Jared Spool has an interesting post showing two states of Smart Money’s Map of the Market: A normal day & yesterday where it is vividly and completely red, reflecting the current finanacial situation.

This reminds me of one of the key points of Jeffery Veen’s recent talk at Web Directions South 08 where he instructed us to find and focus on the story in the data when creating a visualisation.

It also provides evidence that an interactive visualisation while time consuming to create can provide enormous ongoing value if designed well, focussed on a story with long term value and/or incorporating live data. The effort could be compared to the investigative journalism required to write a long form essay or expose.

At the recent Web Directions South 08 (WDS08) conference I saw and touched a (demonstration) Microsoft Surface table for the first time. While thought provoking the table was underwhelming, a couple of aspects of the user experience of Surface did make an impression on me though:

- Removed from an appropriate context of use (stylish night club/hotel lobby as depicted in the promotional videos) the table is uninteresting. The value of this particular configuration of technology, a large touch screen set into a table top, may be determined by where it is situated and specific situations would suggest suitable software applications, e.g. tools for flirting in a bar. On the floor of a tradeshow applications I saw like a virtual piano & photo organising tool seemed pointless.

- As it’s multi-touch more than one person can interact with the table simultaneously, but each users interactions can conflict with another users intentions e.g. a user may resize a photo over the top of one another user is trying to view. This means users need to interact with each other over and above (hah!) the feedback that software provides to understand each others intentions & perhaps modify their own interactions as a result – kind of as if two users were griping the same mouse.

Some interesting related links:

• Official site of Microsoft Surface – check out the videos especially
• Wikipedia entry for Surface
• Blog post about field observations users and Microsoft Surface
• A parody of the Microsoft Surface promotional video

Joshua Porter has written a fairly lengthy post on Activity Centred Design. It’s likely to be fairly controversial I suspect.

Lately I’ve been arguing that the activity is a good frame for design. I started fleshing this out in my book, but admittedly it wasn’t as deep as I wanted to go. I believe that thinking about design from an activity-centric viewpoint is the most efficient way to get where you need to go…which is to create a piece of software that is valuable to people.

Thanks to Alun for the tip off :)

John Timmer over at ars technica reports that Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots. Here’s a taste:

Some researchers have tested how college students respond to fake dialog boxes in browser popup windows and found that the students are so anxious to get the dialog out of the way, they click right through obvious warning signs…

…Follow-up questions revealed that the students seemed to find any dialog box a distraction from their assigned task; nearly half said that all they cared about was getting rid of these dialogs. The results suggest that a familiarity with Windows dialogs have bred a degree of contempt and that users simply don’t care what the boxes say anymore.

This is interesting, though not that unexpected. We know that when performing specific tasks on a website, users are focused on this to be point of not noticing or ignoring things that would normally be obvious.

There are two take-aways I can think of from this. Firstly if you need to present users with important information in the midst of a task, you’ll need to go to great lengths to properly get their attention, and secondly that things like ads and ‘promotional features’ are unlikely to be noticed let alone comprehended when users are in this task mode.

In his post Looking at Trends in the Online Customer Experience, Bill Ives gives a good overview of a recent survey into customer experiences online. Here’s a sample: (my emphasis)

for the fourth consecutive year, nearly 9 out of 10 (87%) online adults who have conducted an online transaction in the past year have experienced problems. Those who experience problems conducting online transactions also reported feeling disappointed (55%), angry (41%), and confused (23%)…41% of online adults who experience transaction problems would switch to a competitor or abandon a transaction entirely. This represents a potential 57 billion dollars (US) impact for shopping sites alone…four in five online adults who experience problems (84%) share their experiences with others — both online and offline.

This last point is at the heart of something I have been advocating more and more recently; measuring the user experience via the ‘back channel’ using social media tools such as Twitter, Technorati and even Google Alerts, to hear what people are saying about your products and services (but not to your face).

Palojono has an interesting and thought provoking post on the semantics of insights versus outsights.

In particular he discusses the fact that design tools are ways of externalising and communicating information to allow us to see things externally (to develop thoughts based on a shared group reality) rather than an having internal (single person) insights.

This was one of the major themes of my OZ-IA talk (slideshare link to come) which in part discussed how we can use things like brainstorming cards to share research to allow us to generate outsights with the business.

http://palojono.blogspot.com/2008/09/good-design-processes-encourage.html

Kate Rutter from Adaptive Path shares some thoughts on graphic visualisation in The Joy of Sketch : explorations in hand-crafted visuals. To quote:

About two years ago, Adaptive Path experienced an upwelling of analog approaches. We started using design tools that jumped out of the screen and into the real world. We started using our hands to make things. Alongside our computers there appeared slabs of blank paper. Rather than reaching for a mouse, we started reaching for a Sharpie. Large rolls of paper and drafting dots became part of the lingua franca of client working sessions. Sketching was the new black.

Adaptive Path’s Indi Young shares some ideas on sharing your audience’s perspective in her article Look at it Another Way.

I particularly like this example:

The people who designed the bike talk about what the bike can do, but the rider wants to find out what she can do. In the former vocabulary: “We give you 20 gears.” In the latter vocabulary: “I’ve decided to bike to work twice a week, but I fear the pain of getting up that steep hill on the way there.” If the bike company were smart, they’d be talking about making it easier to get up hills while commuting to work, or suggesting alternate routes or techniques so that you’ll arrive at the office without needing a shower and a nap.

This is great stuff and I’m sure some of the analogies used by Indi could help promote a User Centred Design mentality among web, product and customer service teams.

This competition is designed to help fund participatory learning using digital media. Might be something worthwhile looking at as part of our ideation sessions perhaps?

“Successful projects will promote participatory learning in a variety of environments: through the creation of new digital tools, modification of existing ones, or use of digital media in some other novel way.”

http://www.dmlcompetition.net/newsNew.php#02-21-2008

Looks like the superfooty site designed by Alun (with help from Cindy Hewlett) has allowed a football journo to win a Football Media Association award.

Nice work! These stack on top of Alun and Cindy’s hard work in securing The Australian’s best online newspaper awards at PANPA.

“SuperFooty has continued to kick goals this season, picking up an Australian Football Media Association award last night. SuperFooty reporter Katherin Firkin won the award for best use of online material at the awards.”

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/sport/afl/story/0,26576,24363884-19742,00.html