The Flicker Blog and Podcast

To the marketeers who think that it’s a good idea to insert promotional messages that disrupt the normal procedure of withdrawing funds from HSBC cash machines. You are wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong.

Casual observation should help you conclude that users have been through this procedure so many times before, that they barely read the screens presented to them.

They are 100% task focussed. They want cash. They are quite probably talking to a friend, and on the way to the pub; or off shopping. They are more likely to be looking over their shoulder at the impatient queue behind them than at your screen.

They have entered their PIN, they have selected ‘Cash Withdrawal’ and a desired amount. They are waiting. They are listening for the beeping that announces the imminent arrival of beer coupons. Please note - they are not reading the marketing message that asks them to accept or cancel your kind offer of information on a new service. Even if they were interested - with the queue behind them, they’re hardly in the mood, or context for hold-ups.

Just because there is a perceived opportunity, do not think it must be taken. Put yourself in the shoes (or the queue) of your customer and ask what the emotional response to an unwelcome, and disruptive delay in proceedings will be. If you conclude that a rational and reasonable response is anything other that ecstatic, ask yourself if this endeavor is a worthwhile one? Thank you.

Some time ago, Ian pointed me at a video of two new visualisation tools (Stack and Swarm) that have been developed for Digg. Now that they’re both live (on Digg Labs) I wanted to give them a mention.

Stack is a visualisation tool, showing ‘diggs’ as they occur in real-time. Taking the form of a bar chart, vertical bars along the bottom grow, as blocks (representing ‘diggs’) fall from above. Visually, it feels like an early 80’s video game, and the default zoom level tends to yield little in the way of information. Clicking on a bar (which at the lowest zoom level, requires the manual dexterity and speed associated with playing a video game) gives you a more detailed view on the respective story. Interesting stuff!

Swarm is definitely the approach that I find most interesting. As a real-time visualisation tool, it affords far more information at a glance. Individual stories are represented as circles, growing in size as they grow in popularity. Hovering over a circle reveals not only the headline, but connections (or lackof) to other stories - arcs temporarily appear to illustrate relationships between items as the user moves them.

There’s a nice application of physics employed in the visualisation - ‘loner’ stories push adjacent stories away whilst connected items have elastic connections (causing a lag in movement that’s dependent on the speed with which objects are moved). I did initially find myself questioning the value of some of the interactions. Moving items around seemed to have little purpose beyond sheer playfulness, and any attempt to organise items in the constantly fluid state is futile. That said, I have to concede that the interaction does help the user grasp the relationship (or lackof) between objects in a way that visual stimulus alone, would not.

As real-time visualisations of data go, both approaches are very impressive.

A couple of links that have been doing the rounds at work - some Qualitive and Quantitive studies into the most commonly used web fonts:
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts: Which is Best and When?
and
Determining the Best Online Font for Older Adults

It’s interesting to read about the methods used, and the information may help inform (or at least defend) certain design decisions that are made, but it all unravelled for me when I read that Comic Sans, was one of the most favoured fonts by the participants!

The BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype movie shows a beautiful, elegant and seductive alternative for the contemporary desktop metaphor we’ve all known and used on our PCs since the 80’s. Whilst the demonstrated interactions are not 100% intuitive or self-evident, they do appear to be easy to learn (not unlike Grafitti on PalmOS).

Despite the impressive execution of the concept, I am a little puzzled as to what problem is being solved here. It would appear (to the designers of this prototype) that in the real world, the messy, cluttered desktop, with piles of documents scattered everywhere, is desirable. In the real world, your eyes can tell you in an instant, what you are looking at - making sorting and location of objects far easier. The resolutions of displays may be going up, but in this demo, all PDFs are displayed by their icon alone. Minus a filename or preview, how do you know what you are dealing with when sorting piles of documents?

For me, the most dissapointing aspect of this is that it just extends and polishes the existing metaphor. Piles of files - aren’t they just a new way of thinking of folders? With the virtual world, are such rigid presentational groupings appropriate? Wouldn’t an interface that shows connections and dependencies automatically be more useful?

I’m sure that there’s far more to the prototype than the movie shows, and that using the interface itself, would make the merits more forthcoming. However, I do feel that it’s wrong to assume that the actual, cluttered desktop is the optimum solution to the problem.

If I were to generalise hugely, and say that people fall into two camps - those that keep their desks tidy, and those who do not, who would this interface benefit? Aren’t those who keep their desks tidy most likely to save and manage files and folders as a matter of course, and those who do not, be most likely to dump everything on their desktop? My feeling is that the less tidy amongst us, are also those who are less likely to go to the effort of sorting a messy desktop into piles. To me, it would seem that this prototype is aimed at just those people.

Graphical representations of the moods reported by Live Journal, as visualised by the Informatics Institute in Amsterdam. It was particularly significant (though not surprising) to see the huge downward trend following the tragic events in London yesterday.