Category: Information Design
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The Scrolling Experience and “The Fold”
Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935 In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the…
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iPhone Apps I Want
I am thoroughly enjoying the debut crop of iPhone Apps — a welcome improvement over the (mostly) second-rate half-baked apps available in the Jailbreak era. Here are a few imaginary apps and functions I wish I could be using right now. 1. Batch Sync Most New Yorkers with iPhones will recognize this scenario: You get…
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Research + Interpret + Produce = Design
A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations. Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst…
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Edward Tufte’s iPhone
The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone’s screen resolution and its compelling and easy-to-use zoomable UI paradigm. In…
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Design Research is a Design Process
I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and…
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How Deep is your Internet News?
In today’s Times, I read a story that included a fallacy that I’m pretty fed up of hearing: The accusation that web-based news and journalism is overly brief and shallow, that it caters too much to the short attention spans of ADD-addled youths, and that the web is ushering in a new era of crappy…
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Get Info
I found this on the inside of a 1950’s recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and thought it looked a lot like the iTunes “Get Info” UI. It struck me that metadata, and the graphic design thereof, has a vast history in print that is probably worth exploring very deeply when we design metadata displays for…
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Circular UIs are Fun
A few years ago I was invited by the Whitney Museum to contribute an artwork to their Artport site, their showcase of interactive artists. My contribution was “Concentric Empathy”, a work about the various sorts of non-human emergent intelligences we might have to confront in the coming century. I am showing it again here because…
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Challenge: If You Can’t Say Something Nice about OLPC…
The One Laptop Per Child is now appearing in people’s mailboxes. But I’m a little sour about all the unquestioning praise for the user interface design, which to me looks like a complete disaster. So I have a challenge for UX pundits and professionals who are also proud new owners of the XO: Say something…