Multi-modality is more important than we think it is… And we thought it was important to begin with.
Lisa Herrod, writing for A List Apart about how deaf experience captioning and subtitles. Even captioning, it turns out, is often not enough for a good experience. Best piece on disabled and interaction I have read this year I think.
Jack Shedd on Big Contrarian wrote a very thoughtful piece on multiple groups working together on a product:
The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. Yes, in theory, the design team should come up with a perfect solution and the engineering team should be smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and neither should ever have to talk to each other.
While I am not in agreement with his statement about:
Engineers reminding designers that the supply of time and money being finite, choices have to be made. The two together defining more perfect solutions that ship, and work not just correctly but elegantly.
Using design could just as well be the measure of saving money since that is the essence of making sure beforehand that you are making the correct product which should work as expected. Via Cameron Moll.
A fun YouTube video of a lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson detailing some problems with the intelligent design argument. Funny because it is true.
The ever-going cycle of explaining exactly what you do. Via Jakob Persson.
A good interview with the man behind many excellent user interfaces such as those found in Poser 3 and 4 and Kai's Power Tools which are famous for their different and good user interface models.
Tom Insam explores the different looks and behaviors of the volume widgets found on the iPhone.
The good thing about research is that you only have to do it once and many projects can benefit from it. Not unlike open source software. But it turns out few developers make use of even the good research that is available to them.
Steven Frank, offers suggestions for future versions of trees in his thorough review of these carbon based thingamajigs:
If I could make one suggestion for future versions, it would probably be for trees to become "untethered". That is, preserve the top portion without the intervening trunk. I have on a couple of occasions been walking down the street and gotten a branch in the face. This is a painful and, let's be honest, humiliating situation.
Based on Gapminder, of Hans Rosling fame, Google just announced their new Visualisation API one year after acquiring Gapminder. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.
Via: Information Aesthetics.
Repeating the results from the World Color Study, Dolores Labs asked people to name random colors:
We showed thousands of random colors like this to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Here's what they said:
