Put A Little Goo In That Interface!

Fellow ARc90’er Avi and I were chatting up the goodness of physics-based puzzle games like the excellent World of Goo and Crayon Physics and it got me thinking: what’s so universally appealing about these types of games?

I think the answer lies in how these games reinforce our hard-wired logic about the physical world. From our earliest days on this earth, we start to sort out how objects in the real world interact. Some pretty basic ground rules are laid down and reinforced throughout our lives. Things like gravity and the various laws of our physical world are completely hard-wired into our minds. If you actually draw out these laws into their basic scientific formulas, its relatively complex stuff. But in our brains from a very early age, it’s all second nature.

Physics-based games and interfaces play a sort of trick on us. For fleeting moments, even though we’re interacting with pixels on a screen, all those familiar rules are validated. This is why they feel so inspiring when we first experience them. They illicit that “whoah!” after seeing a good magic trick.

As we design interfaces, don’t discount the power of simulating the real world – even in the most subtle ways. Even something as simple as a sliding accordion box feels better than just popping up and hiding information indiscriminately. Just ask Nintendo (with the Wii) and Apple (in just about all their interfaces – iPhone, Coverflow, etc.).

So the next time you’re designing that all-too-boring invoicing application interface, think about putting a nice helping of the real world in it. It’ll make the experience just a little more fun.

[While poking around for links to this article, I stumbled on a nice list of physics-based games. Have at it!]

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A Trip Through Lebanon

Recently, Tina Roth of the popular Swiss Miss blog shared some photos of her trip to Switzerland. Her photos give us a glimpse into the order and tidiness commonly associated with Swiss culture. I myself passed through Switzerland recently as well, but it was just a waypoint to a markedly different destination: Lebanon. To counter Tina’s post, I thought I’d share some thoughts about life in Lebanon and how design lives in the public space.

Continue reading A Trip Through Lebanon...

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Offline Prototyping Awesomeness With The Web Stencil Kit

Prediction for 2009: paper’s making a comeback. I’m talking about things like writing, taking notes and keeping a sweet-as-hell looking Moleskine under your arm as you strut to your next meeting.

Want proof? Take a look at this UI prototyping stencil whipped up by the Design Commission:

They’re not available just yet but they promise to have them up for sale in January. I want one.

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Need Gift Ideas For Your Favorite Hipster?

Mighty Goods has nice gift ideas for hipsters. While you’re at it, if your hipster friend happens to be smart, there’s gift ideas for smart people. If these hipsters and/or smart people (yes, hipsters are sometimes smart) happen to work for you, there’s gift ideas for employees.

Now let’s all do our part to help the struggling economy by buying all kinds of stuff for each other. Oh, and for Jesus too.

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Some Good Reading At The Arc90 Blog

The Arc90 blog is often laden with highly technical tips on everything from SQL to Flex to JQuery. It’s nice to see some non-technical stuff show up: Kamni Khan’s When We Were Young talks about Arc90’s early years (Brooklyn!) and Jennifer Epting’s The Liftoff Moment expounds on the struggles (and triumphs) of doing that thing we do here at Arc90.

They’re both really well-written and not laden with code snippets…so have at it!

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Does Anybody Use Trackbacks Anymore?

Does anyone use trackbacks anymore? Is it dead and/or de facto dead? I’m thinking of removing it from basement.org.

Also, while I’m at it, does anyone give a crap about Technorati tags? Heh.

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Elsewhere Links RSS Feed Fixed

Just a small Public Service Announcement: the Elsewhere links RSS feed was botched up for awhile and wasn’t getting updated. It’s now fixed and working just fine. Note that the full basement.org RSS feed includes all the Elsewhere posts as well. Sorry ‘bout that.

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The Television-ization Of Newspapers On The Web

So I’m gong through my usual routine, sipping my coffee and visiting the usual handful of news sites. Eventually, I land at the NY Times and I’m confronted with this:

It’s not your reliable Times home page with some ads, it’s your reliable Times homepage infested and overwhelmed with an advertisement. The ad not only completely dominates the above-the-fold experience (and my “fold” is generous here, 682 pixels high) but it’s moving around, people are talking (thankfully with the sound turned off) and the whole thing just overwhelms the newspaper reading experience.

Now, it’s worth noting that the New York Times is fully aware of this and provides a Minimize Ads control near the top of the page (you can actually see it in the snapshot, it’s the little gray box). It’s thoughtful of them to provide this. I’ve actually written about this “Off Switch” before. But here’s the thing: you don’t actually see that button the first time you’re greeted with that monster ad. Only if you refresh or revisit do you see it.

Anyway, the goal of this post is not to beat up on the NY Times advertising policies. The NY Times, in my opinion, is the best (if not one of the best) news destinations on the Web. Maybe it’s just nostalgia, but I still perceive nytimes.com as a digital representation of the paper newspaper. In the paper version, we would never see this kind of compromise for advertising on the front page. If you gray out the actual non-content on the above the fold, we’re left with this:

As you can see, a good 70% of the real estate is useless. This isn’t a newspaper anymore. It’s television. Ultimately, this is about controlling the experience. Television and radio, with it’s doling out of valued content over time, can place advertising along the experience timeline. To get to the stuff we want, we pretty much wait. Print publications are different in that I can jump to and go to anything I want. If I’m interested in the Science section, I’ll just “fast-forward” right to it. My options are far less linear and my ability to jump is unencumbered.

