Things people carry with them

Brilliant set of photos that document people and what they carry about with them.

Viewers of the Persona diptychs take a voyeuristic delight in not only glimpsing the items usually tucked away in bags and pockets, but in identifying with strangers by relating to the tokens they carry with them.

Strong portrait photography combined with meticulous arrangement of objects neatly covers 2 disciplines that someone working in UX has to deal with: personas, and information architecture. For now, let's just talk about personas.

Personas are composite characters created to personify a specific segment of users. Why? Well, it creates empathy for the specific user and avoids self-referential design. The focus is then on accomplishing specific goals that allows the product to satisfy many people with that goal, whether or not they match a specific market segment.








via Jason Travis

Attention and Information

I'm hearing more and more about how people are worrying about the explosion of information that analysts and executives must consume, as well as the increasing variety of sources from which that information comes. However, I've always thought it's not the amount of information that's changing, it's how we filter it to find what's relevant.

This article from The Aporetic states:

"Peo­ple often argue that we have too much infor­ma­tion and too lit­tle atten­tion; that this is a con­di­tion of being “mod­ern.” But the oppo­site may be true: that atten­tion is a human con­stant and that it con­stantly seeks new forms. Where there’s “sur­plus atten­tion” we always come up with things to occupy it."

via The Aporetic

and Boston Globe

"I sometimes worry about my attention span, but not for long" - Herb Caen

Further reading into this subject has revealed that this is not a new problem, it is years old. It's procrastination in disguise, and it is incredibly addictive and slows us down.

"Always-on, multitasking work environments are killing productivity, dampening creativity, and making us unhappy."

Further reading here

If you're concerned about how you consume information and how it might be changing your behaviours, I strongly recommend that you do nothing for 2 minutes.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow has written a fantastic Guardian article on this.

Organising and Categorising

A large part of UX is about categorising different types of items and structuring them in a logical and visually pleasing way. Many industry-famous User Experience experts confess to an almost unhealthy obsession to have to lay out objects on a table in order of size, alphabetically order their collections, or group household items in categories. If you find yourself getting annoyed when you next find a fork in the spoon section of the cutlery drawer, spare a thought for User Experience Architects and how frustrating badly structured content on a website is.

This lovely blog, ThingsOrganisedNeatly pretty much sums up what I'm talking about.







via ThingsOrganisedNeatly

Russian Domed City

A Russian company has unveiled plans to built a 100,000-person domed city in an abandoned Mir diamond mine in Siberia. The city named Eco-city 2020. The Mir diamond mine is the second largest excavated hole in the world, quarter-mile wide and over 1,700 feet deep, the mine would be completely covered over with a glass dome to protect the city from the weather in Siberia, and the solar cells embedded in the dome would power the city. Designers AB Elise explained:
"The new city is planned to be divided in 3 main levels with a vertical farm, forests, residences, and recreational areas. On of the most interesting aspects of the proposal is the glass dome that will protect the city and would be covered by photovoltaic cells that will harvest enough solar energy for the new development. "
An estimated 100,000 people would be able to live in Eco-city, and architects are hoping that it would help to attract tourists to Eastern Siberia.

Whilst this is not a very realistic project, and is unlikely to actually happen anytime soon, there are tantalising conversations going on about how this type of construction would be perfect for colonising craters on distant planets.

via AB ELISE

Future Media Surfaces

“We look at the near future, a universe next door in which media travels freely onto surfaces in everyday life. A world of media that speaks more often, and more quietly.”

Media surfaces: Incidental Media from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

“In contrast to a Minority Report future of aggressive messages competing for a conspicuously finite attention, these sketches show a landscape of ignorable surfaces capitalising on their context, timing and your history to quietly play and present in the corners of our lives.”

Media surfaces: The Journey from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

"Each of the ideas in the film treat the surface as a focus, rather than the channel or the content delivered. Here, media includes messages from friends and social services, like foursquare or Twitter, and also more functional messages from companies or services like banks or airlines alongside large traditional big 'M' Media (like broadcast or news publishing).

All surfaces have access to connectivity. All surfaces are displays responsive to people, context, and timing. If any surface could show anything, would the loudest or the most polite win? Surfaces which show the smartest most relevant material in any given context will be the most warmly received."

via Berg

Movie GUI's

A graphical user interface is often shortened to GUI (or 'gooey') and is used to provide the user with a set of on-screen controls so that they can interact with a program or computer. These are very carefully considered and developed with incredibly thorough user research on a foundation of established best-practice guidelines. Simply put, GUI interaction should be seamless and there should be no obvious stumbling blocks that would annoy a user off to the point that they give up and find an alternative solution. Consider this the next time you're using a touch screen to buy your train ticket.

