David H Law

For our over-notified selves :)

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:09:01 -0500

For our over-notified selves :)

Heat map of NYC's most popular jogging routes

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:46:44 -0500

Super cool visualization of 1000 Nike+ users swarming over NY. The compressed real time video where you get to see everyone out and about is super cool.

http://cargocollective.com/coopersmith#1327371/Nike-Plus-Visualization

Skeumorphism

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 23:58:59 -0400

The newest design buzzword. It means to design things that emulate real-world objects, like how the iPhone notes app looks like a yellow legal pad. For two interesting perspectives:

It sucks: http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy

It sucks, but I guess it’s ok: http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-people/

I tend to waver, but I think I agree with Andy. Disguising a sophisticated new UI as a familiar but defunct design has an air of pandering kitsch… but it is in fact an extremely effective tactic to soften the design of a new piece of technology so that a normal person feels comfortable approaching it. If you truly believe in the democratizing power of technology, this should be ok with you. If you value innovative designs and aesthetic integrity over all else, it is abhorrent. Personally, I think these things are bad only if one is unable to ever move past them. We still send mail right? That’s why it’s ok that every email app still has an envelope on it. But no one uses floppy disks anymore, so maybe that one should go. Some people still take notes on yellow legal pads…. so maybe we should just lighten up and deal with it :D

Sneaky Menu design

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 17:20:00 -0400

I read this article, unfortunately, right after I got back from lunch where I bought the curly fries that were highlighted in the bright yellow box on the menu. Now I feel like a sucker! They highlighted a few best (most devious?) practices:

Make the dollar amounts appear visually smaller by rounding up and omitting cents
Make the dish titles scannable, but not the prices (i.e. don’t right-align the price column)
Put the highest margin menu items on the right hand first page with a a box to draw attention to them, as that’s what you see as soon as you open the menu
In the rest of the menu categories (other than the attention getting first right page), front load the most expensive items. If you’re familiar with order of presentation and memory retention, this is the Primacy effect. You remember the expensive stuff and everything else then seems cheaper by comparison.

Interesting analysis on this particular design challenge. They are either trying to hide the price from you (the cynical view) or they are selling you an experience and are trying to improve it by getting you to focus on the food instead of the price (the apologists view :). Call it what you want, I’m only ordering from the bottom left of the last page of the menu from now on!

http://www.salon.com/food/francis_lam/2010/02/22/how_menus_manipulate_diners

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:16:00 -0400

Thanks Alex Zane for turning me on to this great documentary about technology and its effects on the philosophies and policy decisions of our leaders. The descriptions of a tech-driven utopia are inspiring and horrifying at the same time.

I certainly agree with many of the basic points here, that information technology has the means to be a great equalizer, to destroy the need for rigid political hierarchies and truly free mankind. Still, watching the misguided application of that philosophy using immature technologies is scary to say the least. I also have to take issue with the idea that we’re going to be “watched over” by our technology. To me, that’s a betrayal of the human spark in its most depressing form, designing a new cage for ourselves when we should be building a world without cages. I believe instead that we will use technology to distribute power, to give us all the ability to watch over ourselves. In short, haven’t we seen enough movies about this to know what to do? Get that freaking blue pill away from your mouth!!

Trash the turntables? Not so fast...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 12:05:00 -0400

Lately I’ve been noodling around with my iPad, using it as a controller for Ableton Live. It’s amazing; if you are so inclined, I highly recommend trying out LiveControl, it’s free and it’s the best clip launcher I’ve ever used. Turns your iPad into a Kaoss pad, custom controller for anything in any device chain, and standard MPC type drum pad/piano controller. Just incredible that it’s free, and so flexible; I would have paid out the nose for it.

