Archive for April, 2006
There are sliding doors into the underground station at Nationaltheateret in Oslo.
Obviously, people got confused, walked into panels that did not open automatically, that did not function as doors. The wall of glass doors has a “false affordance”; parts of it look like they would open, but don’t. So someone decided to paint arrows to help people distinguish the door parts from the non-door parts.
The arrows do not help.
Some arrows point towards the door, some point where the door is going to go. Like this:
> > <> > < < > < < > > < <
Some of the arrows have fallen off, making it even harder to figure out.
A better solution would have been to put arrows only on the non-sliding parts, or better yet, add a half-tone or checkboard pattern to those parts instead of using an arrow. A clear window then indicates a doorway, while a translucent window indicates it functions as a wall.
I enjoy this little dance with the doors nearly every day, because it reminds me of the first chapter in Don Norman’s book on Everyday Things. It features a glass-door trap as an example of poor design.
April 30th, 2006
After a couple of weeks off-line, thanks to some bucket-head phone line installer asked himself “if this phoneline isn’t being used for anything, why is it connected?” I can spend some time tweaking the site.
It now sports the latest in RSS integration technology - almost all these tweaks rely on the same basic protocols and formats. Nifty! Look over there –>
- Latest images from flickr
- Latest tags from del.icio.us
- Latest songs annoying my coworkers at SuperOffice
- Current (and terrible) Battlefield2 status.
April 30th, 2006
The Simpsons invent words in order to embiggen the funitude of the show. Words like Cromulent and Embiggen. Sacrilicious. Lupper (Lunch/Supper - the obvious follow-on to a hearty Brunch). Dumbening. and many many more.
April 16th, 2006
I want a user interface this cool and this interactive. (Full video at google)
Unlike the wall-size display that Tom Cruise used in Minority Report, this stuff is real.
The cool thing here is that the user interface supports multiple touch-points, so that you can use both hands and multiple fingers to manipulate the objects on the screen. You can thus rotate an image by pinning a corner and dragging the other corner with your other hand. You can scale and object by dragging its corners further apart. The whole UI becomes much more interactive and manipulable, in a way that should make the whole UI a sort of simulated, cartoon reality. Like a cartoon, everything is squishy and stretchable.
Randy Smith did some interesting UI work on this type of system via ARK (Alternate Reality Kit), but it was limited by having a single mouse pointer.
Self is another system that would work well with this kind of GUI - the objects have a virtual physicality that lends itself to direct manipulation. One of the GUIs built on Self implemented the Disney laws of animation, so that windows bounce and deform much like Bugs Bunny would, rather than just appearing out of thin air.
April 2nd, 2006
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April 1st, 2006
