The challenge Find a usability problem. Design a solution. Share it with a person who can solve the problem Looks easy… Is that all? Just find a problem, solve it and tell your solution? Problems can’t be hard to find. Designing a solution can sometimes be really simple. And how hard can it be to …
Monthly Archives: July 2008
Tagclouds with Wordle: color, font and orientation
In my previous post about tag clouds I briefly mentioned alternative sorting principles. Martien Heijmink’s weblog VIBE pointed me towards
Tagclouds are more than navigation aids
Tag clouds can be sorted in different ways: alphabetically, by frequency, semantically and randomly. Will McGugan prefers them sorted by frequency, because that makes them look better. In the comments people pointed out that it is easier to find items in a sorted list. Will responded he chooses form over function. Navigation aid? But what …
Visualization
I just discovered visualcomplexity, a catalogue of over 600 visualizations. There are a couple of really great finds. The best visualizations reveal the underlying structure of the data but without sacrificing the complexity and show artistic beauty and elegance. Other catalogues are mentioned at the coding horror weblog. It seems the developments in visualizations have …
Quick sketch: from textual pointer to arrow
I really like Phatch. It’s an elegant piece of software for batch processing images (its name is a contraction from photo + batch). Open source, in active development and quick to learn and friendly to use for tasks such as making thumbnails for a directory of photos, or adding round corners and drop shadows. And …
Directions: previous, next, back, forward
A simple navigation structure in a wordpress weblog, typically found at the bottom of the landing page: Why is this intuitive? Reading direction in English (and Dutch, and many other languages) is from left to right. When reading we are trained at starting in the top left corner, then moving to the right and downwards. …
Standards: when there is no obvious best choice
On which side of the road should we drive? Although I probably could make up an argument for either side based on the asymmetry of the brain’s hemispheres, this would be little convincing. Driving on the right is not safer (or less safe) than driving on the left. But it is pretty obvious that randomly …
Apples, oranges and other fruit
How many items can a category contain before it grows too big and should be split? Long lists are overwhelming and confusing. But it can be very easy to get lost in hierarchies with subcategories, several layers deep. In 1956 George Miller wrote The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our …