These monome devices, described as “adaptable, minimalist interfaces”, let you hack a grid of lights. The extreme design reduction liberates the device’s perceived potential. Adding any extra features to the device would be like replacing a blank canvas with a coloring book. The device is built by two people from the future, brian crabtree and kelli cain, where capitalization has long been regarded as superfluous decoration.
I have a love / hate relationship with A / B tests. Leaning too hard on them to make design decisions can make for very anemic process. It encourages an incremental, guess-and-check approach that feels like a task better suited for an automaton. Even when isolating one variable, the results mainly speak to “what” had the effect on behavior, rather than the “why”. I’d rather be solving problems and taking bigger strokes. But you simply can’t argue with its place in the toolbelt, especially when seeing some of the results on ABTests.com
In his latest post, Joshua Porter riffs on the concept of ‘every-day apps’, something I’ve talked about in the past (although I used ‘destination sites’ to describe such properties). In my post, I made some base assumptions suggesting that our capacity to visit sites on a regular basis is finite. It was nice to see Joshua cite a study reaffirming my guess, demonstrating that most people regularly visit only about 10 sites.
I found this description of product design particularly poignant, mostly because I’ve made this same mistake:
In general, most people think they’re building an everyday app, but they’re not. When the actual use patterns are discovered, most apps will be used every few days or less.
The rest of the article is spent postulating on how LinkedIn could bridge their ambitions to be an everyday site. For me, the more interesting problem is acknowledging that you’re not an everday app while still positioning the product to succeed.
Twitter is frequently lauded as a triumph of simplicity. “It should be Twitter simple” can be heard punctuating discussions around new product development.
To the contrary, I think Twitter is complicated as hell. Explaining the value proposition to an internet-savvy person accustomed to a service like Facebook can draw the same blank stares as explaining it to your grandparents. The 140-character limit feels arbitrary and limiting. Twitter search, a product with incredible value, remains hidden from the general public. Dozens of clients and hundreds of Twitter-based websites add to the cacophony.
Part of the reason it’s so difficult to explain is that it’s not a website and it doesn’t have an explicit purpose, meaning the conventional vocabulary to describe online properties fails here. It can be better seen as a medium of communication where the value proposition is completely contingent on how the person chooses to put this medium to use.
All this, just to say that I am loving the Cocoa IV drip from @scottstevenson and @cocoadevcentral even though it represents a departure from my approach of only following people that I’m somehow personally acquainted with. I also have a thing going on with the robot from @popurls, who’s got some jokes.
I really like the concept – especially its name – of the “cognitive shield” as described by Aza Raskin. The point is to block out information that might distract a user from their primary task, while still have it be available in case it is relevant to that task.
In the end, the affordance of the final implementation ended up getting in the way, but the concept was retained in a more understated form.
We’ve taken another tack this time at not breaking your train of thought by using default fonts and a Firefox-gray background. Instead of taking the over-the-top cognitive shield approach, we are trying to make the page “fit-in” to ameliorate a visually jarring experience. After a couple days of testing and feedback, it seems to work.
While I’m not willing to give up on the concept of abstracting secondary tasks / information in the bold way the original concept proposed, a sufficient cognitive shield will always be available in the form of a good visual hierarchy and adherence to the principals of information design.