Usability of Paper

I’m not necessarily a proponent of persisting paper-based resources per se, at least not from a sentimental or habitual perspective. Instead, I see a real experiential value to paper–one that’s hard to replicate with a computer. People like to read and use information on paper more than on screen. The experience is hard to replicate. Until computers can truly offer a similar experience to using paper, we’ll still see people using it.

I’ve written on this topic several times already. My now-old “Printing the Web” story over at B&A really marks the beginning of my interest in how we experience information on paper. It’s based on observations of real human behavior, namely that since the advent of the web and widespread personal computing we’ve not at all seen a decrease in the use of paper. This is also at the heart of a recent post on this blog.

Dimtry over at UsabilityPost muses about our attraction to paper as well. See his post “Why We Still Use Paper.” Many of his conclusions are accurate, I believe. We’ve been looking into this at work for a while, and I have evidence to support many of his claims. I would have liked to have a seen a better formulation of his points, though: the text and argument rambles a bit.

A commenter to the above post points to a new flexible, ultra thin screen by Sony. Impressive, but not surprising. We’ll probably be seeing more of this type of technology in the near future. E-Ink, flat screens you can draw on, portable ultra-thin devices: all of these will continue to mirror the experience we have with paper. That’s why understanding the information experience we have with paper resources should be the first line of investigation, I believe.

Semager – German Semantic Search Engine

Semager is a freely available semantic search engine out of Würzburg. The UI is a little lack-luster, for starters. But more importantly, I’m not convinced of the results–at least not based on the searches I tried.

A search for “usability,” for instance, exposes “testing” as the #1 related keyword. OK, that’s fine. But then they seem to be using those terms for further search processing (I’m guessing), so that the 5th and 6th results are about testing, but not usability testing.

And an ego-search for my name didn’t surface my book in the results or in the related terms, which had “pragmatism” as the first one. Oh well.

Wikipedia Roll

Here’s an interesting mashup: Wikipedia Roll. I’m pointing to the page for “Usability” but you can search on any term.

Looks like they are doing some type of entity extraction to cluster facet-like groupings of concepts on the fly. That’s cool in and of itelf.

I also like the UI. It’s a type of visualization that doesn’t rely too much on graphic or visual representations of text, like with small balls or spider graphs. Instead, you interact directly with the concepts and labels themselves.

Misconceptions in UX – Whitney Hess Post

Whitney Hess has done her homework and talked to a sampling of thought leaders in UX about misconceptions in the field. See her post “10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design.” There’s not too much new here in terms of material, but it’s a really timely update and an excellent summary on the leading issues. I agree with all of them, though I might have ordered them differently.

Thanks for this, Whitney!

Rotating Navigation – Examples

Previously I pointed out how rotating navigation mechanisms are on the rise. These are content areas that show multiple items within the same space on the page. There is often an automatic part of the mechanism that “plays” through all of the items, but there may also be paging controls to jump right to a given item in, say, a sequence of 3 things. It’s a good way to make use of screen real estate and surface content without cluttering the page.

This trend seems to be continuing. Of particular interest is the rotating navigation element on the CircuitCity.com homepage:

CircuitCity.com Rotating Element

The vertical text bars on the left are clickable to reveal a new piece of content in the middle. After clicking one of them, the top piece of content rotates to the end of the stack of vertical bars. It’s as if you have a stack of cards in your hand that maintain a constant order as you flip through them. To look at the third card, you take the top two and place them at the end of the stack. Interesting metaphor for interaction. I got it right away.

Newsweek also has a rotating element on their homepage for headline stories. The controls for this are quite complete: next, previous, paging, and the ability to play all.

Rotating headlines on Newsweek.com