When it comes to movies, all the decades of usability principles go straight out the window. Movie GUI's are thoroughly unrealistic from a usability point of view, but are incredibly fun to look at. Their one job is to get the message across to the audience that something integral to the plot is happening. If you're wondering what is it about movie GUI's that's so unrealistic, check out Jakob Nielsen's rather comprehensive (and super nerdy) article.

Since the 80's, movie GUI's have come a very long way, and this awesome blog captures some of the great retro ones from classic movies that you may have seen.

Creating futuristic user interfaces (or FUI's) has become a job for some lucky people such as
Mark Coleran who gets to build cool futuristic GUI's all day long. Check out his portfolio to see what I'm talking about.












via Access Main Computer File, Jakob Nielsen,
Mark Coleran

What is UX?

Right, I'm aware that 'UX' isn't a familiar term outside of the industry, and telling someone that you're a User Experience Architect often meets some blank faces and results in that person turning around and trying to find someone normal to talk to. So, courtesy of Smashing Magazine, here is a fairly concise definition of UX.

"User experience (abbreviated as UX) is how a person feels when interfacing with a system. The system could be a website, a web application or desktop software and, in modern contexts, is generally denoted by some form of human-computer interaction (HCI).

Those who work on UX (called UX designers) study and evaluate how users feel about a system, looking at such things as ease of use, perception of the value of the system, utility, efficiency in performing tasks and so forth."

via Smashing Magazine

10 Best Jobs Of The Future

I'm obsessed with the future; the technologies that are visible on the horizon and are just out of reach, how our lives have changed so drastically in the past ten years, and how the next ten years will make life today (in 2010) seem like we were living in the middle-ages. Children today have grown up with the Internet all around them, and our lives have become irreversibly intertwined with something that isn't tangible - it's everywhere and nowhere.

Check out this brilliant gallery of the 10 best jobs of the future after the jump.

via PopSci


If you're interested in future technologies, check out my other blog - Links From The Future

Taxonomy of Rap Names

Fantastic example of taxonomy - the most popular rappers all categorised and plotted on one chart. Check out a more hi-res image to see the smaller details after the jump.

via WFDJ

The Cube carpark

A new car park in Birmingham has a sophisticated £2m robotic system that enables cars to park themselves. Whilst this space-saving technique has been used in Japan for years, this is a great example of planning, labelling, and archiving items.

via BBC

Extreme Planning

Incredible display of planning taken to the extreme. If you didn't / haven't played Sim City, then this won't be as impressive.

Human Landscapes

South West Florida has experienced a dramatic boom and bust in residential development. Many homes there are empty and have been for years. Huge developments sit partially completed among densely built up neighborhoods and swampland. There are "enough housing lots in Charlotte County to last for more than 100 years".

Having played a lot of Sim City during my childhood, it makes me wonder about the minds of the people who created these structures and the beauty that comes with carefully crafting a population's living space. More images after the jump.

via Boston Big Picture

Army rations

Troops from nearly 50 countries eat military rations every day that remind them of home. Photographer Ashley Gilbertson and food stylist Maria Washburn have done a lovely job of labelling and categorising each ration pack.

"Each year, among the countries with troops in Afghanistan — the current number is 47 — tens of millions of dollars are spent researching how to fit the most calories, nutrition and either comfort or fun into a small, light package. The menus and accompaniments are intended not just to nourish but also to remind the soldier of home."

via NY Times

Wireframes

Often worked up from sketches to formal documentation, wireframes show the layout of an interface screen. Describes each element and behaviour. The focus is on layout, labels, and interactions. Avoids finished design elements such as color and photos, instead using placeholders for images, and sometimes copy.

They are used to communicate the specifications for individual pages or templates. Also used as prototype for usability testing. Prevents premature conversations about surface issues like color, instead focuses discussion on correct and complete content and functionality.

Wireframe sketches and final documentation are quite often kept confidential and aren't made available to the public. But the Wireframe Showcase site offers a rare glimpse at the UX work underneath the surface of the site.

via Wireframe Showcase

and OneXtraPixel

and Flickr Group - UX Sketches

The blueprints to the Eiffel Tower

Fantastic blueprints of the Eiffel Tower via La Tour Eiffel

It's busy in orbit

Since the advent of the space-age over five decades ago, more than thirty-five thousand man-made objects have been cataloged by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network. Nearly twenty-thousand of those objects remain in orbit today, ninety-four percent of which are non-functioning orbital debris. These figures do not include the hundreds-of-thousands of objects too small to be cataloged, but still large enough to pose a threat to approximately nine-hundred operational satellites in orbit around the Earth. In addition, collisions between debris objects could potentially lead to a continuously growing debris population, thus increasing the risk to operational satellites.




via SmartPlanet and Popsci