So when I read this article about ditching turntables, I thought the guy might have hit on something… Alas, I must disagree with the basic theme, that turntablists are elitists hipsters clinging to outdated tech for no good reason. No doubt the touch UI is great for beatmatching, but that’s really mostly powered by Traktor or Serato or whatever he’s using, and it’s only one of the things that a DJ does with turntables. Physical turntables still provide haptic feedback that simply can’t be matched by a touch screen, and physical feedback is incredibly important in any music performance. Sure the software does great beat matching, but how does a touch screen replicate the feel of the record sliding on the slip mat as you scratch, or the friction of pinching the spindle to nudge the beat down? It doesn’t, and both those things are crucial to the feedback loop that lets the DJ identify playback state of the song and manipulate tempo. And the car analogy is weak; preferring a real turntable is more akin to preferring a real paintbrush over Adobe Illustrator.

Google+

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:45:00 -0400

Just got my account! It’s pretty interesting stuff. My initial take is that it absolutely has the capacity to compete with FB, 1) because it’s a near perfect clone of its key feature of the ~~feed~~ stream but also 2) because it can integrate and enhance many of their other products very smoothly. Some key advantages I see Google+ having:

Circles seems to address some of the most glaring policy/privacy holes that FB had up front, and it’s slick and looks easy to maintain. Needs a list view though…
Sparks are essentially topical aggregation, in practice. They seem to have chops in semantic data processing that can really make this useful. Integrating feeds full of things to share with a perfect outlet for sharing them is a great move.
Picassa integration makes it a real social photo sharing service, rather than FB’s lower res service.
Geotagging check in data + photos could enhance Maps significantly with non-google streetview pics of real world locations.
They own Chrome; early adopters love Chrome and they can integrate sharing and +1 capability directly in to the browser.
Docs. Imagine the feed showing on the side the last 10 docs you worked on with so and so… Google Docs immediately beats the pants off of FB docs, which are pretty much just collaborative text files. I can see if an SMB wants to become “socially enabled”, there are implications for this that are very exciting in terms of providing fully integrated workflows.
Reader and Search are +1 enabled; I think this will greatly increase the value of Google’s search results in general.
Calendar + Huddle chat make for a great event planning tool with your friends.
Video hangouts are pretty interesting. Someone said to me “it’s like IRC, but video”. Watching youtube vids with your friends is great fun, something we do anyway in real life. I can see people leaving this on by accident though… I turned on hangouts in the morning yesterday, and I’d forgotten it was on until suddenly a friend’s giant face popped up on my screen.
Data mining and user trust; I refused to let FB mine my gmail for potential contacts, but Google can just do it… which was a huge screw up the last time they did it with Buzz, but this time it worked really well because they just used it to power suggestions, rather than rudely creating my friends list for me. A few people I hadn’t talked to in ages showed up as potential contacts, and I was able to immediately contact them to say hi even though they weren’t signed up for G+, because it’s email. The FB brand, with Zuck making headlines for glibly violating user privacy, doesn’t exactly give me the warm fuzzies. They seem to be driven by a dogma of total openness that most people I know don’t jive with.

I agree with the opinions in Wired that most people on FB actually aren’t exactly fans of it, and only use it because it has a critical mass of users no one else can match… but once there is a second critical mass of users on +, I know I’ll be using it less and less. I also think that with the more robust OpenSocial integration Google has with other social networks, the whole idea of porting over friends and not having critical mass isn’t going to be as much an issue as the hand-wringers say.

Great Example of Attentional Spotlight

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:33:27 -0400

I always find these attention demos fascinating, but this one has the added bonus of real-world applicability in legal cases. My old boss used to do human factors testimony, using HF to articulate exactly why that path wasn’t lit well enough, for example. I always found it fascinating… Too bad the results came too late to exonerate this guy!

