raleighnet.org

Some interesting thoughts on information visualization over on peterme.com yesterday. Loads of great links and examples that I intend to follow up on later.

A lot of people are pointing at This Story about usability testing. Just bookmarking it so I can remember to check it out when my attention span is longer.

Looking Glass is a zoomable, panable virtual white board. I watched the flash demo, but I’ll probably wait until I get home to install their 60 day trial version (requires linux or PC). I can see where something like this may be interesting for Chat or Team Collaboration. But, it seems that most of the things you’d want to be uploading require too much time to produce to make it as real-time as the Flash demo makes it seem. It would be interesting to see how this work in practice. Link Via: nooface.net

Macromedia sure is in full spin with trying to make Flash a web application IDE. First they bring Jakob on board to give them the “This is Usable” proclamation. Now, I find out that UIE (Jared Spool) is writing white papers on how to use Flash. The white paper Macromedia Flash: A New Hope for Web Applications (PDF) and a bunch of others is available at Macromedia.

JSNav is a script to quickly and easily maintain site hierarchies. It seems cool, but it’s just outside my programming comfort zone. Maybe if I’m feeling brave later I’ll play around with it and try to work through it.

Elegant Hack pointed me at this incredible video from the Stanford Center for Professional Development. Scott Klemmer demos a wall sized UI for web site development. I don’t tend to design that way. Probably because I don’t design in “teams” as much as I would in a larger department and probably because I’m oddly more comfortable iterating in the digital world than the physical world, but the demo is really cool. Certainly worth a look. It’s linked off This Page. It’s the first video in the Archived Lectures.

So we know that users favorite (or at least most used) navigation device is the back button. Well then how about a site that forces you to navigate forward by going back? No? I didn’t think so, but it’s an interesting experiment all the same. Check it out: Reflektions.com

Inside the philosophy and process of Frog Design

“With SAP,” notes Rolston, “we cut our teeth on developing a methodology for defining design solutions at a less literal level, and at a more abstract, procedural series of layers.” In effect, prompted by the practices of software engineers, the Digital Media Group began to objectify the design process.

Hey Amazon, the fact that I’m not interested in one of your recommendations does not mean that I rate it a two. I more than understand the need to throw a kludge on top of a system to make it do something that was left out of the original spec. It seems to be all we do anymore, but come on, add another column to your table already.