now. Here’s my verdict:

• It works. But I cannot say it works better than the previous design.
• Where is the style sheet? The site needs skinning. Looks like high def wireframes went online. White space is useful if employed in a controlled manner.
• Definitely have a problem with top navigation. Why having UK and England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales as top labels?? (Ok, I know why, but I don’t agree.) Also: if I’d come up with the labels ‘Sci/Environment’ and ‘Entertainment & Arts’ I’d most probably got sent back to my desk.

I still find it kind of embarassing to see BBC news with an inconsistent global BBC banner.

BBC News global nav

Lots has been changed on the BBC News site. I wonder about stuff that hasn’t been touched. Despite its recent major revamp, BBC news has a visually inconsistent global nav and site search. Even the logo is smaller than on all other sites of the family. Any design rationale?

BBC News site redesign

Mother BBC has launched its redesigned News site a few days ago. I want to actually use the site on a day-to-day basis before I express my user opinion. So no comment yet.

I’m however interested in ‘The-making-of’. Paul Sissons, the creative director of this project, explains. His view on the site’s redesign appears rather presumptuous to me. It sounds a biit like ‘You may not realise or not even appreciate it, but rest assured: we spent your money doing the right thing’. And indeed, there are some interesting design considerations, like the new homepage template that allows controlling the ‘volume’ of a topic or story. In other instances, the BBC appears to adapt standards that other news sites already have put into practice a while ago, such as horizontal top navigation, bold typo, and vertical depth (prime example for this site style is the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter).

Some nuggets:

‘The gradients and textures of “Web 2.0″ are gone, and everything is pared down to the minimum required for delivering news.’

‘With an incentive, users will scroll. If that proves a positive interaction, it’s something that could become habitual. So rather than design our indexes and front page with everything at the top of the page, we are encouraging scrolling by putting richer content within stories and towards the bottom.’

‘With Top Stories prominently visible to every user, we allow for more sideways navigation. People won’t have to click back and forth from Front Page to story in order to read the stories of the day.’

Kurt Schwitters: Gesetze der Bildform

Visiting the exhibition Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde at the Tate Modern, I was struck to see something like a website wireframe in a small book from 1930, ‘Gesetze der Bildform’, by the modernist artist Kurt Schwitters.

Kurt Schwitters: Gesetze der Bildform, 1930

On these two pages he compares / contrasts orientation with advertising.

Orientation / Advertising … (Orientierung / Werbung)

1. Static / Dynamic … (Ruhend / Bewegt )
2. No center, balanced, hence stable / Distinct center, hence radiating … (Ohne Mitte, daher ausgeglichen / Betonte Mitte, daher austrahlend)
3. Passiv / Aktive … (Passiv / aktiv)
4. Objektiv / Subjective … (Objektiv / Subjectiv)
5. Vertical, horizontal, rectangular forms / Parallel, any shape … (Senkrecht, waagerecht, Vierecke / Parallel oder schraeg, jede beliebige Form)
6. Parts of the same type; the negative of each part is essentially the same as its positive / Parts of different types. Negative and positive are essentially different, like conkave and convex … (Teile gleichartig; das Negativ jedes Teiles ist im Wesen gleich seinem positiv / Teile verschiedenartig; Negativ und Positiv sind wesentlich verschieden, wie konkav und konvex)
7. hence – providing orientation / hence – advertising, aggressive … (also – orientierend / also – werbend, aggressiv)

Visually structured v plain language information

My comment in response to Jeff Johnson’s book/article: Designing with the Mind in Mind

I do agree that visual structure is key to clean and scannable interfaces but this insight is often being challenged in usability test sessions. Presenting information in a purely structurded way implies some level of abstraction that many users (particularly casual ones) cannot follow easily as it makes them ‘think’. And this is what UX designers want to avoid by all means .

People often prefer plain language information, phrased in full sentences. My guess: it’s because a sentence is more explicit and is better suited to mimic a conversation (which successful HCI is all about).

This does not hold true for any site and any type of information and it doesn’t undermine the good principles that you’ve outlined here. But it shows that minds work differently and many people want to be addressed in a more direct (as you call it) prose style.