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/20/137086464/why-seeing-the-unexpected-is-often-not-believing?ft=1&f=1007

Bento

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Pretty great concept for a laptop composed of modular touch screens and mobile devices. My mom used to pack bento boxes for me when I was a kid so I find the idea especially cool. It takes things I already do and applies design thinking to to them. For example, there’s already all kinds of hacked apps that let me use my iPad as my primary MIDI controller for Ableton, or as pseudo Wacom for my desktop, or my iPhone as a remote touchscreen for when I connect my laptop to my TV… so developing a product whose purpose is to put them together is a pretty natural extension. Wish I’d thought of it :)

It combines a few designs that we’ve seen before (like they Optimus OLED keyboard that can have app-specific keys), with some other ones that I’ve always thought would be great (like the dual input touchpad that accepts/differentiates between both stylus and touch). I do wonder if some parts are overkill, like the Bento Pad 29:1 aspect ratio pad that isn’t all that different from the pad that’s right above it. But hey, always room for a new device type! I wonder if touch keyboards will become a thing, solely for the purpose of being able to have app-specific controls.

http://www.yankodesign.com/2011/05/06/bento-box-kinda-like-voltron/

Mousing is faster than keyboard?

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:10:00 -0400

I’ve always assumed the opposite, given my own proficiency with keyboard shortcuts, but Tog apparently has the proof that the cognitive overhead of having to remember a keyboard shortcut takes longer for us to compute than grabbing the mouse and executing the action by pointing and clicking. He does make a concession that two handed tasks such as selecting with the mouse while doing ctrl+c to copy are greatly improved by keycuts.

Still for some reason, I have difficulty believing that these were totally normalized to account for training (I can instantly twirk my hand into the deadly cmd+ctrl+shift+4 screencapture move :) and for the fact that there are a LOT of two handed movements; almost anything in photoshop for example, where I think the lag between selection and tool picking would totally kill my productivity. Also, since we’re on the mac; how about window selection? You can’t tell me that pressing ctrl+w to rapid fire close tabs on firefox would be slower than me moving my mouse to each tab, acquiring the little X as a target, and pressing the button. I refuse to believe it! :D Also, alt+tab anyone? I wonder how it compares to Expose…

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html

Designing Invisibility

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 12:28:23 -0400

As a Human Factors nerd, I found this particularly fascinating. Modern Camo looks like pixel art, because the pixels are mathematically closer to actual noise than the more stylized camo patterns of the past. Westpoint’s engineering psych dept must be a cool place to work!

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/invisible-inc/8523/1/

Touchable Holograms

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:35:00 -0400

Very cool tech for creating holograms that provide haptic feedback. Half the system is built using off the shelf technology (Wiimotes) and the other half is a new fangled ultrasonic feedback device, that basically tickles your fingers to create the illusion of touch. I’m really curious to see how flexible the system is; how many planes of touchability can it support? What if one hand is blocking the other hand’s line of sight to the feedback device? From the video it appeared that the touch sensing was uni-directional i.e. you could feel objects up or down, or side side, but not both at the same time due to the projector. Can the holography projection setup co-exist with a more robust system of touch sensors? Maybe next year they will have an array of Kinect’s doing the touch sensing, and a full surround system of touch effectors.

The use cases here seem endless; they mention that one of the major sources of infection in hospitals is people touching the same machines and passing germs around. If the machines had a holographic interface that could provide the same tactile feedback without actually being touched, you could significantly reduce the opportunity for cross contamination without sacrificing the usability of the instruments. You could even combine it with tech like these contact lens displays to create a personal dork field of touchable objects that only you can see! :)

Touchable Holograms

Designers need a reality check?

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:06:58 -0400

I definitely agree with this article about designers needing to be able to code as well. I’ve always found that the most effective designers are the ones who know the limits of what can be built, which entails at least a cursory knowledge of code. Think of a building architect who has to design a building that existing materials engineers can support. Without that knowledge, all you’ll ever design are pipe dreams.

That said, I still think that there’s a place for more forward thinking design that pushes the boundaries of what is achievable; without dreamers like these, we will only ever build more of what has already been built.

I guess most recipes list out measurements by volume rather than...

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:57:00 -0400

I guess most recipes list out measurements by volume rather than weight, but this would be great design for someone trying to lose a few pounds; measure out exact portions as you are cooking them.