From the NY Times, the “President Map.”
I love a good interactive visualization .. these two below show the difference in support for the major parties between the 2008 election and the 2004 and 1992 elections.
There’s a few other visualizations, including a bubble representing how far the leading candidate was ahead of the other:
I thought this was interesting — 52 examples of registration forms from around the web. Although some registration is necessary, I’m all for registration-free web sites (here are a few references to why more web sites should consider removing registration)!
Slap.
From Shutterfly.
I had just typed the name of a project to save in a text field and pressed the “save” button. There were no mention of any characters I couldn’t use. But, it was clear (only because I’ve seen programmers make stupid choices like this in the past), that the apostrophe I had used in the project name wasn’t allowed.
Don’t subject users to silly restrictions like this. What kind of architecture/design doesn’t allow apostrophes to be used in the name of something like this? I realize file systems have some interesting restrictions — but if this isn’t being stored in a database … then, yikes, what are they doing? If I had not already invested a lot of time uploading photos, selecting photos, etc., I would have abandoned them entirely and moved on to their competitors (with what amounts to be the world’s most unreliable uploader from what I could tell — I had to try to upload some photos 6 or 7 times before it was successful!!!!!),
(Just so happens that I was signed up as a new user and had a whole bunch of free prints from Amazon — so I couldn’t complain about the price. However, I’ll not return to them.)
I hope the prints turn out better than their web site design and implementation.
From a dry (college professor style) video from Edward Tufte regarding a common data density design issue on the iPhone.
(screen shot taken from his video)
He mentions the cartoony interfaces and how many applications on the iPhone do not properly take advantage of the 163 DPI screen.
Looking at the weather example though, I’m not sure that his “fix” is what the average person wants as is. His suggestion, which does get me thinking (the whole point of his books and lectures), is that he’s blown the “at a glance” weather and temperature feature of the original design by making the graphics and fonts too small. When I’m looking for the weather, I’m most commonly interested in today’s weather (or the current weather). A 5 day forecast, although interesting, becomes less useful as general data as the number of days from today increases.
Although I appreciate a good satellite image as the next person :), the image is too big. I see no reason to not have a full size version available as a single “click” or gesture, and thumbnail the image for the rest of us. Increase the font sizes of everything else on the screen, and hopefully return the small weather icons to a usable, again, at a glance size.
How would you change the UI? (Or do you like Edward’s as-is?)
Billy Hollis on Getting Smart with WPF
I didn’t watch the whole video from start to finish as I wasn’t too interested in the functionality as a whole — just the general feel. I’d suggest skipping to about 3 minutes in or so …
I’d be interested in seeing how they handle a lot of the edge cases — a lot of the screens look nice, but what happens if there are too many notes?
It’s an interesting and nice looking application — it’s hard to tell how keyboard friendly it would be though. It looks like it’s a mouse/keyboard/mouse/keyboard style interaction.
Although seeing a video of the application doesn’t necessarily do it justice, the animations seemed unnecessary and would be distracting after a few hours of use. Anytime you’re building something for someone else who has to use your product for many hours, consider whether the ‘glitz’ and animation you’ve added will become distracting or annoying.
One challenge we’ve noticed with WPF is that it’s hard to do high quality focus and validation elegantly. There are lots of options — but few that a good match for many data entry centric applications.
Although interesting that they have these little notes — and shows off the power of WPF, I’d twist them around to be horizontal so they’re easier to type into (it’s not natural to read or type at an angle like that and there’s no reason to do that to the user).
How difficult would it be to create an effective version of this for the web (not a clone, but a web-ized version of this application)? Thoughts?
Thanks to indyfromoz for the suggestion to watch the video detailing this WPF application.
