“ideas”

I guess it’s such an obvious rebus^WP scores of people must have had it already, but I’d never seen it before, it just occurred to me this morning, and am quite fancying it right now. (Pretty cherry from Kainoatec)

In what must be one of its most bizarre moves to date, Google just released a collaborative-tagging game (!): Google Images Labeler. It frankly seems against the company’s algorithmic DNA and I almost dismissed it at first, but perhaps it’ll work… for a while: it’s actually interesting to play but the interest fades quickly. (Via John Battelle)

I believe that an interface that is both modeless and, insofar as possible, monotonous—all other design features being of at least normal quality for a modern interface—would be extraordinarily pleasant to use. A user would be able to develop an unusually high degree of trust in his habits. The interface would, from these two properties alone, tend to fade from the user’s consciousness, allowing him to give his full attention to the task at hand. The psychological effects of totally (or near totally) modeless and monotonous systems is an area of interface design ripe for experimental study.

If I am correct, the use of a product based on modelessness and monotony would soon become so habitual as to be nearly addictive, leading to a user population devoted to and loyal to the product. Its users would find moving to a competitor’s product psychologically difficult. Unlike selling illicit drugs, marketing an addictive interface is legal, and the product is beneficial to its users; in another way, it is just like selling illicit drugs: extremely profitable.

Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface^AM, p68

With modeless he means that “a given user gesture has one and only one result: Gesture g always results in action a.” With monotonous, that “any desired result has only one means by which it may be invoked: Action a is invoked by gesture g and in no other way.”

(It’s surprising how all this can be expressed by saying that we want the relationship between gestures and actions to be a function^WP, and an injective^WP and surjective^WP one at that. In other words, a good interface is a bijective^WP interface. I remember how hard those words were to me my first semester studying Math. Never thought I’d find them again studying interfaces!)

And regarding the quote itself, it’s a tough sell, because it goes against many of my computing prejudices. But Raskin just might be right—in a truly revolutionary way. We’ll find out at Domburi. ;)

Jon Aquino, father of YubNub, is onto something with his idea of deep software:

To my constern, I could only venture Vim, Mathematica, and some tentative candidates to his growing list, so please pay his post a visit and contribute.

There was on the thread, though, one nomination to the title of deep software that I simply can’t skip, because I happen to agree that the nominee is one of the best pieces of software there has been (and its author build it when he was, get this, eighteen; see Rolling Stones article on him) and because the nomination itself is just damn good writing.

That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in Mindfulness^AM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?

No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:

Any thoughts?

Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous posts^ELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:

To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson Crusoes^WP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?

Now, of course I had no option but to post a just-found formista quote that links conceptualization and algebra with genius to spare. I’m predictable and then some.

I shall read Ayn Rand soon, I can feel it’s just about the right momement for us to meet. (She surely is one polemical woman: there’s no shortage to people advising you against her and her massive—as in, it has so many damn references (~100) that it needs two-columns for footnotes—↓pedia↓ is currently protected until the bickering quiets down.)

In a surprising study, Jakob Nielsen found out most (85%) of the learning gleaned from usability tests came from your first 5 user tests; 3 users tests will still give you a whopping 67% of the learning there is. He then goes on to advocate small and iterative testing over a single massive one (say, three tests with 3 users each and improvements in between instead of one lone test with 9):

Combine that with Joshua Schachter’s, founder of Del.icio.us, idea of “Starbucks usability tests” (“offer someone coffee to sit down and play with your product.”) and you’ll know why I’ll be this Friday on Minerva’s Starbucks harassing three every pretty girl I can find with Domburi (TeenVogue recently had a feature on young fashionistas being excellent for usability tests, can’t find the link though).

As I mentioned a week ago, I am just starting to feel my way around McKinsey’s Quarterly but it’s been impressive so far. I recently finished reading the three complimentary articles I was granted upon registering (which is free) and they were all remarkable.

As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)

The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.

Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?

And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).