Can a whole building be a bad affordance?
This is a card swiper outside the North Quad building, where the University of Michigan’s School of Information is housed. Notice how the area where the card should be swiped is filled up? Yeah, if you are in the know, then you realize that our student ID cards now have RFID tags and so you can just hold up the card to the front of the card swiper to get access after-hours. If you aren’t in the know, then you have to search out the sign which tries to explain this method (and the sign is not right next to the card swiper!). Read more…
The State of Information Visualization in Academic Libraries (Online and Offline) – Quasicon 14
I gave a 7-minute Lightning Talk at Quasicon 14.
Here is the podcast of my presentation and here are the slides.
The TL;DR version of my talk: info viz in academia is still in its infancy, but it has great potential to provide value in the information discovery process – namely by giving a sense of context and a sense of relationships in a “glanceable” format.
I’m interested in hearing of any other interesting visualization tools you might have come upon in the academic world (I’m on Twitter @_sferrari).
Google Design Jam
Design Jam Problem: How to Increase the Visibility of Google Wallet
Last night SOCHI (no, not the Russian city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, this SOCHI) sponsored a Design Jam with Google recruiters who were in town for the UM College of Engineering Career Fair. Of the three design jams I have participated in, this might have been my favorite so far (though the one with CTools – a future blog post in its own right – is a close runner-up), partially because the design problem and the design constraints were simply stated. The product we were working on – Google Wallet – will be soon be getting some new functionality which we got a preview of. Wanting to raise the profile of Google Wallet, Google asked us how we would make it more visible to the common Google user.
My collaborators for the Design Jam were Colin Drayton and Iman Yeckehzaare. For some reason I don’t quite recall, we got to thinking about Amazon’s 1-Click button.
By clicking on this button, an Amazon shopper skips the whole checkout process – the item just gets sent to their default shipping address and their default credit card gets charged. This provides an excellent functionality but it’s limited to Amazon’s offerings. This is where we thought Google Wallet could intervene and offer some differentiation on the market. Read more…
The Toy-like Nature of Buttons and Gestures
In a class last fall we studied the use of color and Gestalt principles in website designs. One thing that stood out to me was just how much buttons are designed to look like toys: little islands of saturated primary colors yearning to be clicked. Below is the travel search website Hipmunk homepage.
Once you start entering the names of airports in the search boxes, the Search button turns from a drab color to this colorful fellow below:
What happens when you combine Beats by Dr. Dre with EarPods…
[Update on January 10, 2015: Note that this mash-up was created long before Apple bought Beats!]
More Beats than EarPods but….
Designed by a prompt in class to remake the Apple EarPods, which are just fine in my opinion. Favorite feature of the above design: magnetic force used to keep headphones on head. Not sure how this would affect human health or the music quality… but hey, no wires!