Information design
Facebook Redesign circa 2006, sort of…
First, sorry for no posts lately. The new year brought a reorganization at work that has ben buried in new work and responsibilities but the posts will start flowing again soon and I have a lot of good stuff on deck.
Today I saw an interesting article that from December 2006 to February 2007 the agency IA were in touch with the product manager at Facebook trying to redesign their site. The contract was never signed and they kept their designs in the drawer until now. I always find this proposed redesign exercise to be interesting but the problem with all of this is that the designs they posted aren’t from 2006. Saying that “The web is not the same anymore and neither are we.” they took their “sketches” and created these comps “to contemporary design standards”. For me this makes the quality of the work really hard to judge because without the original wireframes you can’t tell really get a sense of how pure the designs are or how much they were effected by the adaptation. None the less it is interesting to read the thinking behind the work.
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Peeking Into Netflix Queues
There is an interesting article in the New York Times today that uses Google Maps based data visualizations to show neighborhood by neighborhood Netflix rental patterns in 12 major U.S. cities. For the selected city you can roll around the map to see the most rented movie by zip code or sort them by most rented, alphabetical or meta score and then use the slider to go through the 50 movies listed. In looking at New York you see interesting trends on some movies like Mad Men that is almost exclusively concentrated in Manhattan, Obsessed that was concentrated in Brooklyn and New Jersey and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was seen by everyone everywhere.
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Vacation assignment – Help design Firefox 4
Mozilla’s Firefox continues to chip away at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s market share and recently they been showing off new user interface mockups of the next major release – Firefox 4. Staying true to its long-standing focus on openness, Mozilla has launched the Firefox 4 Design Challenge this is a series of events meant to encourage innovation and experimentation in user interface design. The first challenge asks you to concentrate on ideas for switching Firefox’s Home button to a Home tab that will facilitate start pages in the browser similar to MyYahoo and iGoogle start pages. They have supplied the following mockup of how the browser might keep the new start page concept available up top via the Home icon at left:
If you want to participate in the Design Challenge you have to submit a short video explaining your concept and presenting a mockup that clearly shows how a new start page might work. Wireframes and polished comps are also welcome. Mozilla has a submission form available here and example templates are available here. How often can you use your time off to influence how millions of users will interact with the web.
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Personas – see how the Internet sees you
I came across another interesting data visualization site today called Personas that was part of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. The site creates an aggregate display of your online identity by scouring the web for information based on nothing but your name and attempts to put you into a predetermined set of categories. It runs through a few different stages of analysis before it presents you with a colored, segmented line that shows what you are made of according to the internet.
I like this not only as an information design exercise but that it a great illustration of how the vast amount of data on the internet can be filled with near perfect insights as well as huge errors and mischaracterizations. I think that this ying and yang of good and bad is a natural result of pulling data from a one dimensional search, in this case only your name, and the inclusion of any other metrics would obviously greatly improve the results. That being said I think it is also a good reminder that all the data in the world is useless without the skill to be able to analyze and mine the data to separate the gems from the trash.
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Facebook facelift
I was cruising through Behance today and came across Barton Smith’s self initiated re-design of Facebook. The comps and video are a little small but can you see his design is a really nice, streamlined and organized take on their site. Things like the publisher toolbar that let’s you post content from any page, the streams’ 2 tiered filter and bottom ticker are smart changes that Facebook would do well to consider for their re-design. This type of thinking would move the site forward by keeping and enhancing functionality and stop their trend of stripping their site further and further down into a more and more generic mediocrity.
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New search tools – AppBoy & Addict-o-matic
I came across two interesting new web search portals today for mobile applications and traditional search I thought I would share to see what you think of them.
AppBoy
Appboy is a new online platform that was created with two purposes. FIrst it is a search engine or sorts that will help you weed through the thousands os applications to find the best iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps out there. You can also post application ideas that the community can vote on in order to get a develop to create it. I can’t find any real examples that this has actaully happened but if it does you get $250 which does really small given the potential upside and profit a great application could generate. I am curious to see if we will starting seeing more and more sites like this to help you get to the quality application out because when it is left to popularity we are left with fart generators and moron tests.
Addict-o-matic
Addict-o-matic starts out looking like your average search engine that happens to have a large Dyson-esque mascot. You plug in what you are searching for and the site returns the results in 19 separate content boxes that show you results from sources like Twitter, YouTube, Digg, Yahoo Web Search, Flickr and 13 more. You can dig into any one data source if you want to but I found it interesting to try different terms to see the data grouped and displayed in this new way because it gives you a different feel for the results.
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Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami bring design to QR codes
When it comes to QR codes what you see is what you get because they all look the same and I have never seen any variation in them until today. Louis Vuitton and my favorite modern artist Takashi Murakami have created the first QR code that is actually designed in the brand’s visual language and characters that Murkami created. The coolest thing is that even with all the design the code actually works and takes you to the Louis Vuitton online Japanese store. I this has to be take a long time to create but this addition of branding to the QR codes could turn them into something really cool that could be used as a design element in a lot of different places.
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SHSK’H Music Player
I am a sucker for really clean information design and unique interface design that is new but still easy to understand. The new site from SHSK’H does all of those things extremely well. The site starts simply enough with four dots that are held in place by a number of elastic strings. Rolling over one of the dots sticks it to your cursor and you can move it around and play with the kinetic nature of the physics. Clicking on one of the dots will make it zoom up and each of the strings that bound the dot changing to represent music tracks in the volume of music. As the song begins to play an audio graph of the music begins to scroll down the line for the selected track which is subtle but adds an engaging element to the experience. Changing tracks can be done one of two ways either with the dot itself which has taken on iPod like controls or just clicking on the string and track you are interested in. For me this type of design is some of my favorite because it is so clean and so simple but I know how hard it is to design something that is this simple but stays so usable and engaging.
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Real time information design – DIGG Labs Arc
I am a sucker for great information design and I have thought for a long time that what Digg labs does with it in real time is probably the best I have ever seen. I first wrote about Digg labs back in November of 2006 with their Swarm information display and today I was cleaning out old entries that I never published and realized I never wrote about my favorite tool – Digg arc. The concept here is again the information display of stories in real time as people Digg them on Digg.com. The stories arrange themselves in a circle in color coded groups depending on their subject matter like science, lifestyle or entertainment. The screen name of the user who created the Digg appears around the outside and if they Digg more than one story during the session then a connector line appears between all of the stories they have acted on. You can also down arc as a screensaver which is interesting since it is able to run for a longer session than you would normally have in a web browser so the resulting chart is really elaborate.
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