UIScape

When I spent three months at Microsoft Research last year, I came across a lot of fascinating work related to interaction design. Colleagues would talk about their projects, people would report back from conferences, visitors came in to present their work, and I found things during literature reviews. Some of the designs I saw and read about were so cool that I couldn't believe they weren't more well known. Even my friends and I, who were supposed to be into design and human-computer interaction, hadn't heard about them. There was an obvious problem here.

I think the reason for this lack of dissemination is that the main way for researchers to make their ideas known is through conferences, journal articles and coffee-break chats. All three of these channels have only other researchers at the receiving end.

Most of the published literature is available online, but very often not free of charge. Researchers usually have access to relevant digital libraries through their employers, but designers and other potentially interested people are unlikely to be willing to pay.

Of course, many papers are available for free. However, a further barrier is that the format and language of scientific papers is not what non-researchers would consider an easy and engaging read. Given this "language barrier", as well as the prerequisite knowledge required for a lot of the material, you won't find many people casually reading the latest CHI conference proceedings on the train or flipping through a 20-page research study during their lunch break.

There is one web site which has addressed this same problem, albeit not for interaction design-related research. Ars Technica's Nobel Intent journal supplies those who have a casual interest in science with digests of interesting studies. These are written in a fairly casual style, usually include any necessary background knowledge, and only take a few minutes to read.

It didn't take much ingenuity to realise that such a model may be exactly what is needed to break the barrier that I had witnessed in human-computer interaction research. I got a few friends from university to join me in the effort to get something rolling. Well, after a few months of planning, designing, building and writing, the result is finally here:
http://uiscape.com

I sincerely hope you find it interesting and that it will help get many more people excited about the work that's going on out there.

If you have any questions about the concept or design of the site, you can comment here or email me.

Web 2.0 fun

Made with the Web 2.0 Logo Creatr Beta.

The Non-Wheel iPod

Whenever you see the rumoured next-generation video iPod mentioned, the expected features always include a huge screen covering the front of the device and a “virtual”, touch-screen-based click wheel.

I may be missing something here, but what exactly would be the point of that? The reason the iPod has a scroll wheel is to make scrolling easier on a device that doesn’t allow more direct manipulation of screen content. If you had a touch screen, the grounds for having a scroll wheel would disappear, and you could just use a scroll bar, right? A scroll bar would allow scrolling directly to any point in a list and would involve less (and less awkward) physical movement.

Also, if you had such a nonsensical, virtual scroll wheel, you’d be waving your thumb around over the contents of the screen all the time, which doesn’t sound like a clever idea. Of course, you could dedicate a section of the screen for this wheel, but wouldn’t you rather use that space to make the list taller?

So I think either the creative minds behind the rumour sites didn’t think this one through properly, or the creative minds at Apple are making some rather silly decisions. Let’s hope it’s the former.

i use this

A few days ago, i use this, a nice alternative to MacUpdate and Versiontracker, was launched. It uses a model that’s quite different from, and arguably more useful than, traditional software databases. Instead of the number of downloads (which say more about marketing than about quality) and user ratings (which only a very small proportion of the user population provide), i use this simply lets registered users mark applications they use. The resulting numbers are what drives the rankings. One advantage is that since you can also unmark an application when you’ve stopped using it, the data stays representative over time, so that the Internet Explorers and StuffIts of this world don’t skew the results.

The uptake in the first few days seems to have been quite impressive. I think it’s the aspect of personal expression (”Look, here’s what I use!”) that makes this model so attractive and gets people to happily provide the data. It also has a social component by allowing networks of friends and by showing you “neighbours”, who use similar applications.

It’s also a very useful tool for developers. The data on my applications so far looks quite unexpected. I might do a little review in a few weeks time when the site has a larger set of data.

I hope that in the future they will provide some more interesting data mining results in addition to the list of top and hot applications (which, I’m guessing, take into account how many people “love” an app). For example, I’d quite like to see the fastest recent climbers. Also, an interactive graph of the total distribution might be interesting (which I imagine would be a Long Tail).

Oh, by the way, if you’re interested, i use this.

John Gruber goes full-time

Following a couple of years of contemplation, John Gruber of Daring Fireball has finally made writing his full-time job.

John is a great writer, and DF is my favourite Mac/technology column. His analyses are always spot-on, making it seem like he has been blessed with an unfairly large share of all the common sense in the industry. Also, through his Linked List he acts as a sort of human news aggregator/filter, saving me from having to read through all those other blogs and news sites myself.

If you make an appropriate donation, you will be rewarded with goodies such as full-text RSS feeds and cool t-shirts.

I really hope this works out for him.

Brewster Kahle

Seeing this link about Amazon opening up the Alexa index today reminded me that I've been meaning to blog about Brewster Kahle, the father of Alexa and the Internet Archive.

There's an excellent interview with him on NerdTV. It's actually my favourite NerdTV episode so far. Many of the other guests talk a lot about their lives in general. Kahle, on the other hand, talks about what kind of place he wants the Internet to be, something he's very enthusiastic about. He's someone who really has vision, and who just generally seems to get the plot. It's strange he's not more famous.

Check it out.

buzztracker

http://www.buzztracker.org/

If you aren't using it yet, you have to try it.

This is a great piece of information design. I've been checking it regularly for the last two weeks or so, and I find that I pick up news that would have previously completely passed me by. This is because buzztracker draws your attention to the most significant (from the press's point of view) news, whereas on traditional, headline-based news sites you are most likely to notice news associated with regions or topics familiar to you.

I only wish the article titles weren't truncated.

Also check out the About page, which is quite interesting.