beatnic - just wondering

If you have web apps like travel booking systems or services like discussion forums running on your intranet you already have personalisation. Whether it’s any good is down to how well it’s designed and presented and how it feels to use.

For company intranet homepages I don’t think there’s any question that personalisation will become increasingly common. The likes of Netvibes, iGoogle, MyYahoo and even Facebook have raised people’s expectations in this area.

The risk is that companies confuse personalisation with customisation and jump on the bandwagon, rushing to provide all the latest functionality before considering what people really need.

So here are three definitions that should help when thinking about this:

Top-down content

Content that’s there because you work for Company X. Examples include share price information and company-wide announcements.

Personalised content

Content that is there because you’re you. You are in a particular role, in a particular department, at a particular level. How? Either the system knows who you are, or you’ve told it about yourself or a combination of the two.

Customised content

Content (and sometimes positioning and formatting) that you’ve chosen based on a particular set of options. You have subscribed to the latest news about design and have chosen to have the headlines appear in a list on the right hand side of the page. You’ve chosen a particular look and feel for the page.

There is absolutely no reason why the three types of content can’t share the same space. Good interaction and visual design is essential to ensure people can clearly distinguish between them.

If the content is relevant and well presented, intranet personalisation can help make the digital workspace more joined up and navigable, and it can help employees have a better understanding of their overall work environment.

See also: Gerry McGovern’s recent article Intranet personalization: does it work?

Count your opinions

Originally uploaded by Beatnic.

So I thought I’d add my input to the survey being run by London Underground on personal safety at Elephant & Castle tube station.

Unfortunately I didn’t understand how to use this “Opinionmeter” until I’d already started using it - at which point I had already mistakenly answered the first question.

I think the reason I got it wrong is because I expected it to be like a cashpoint (ATM), where the instructional text would appear on the little screen above the numeric keypad.

Only in this case the questions and instructional text are on the poster above the machine.

Being my usual self and therefore not reading the instructions I pressed the “1″ button, because that’s what it said on the screen.

A quick fix would be to have an highly visible label on the Opinionmeter itself pointing me towards the text above.

I really don’t understand the purpose of the screen at all.

I wonder how many other people this has happened to.

Better still, why not build it in to my ticket machine / Oyster top-up experience? Anonymity guaranteed of course.

Don’t be put off by the name!

If you’re interested in anything vaguely related to technology there’s something to listen to here.

I finally started catching up with some of my blog, news and podcast subscriptions recently and that coincided well with the arrival of my Nokia N95.

Some podcast stuff I’ve been listening to and would recommend includes:

• Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake telling the story of how Flickr started life as part of a massively multiplayer online game by Ludicorp and wound up becoming the darlings of the Web 2.0 world and getting bought by Yahoo! where she is now scattering the seeds of design thinking in everything there.
• Ideo boss Tim Brown talks in threes about design thinking - inspiration, ideation and implementation - and how it’s being picked up by big business.
• Irene Au, director of user experience at Google. On setting up a central user experience department, not biting off more than you can chew, and hiring T-shaped people.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again… Netvibes is quite simply everything an intranet (homepage) needs to be.

As well as being a great way of managing all my stuff on the internet of course.

It’s an aura thing.

Internet users make up their minds about the quality of a website in the blink of an eye, a study shows.

Researchers [from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada] found that the brain makes decisions in just a twentieth of a second of viewing a webpage.

They were surprised as they believed it would take at least 10 times longer to form an opinion.

[...]

The researchers also believe that these quickly-formed first impressions last because of what is known to psychologists as the “halo effect”.

If people believe a website looks good, then this positive quality will spread to other areas, such as the website’s content.

Since people like to be right, they will continue to use the website that made a good first impression, as this will further confirm that their initial decision was a good one.

Full article on BBC News.

Macintosh-style interaction design has reached its limits. A new paradigm, called results-oriented UI, might well be the way to empower users in the future.

In his latest alertbox, Jakob Nielsen explains how the concept of what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) is no longer useful or valid and is evolving into what-you-get-is-what-you-see (WYGIWYS) or “results-oriented UI [user interface].”

He uses the user interface redesign for Microsoft’s Office 12 as an example of where this is happening. There’s been positive feedback in initial testing apparently.

You select from a range of examples roughly what you want your end result to be (letter, book, presentation) and then narrow down to more detailed options.