Content delivery and advertising on the Web is sort of it’s own animal. It borrows conventions from both TV and radio and print. I guess it feels wrong to me because, in my mind, you’re not supposed to move sections and words around on me when I’m reading. The physical placement of these information “objects” has become familiar to me. I’ve grown to know the lay of the land. When you move them around, I’m left annoyed and slightly cheated.

I can fully appreciate the Times’ motivation to sell ads. The newspapers are going through a lot of turmoil right now as they transition. My hope is that we’ll find a balance and that newspapers and magazines on the Web will hold strong on the things that compromise the reading experience and more importantly, their identity as news sources for reading news. I don’t want the NY TImes to turn into the NY Times Web Channel.

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Welcome To The Biggest Laboratory Ever

Spreading around the ol’ blog-o-sphere is Google’s Flu Trends. In essence:

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together.

Pretty cool. Really cool actually. What Google is doing here is combining a couple of dimensions of data: where you are geographically and flu-related search queries to determine how the flu virus is spreading.

A few years ago, I talked about Google Base and what I then called the “Incidental Semantic Web.” In short, what I was talking about then is how the monitoring or mining of data artifacts out of selfish behavior can lead to some really interesting insights. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

We search for flu remedies and symptoms on Google because we’re selfishly motivated to learn more. We have no interest in contributing to some database that reports on the spread of the flu. That selfish motivation is precisely why Google can trust (relatively speaking) the data coming in. In other words, this ability to predict the spread of the flu is an incidental byproduct of millions of discrete, selfish acts.

I think this is just the beginning. Imagine synthesizing results from not only search queries, but eating habits (via “smart” refrigerators), drug interactions (RFID is making its way onto prescription bottles) and many other "sources” of data. For example, imagine finding a a far less likelihood of diabetes in cultures that eat extraordinary amounts of cauliflower.

Today, we take a guess about the correlation of different factors (Vitamin X reduces Disease Y) and kick off a study where we then decide to watch and gather data. Tomorrow, we’ll just check the data that comes out of our everyday lives.

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One Big Ball Of Experience

A few months ago, I put up a post about how software delivery is materially changing. In that post, I talked about how software delivery would transition from CD’s and DVD’s to over-the-wire instant software. It’s a worthwhile transition. Eliminating prerequisites to getting software up and running is a great thing.

Just ask Youtube. Youtube exploded precisely because we didn’t have to get the knife and scissors out to pry away that annoying, thick plastic casing to get at the product. Realplayer had a stubborn plastic wrapping around it. Youtube didn’t. Rewind ten years ago and stroll into Real Network’s offices and explain to them that their product was just fine but that their “packaging” would one day do them in and they would’ve laughed you out of the building. Installation downloads. Plugins. Configuration settings. It’s all a big honkin’ waste of time. The URL box killed Realplayer. Hell, even Amazon, the ultimate purveyor of actual physical stuff, is waking up to the uselessness of over-packaging in today’s world.

The un-packaging experience (or in software circles, what is commonly referred to as “download and installation”) is part of the entire experience around a piece of software. In fact, it’s a pretty important part of the relationship: it’s the introduction. The iPhone application and song acquisition experience is arguably one of the main reasons why the iPhone is so wildly popular and successful. The whole process flows beautifully. You don’t need to get the knife and scissors out.

A few weeks ago, I ran across an article or post that explained that MLB At Bat, the popular $4.99 iPhone application that gives you up-to-the-minute scores and video highlights would…*gasp*…expire. For a moment, I was offended and felt a bit duped. I paid my $4.99 and I assumed I’d purchased the damn thing. I owned it. I owned it in the traditional, free-market capitalist sense of the word. I give you $5, you give me a jar of pickles. The pickles are now mine.

Not so. Major League Baseball is going to require everyone to buy At Bat every year. It turns out I didn’t own a damn thing. In fact, I leased it…or subscribed to it. After getting over my initial grievance about the whole thing, I realized a few things. First, $4.99 a year is not even worth debating for an application of this quality. $4.99 gets you a large coffee at Starbucks. Second, all software is headed in this direction. It’s going the way of cable television or cell phones. We’re going to pay to use, not to own.

Today, the burden on software publishers is to sell you software that you will then own. A few years will go by and you’re asked again to “upgrade.” You can choose not to and just keep using whatever you’ve got. The burden is on software publishers to pile on features and updates compelling enough to make us want to pay the upgrade cost. If our copies of Photoshop CS3 stopped working tomorrow because it had “expired” you’d witness some sort of revolt of graphic designers, but that’s exactly where we’re headed.

This shift will bring a renewed emphasis on the software experience itself. The marketing of software; the barrier-to-entry to use; the virtual out-of-the-box experience along with the actual use of the product is all blending together into one continuous interaction. As we ready our idea management product, Kindling for general release, we’re realizing that the entire thing: from marketing pages, to the sign-up process to the actual application itself is really one cohesive experience.

So take heed product managers and designers, the shrink-wrapped box is gone. The barriers are gone. Hell, the actual shelf space is gone. Marketing is no longer over there and your product is over here. It’s all one big ball of experience. Make it as simple and memorable as you possibly can.

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