Visualizations

I’ve been experimenting for a while with Flash, Processing, and Ruby-Processing – making particle systems and various interactions and animations. I started a new page to collect these experiments – visuals.

UI PSA: Do not do this

I’m generally annoyed by the precautions designers take against shoulder surfing (Windows WEP key entry, anyone?), but this is clearly a mistake:

Really, there’s no need to protect a CAPTCHA from shoulder surfing.

Chronotext – the text time curvature

From Ariel Malka, this typewriter visualization allows the rendering of the text path to be affected by the act of typing – inter-keystroke timing affects the curvature of the path.

[text time curvature]

When not to listen to your users, from Livejournal

While it’s important to listen and respond to user feedback, it’s often a mistake to treat arbitrary or isolated instances as a roadmap for enhancements. This post about lessons from Livejournal reinforces this. The idea is not new (see Jakob Nielsen, for example), but it’s useful to be reminded from time to time. Users are generally better at pointing out and exhibiting their problems than solving them. That’s why listening to their problems and observing their activity is valuable.

However, I think that there is value in communities that aggregate user feedback and requests, such as Dell’s Ideastorm and My Starbucks Idea, both of which leverage Salesforce’s Force.com platform. UserVoice is another service that shows promise for user feedback aggregation.