And rather than drilling down through drop-down lists, your options are presented to you in context (according to the task you’re aiming to complete) and visually.

I guess this works in office-type applications because it lets people focus on the content rather than the formatting.

But I don’t think it’s new, just new to office-type applications. Other software has been based on this concept for a while now.

And there are lots of online products and services offering this kind of contextualised option selection and refinement, first thanks to Flash and now with ajax it’s spreading like wildfire.

Isn’t results-oriented UI just user-centred design by another name?

Several times recently I’ve been describing walks and runs to people and thought wouldn’t it be great to be able to plot them out on the amazing Google maps service.

It already does a great job with routes from A to B (say East Dulwich to Marylebone High Street - my current daily bicycle commute).

Imagine being able to put a shape (circle, say) on to a map and then drag its edges to particular co-ordinates or landmarks until you’ve mapped out your route.

Then you could save this route and send it as a link to someone or link to it from your website.

I was just wondering if anyone has any info on anything like this being developed anywhere?

After completing online transactions I often find myself in a cul-de-sac.

There are some notable exceptions, but most sites I’ve used are missing a trick. Often the only options are to return to a previous page or close the window housing the application.

This has always struck me as an ideal moment to let me know what else is available.

Most importantly, tell me I’ve successfully completed the transaction. If it’s repeatable allow me to do it again from here.

Having taken care of that, why not take advantage of that “what next?” moment?

What else is there I might want to do here? I’m not talking cynical marketing ploys here but something that might be genuinely useful to me and enhance my overall experience.

This must be especially important as we move to using smaller handheld devices to access the internet where typing in search terms or web addresses is still very cumbersome.

Offer a couple of (ideally contextually related) interesting choices.

Keep it simple, snappy and easy to follow through.

Yes, but how did I get here?

Yesterday I went to the Design Museum in London with some friends from work to see the design of information exhibition “YOU ARE HERE” (now in its last week).

It was full of amazing examples of how we convey complex information through models, signs and symbols, including navigation devices, orreries, maps, graphs, charts and timepieces. There were some interesting comparisons between how information is conveyed in different cultures.

But I felt it missed a trick by only showing the end results.

What I’d really like to learn is…

• Who was involved (not just the accredited designer)?
• What was discarded along the way?
• What was discovered along the way?
• What do the designs that nearly made it look like?
• How was the end result decided on and who by?
• What’s the story behind the design?

Adaptonyms (also known as textonyms and cellodromes) are words that can be typed with the same sequence of keys on a cell phone using predictive text. For example the sequence “2-3-3″ can produce “bed”, “add”, or “bee”.

Source: Wikipedia

Yesterday I texted a friend to let him know we’d “good to pub”. What I meant to write was “gone to pub”. Anyway he got the idea!

It got us talking about the perils of predictive text.

One friend pointed out that when you want to write “Mum”, the phone insists on offering “Nun” first, even though it’s much less commonly used and comes later in the alphabet. “Book” being offered before “Cool” is perhaps more understandable, but not when you think about which age group does the most texting.

The other day I got a puncture on my way in to work and wanted to text ahead to warn people I’d be late. “Got puncture in Canceryell” (hello, I’m trying to write Camberwell, what on earth is this word?)

Andy becomes body… there are loads of examples. Fortunately I don’t think I’ve offended anyone yet but I can see how it could happen.

And even though I must have written my name hundreds of times my phone never learns to offer it first. When I tap 642 I want Nic not Mic.

Chatting to my friend Claire earlier about having cleared my inbox thanks to Mark Hurst’s very handy guide to Managing incoming email.

We talked about how, because of the tools we’ve been given to deal with our information, we’ve been encouraged to organise our information in hierarchical structures.

A few years ago I built a directory structure in Outlook that I thought reflected my working life. First under the headings “Me”, “My work” and “My team”, and then further sub-divided “My work” in to all sorts of folders to do with the various projects I’m overseeing or inolved in as well as the operational elements and so on.

For me this no longer works.

Now I’m so used to tagging in Flickr and labelling in Gmail etc., I want to be able to apply the same approach to my work information.

Buttons to operate toilet door on board train today…

Just wondering… how do you know when it’s locked?

I’m starting to narrow in on what to write about when I do my Masters

At the moment it’s looking like:

The application of Gestalt theory in user interface and information design for web-based applications

More later.

“Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, US Architect, 1867-1959

Many everyday designs in use in the synthetic world are like moments of harmony during a turbulent but ultimately constructive relationship.

In between these moments you find form following function and function following form, and sometimes they’ll be battling it out between each other.

Here in the chaos it’s disturbing, disruptive and exciting. You can never quite be sure whether or when you’ll reach the next stage or what it’ll feel like when you get there. It’s where ideas and creativity happen.

In between the chaos are the zen-like places of simplicity where the noise has been reduced to silence, stepping off points in the development process, where you could remain forever, or rest for a while, contemplate, and then jump back on again towards the next level.

I’m not sure where the end-point in this journey towards simplicity is. I guess we might turn to nature for some answers.

The stability in Wright’s union of form and function can only ever be temporary.

Perhaps this is what makes us able to appreciate, understand and care about the beauty in the simplest design.

Flickr Graph is a brilliant use of the Flickr API

concept
Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com. It makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs. Start exploring your contacts by entering your flickr username or the email address you used to register there

Designed and built by Marcos Weskamp

Tactile and addictive

Just came across this nifty gizmo called What the font?! - nice idea, very easy to use, and it works pretty well

If you want to know what font someone’s used for, say, an advertisement, a book, an album cover… take a picture of some of the text and upload it to the site.

It will then scan the words in the image and ask you to confirm it’s recognised the letters correctly before giving you the name of the font used, or the closest matches.

I tried a couple. Not surprisingly it’s not too tolerant of fuzziness, so a good sharp image helps.

This slighly blurry word was narrowed down to five fonts, I’m settling on Compacta EF Light.

This reminded me of Shazam the mobile phone service where you can phone a number from a club and it’ll text back to you the details of the track that’s playing (I haven’t tried it, but hear it works OK).

Chip and PIN as a method of payment has been in the UK for a couple of months now, and according to all the major card companies is the most secure system so far.

According to this info on UK government website crimereduction.gov.uk, the initiative is costing £1.1billion. This to combat plastic fraud which in 2002 cost £424.6million in the UK.

Since 1st January stores not using chip and PIN get less protection and insurance against fraud. This was used as the “incentive” to buy in early.

So what’s it like to use?

Not a great user experience for me so far. And canvassing opinion in a quick straw poll friends agree.

It wouldn’t take a lot to improve it. Train staff better. Make it easier for customers to use, no awkward leaning over the sweet rack on the sales counter…

I was just wondering why we don’t seem to have benefitted from what other countries have learnt.

Compared to France, where they’ve used chip and PIN for years, we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. There the “PIN pads” usually have hoods which cover your hand enough so that others can’t see what your PIN is.

Here in the UK all the machines I’ve used so far are more like overweight pocket calculators.

They’re rarely on long enough leads, so you find yourself punching numbers in to the thing while it’s dangling in mid-air or being held by the sales assistant or waiter, many of whom seem bewildered by the new technology themselves.

I make a point of covering my number punching hand with my other hand but for some reason it all feels quite self-conscious, even though that’s what all the advice says.

…context is god!

Now… which categories to put this post in?

:-)

This from razorhead’s blog which I stumbled on the other day and is well worth a read.

There are five types of road crossing in use on UK roads:

1. Refuge: these are the islands in the centre of the road usually demarked by illuminated keep left/right signs which have be battered by cars that managed neither.
2. Zebra: marked by black and white stripes across the road, sometimes accompanied by Belisha Beacons and in 1951 marked the horribly cute reference to animals.
3. PELICAN: he name derives from a pseudo-acronym for ‘Pedestrian Light Controlled’, with the ‘o’ changed to an ‘a’ in deference to the bird. These feature a green or red cross/don’t cross figure on the signal on the opposite side of the road.
4. PUFFIN: these differ from pelican crossing by having the red/green man on the control box where the pedestrian presses the button to cross. There is no ‘blinking-green-man’ phase, but are fitted with extra sub-surface sensors to extend the crossing time if there is high demand or cancel the demand if the pedestrian moves away.
5. Toucan: are similar to puffin crossings but cyclists are also permitted to use them. The name is contrived from ‘Two Can Cross’.
6. Pegasus: similar to a pelican but feature a high mounted button for horse-riders. The red/green man is replaced by a red/green horse.