Experiencing Information

Paul Sherman has a good article in UX Matters called Where’s My Stuff? Beyond the Nested Folder Metaphor. It includes a video of the Bumptop Interface, which was developed by Anand Agarawala and Ravin Balakrishnan. See the video of the interface on YouTube or more information on the Bumptop website, including a video from TED 2007. I came across this about a year and half ago, but forgot the name of the interface. So I was thankful to have come across it again on UX Matters.

The YouTube video of the Bumptop interface begins with an interesting thesis:

“In real work spaces, documents are piled and casually arranged in a way that subtly conveys information to the owner. This expressiveness is lost in today’s GUI desktop.”

In my ethnographic studies, this is something I’ve directly observed to be true in the law domain. Legal information workers implicitly use piles and location to manage workflow. Piles of client files around the office are essentially physical to-do lists. At a glance, they convey who has what amount of work to do and when. Other physical attributes of paper documents support this type of workflow management, such as color and size and additional flags sticking out of the sides of books and folders.

Converting this intuitive, organic way of working to an online system is difficult. You lose an overview quickly. Even with two computer monitors, it’s hard to get the same kind of spatial horizontal-ness you can easily achieve with paper documents. Online workflow management also requires a great amount of discipline: you must rigorously update information in order for the system to function. This, in my opinion, is the biggest hurdle. The benefits of online document management and workflow management are in the long run perhaps higher, but the change needed to get there is quite large because it requires a fundamental change in behavior.

In light of the iPhone and MS Surface and other similar interfaces, the Bumptop interface has potential, in my opinion. It’s a break-away from the tyranny of the typical GUI model. Not sure if Bumptop will solve the loss of expressiveness current desktop GUIs cause, but it pointing to thinking in the right direction…or at least in a different direction.

Johnny Chung Lee is a real creative person. Check out his hack of a Wii remote to get a “Minority Report” style of interaction. No real practical application shown, but it’s quite fascinating nonetheless.

Here’s an interesting video of Edward Tufte reviewing the iPhone. (Warning: it’s a huge file and takes forever to load fully). He seems to like the iPhone overall, but does have a few valid critique points.

“To clarify, add detail” and “clutter and overload are not an attribute of information, they are failures of design.” Seems the iPhone interface are guilty of both, and they’ve chosen to throw out information rather than fix the design (according to Tufte).

There is a nice article in the most recent issue of D-Lib Magazine called Enhancing Search and Browse Using Automated Clustering of Subject Metadata. The authors looked at ways to integrated automatic classification with traditional categories. “Results indicated that while the algorithm was somewhat time-intensive to run and using a local classification scheme had its drawbacks, precise clustering of records was achieved and the prototype interface proved that faceted classification could be powerful in helping end-users find resources.”

I like the practicality of this study. Lots of screens are shown, helping you grab onto issues discussed. They also talk about user testing and integrating that feedback into the designs.

Silobreaker is a current awareness service that launched at the beginning of 2006. It’s designed for the “light information professional,” as Silobreaker puts it. (I’m assuming this description doesn’t refer to the weight of the person, but how much information work they do). The product is rich with various features for visualizing, extracting, and clustering search results to expose relationships in content and give as much context as possible.

They’ve recently re-done the interface. Check out the the beta launch of Silobreaker.

Not surprisingly, the interface is very link rich: you can click on just about anything at any time. There are also quite a few mouse-over features that reveal a quick view of information in layers and such. I like this overall approach and feel it’s appropriate for the target group. But frankly, I prefer the original version of Silobreaker. The information design of the beta product doesn’t seem to help visually scanning information on the screen, and it appears more cluttered somehow (although the amount of information is about the same).

Overall, Silobreaker lives up to its claim that it provides numerous ways to slice and dice content. For a relatively new servcie, it has many strengths and an impressive range of features and functionalities. The underlying concept moves away from searching in favour of browsing; however, the product is complex and presents potential interaction problems such as small texts and targets to click. Nonetheless, Silobreaker’s unique approach is likely to appeal to many users who conduct news research and require current awareness content on a regular basis.

Uday has a really good thought piece over at Boxes and Arrows entitled What Does Rich Mean? Good question…and good answers. Read the article. This de-buzzes the buzzword “rich” for sure.

“And therein lays the great burden and hope of designing for rich experiences. As arbiters of human attention, designers must ensure there is not an overload of superfluous, gratuitous richness that distracts users or makes a product difficult to use. Recognizing that every digital product is a rhetorical moment amplified by expressiveness can enable designers to tap into the promise of rich experience: intelligently crafted, well-intentioned acts of communication that are emotionally satisfying and sensibly organized to meet user goals, thus becoming something memorable and valuable. Ultimately, that is what richness is about—connecting to those core human qualities that define our goals, values, and attitudes for living.”

Go Uday.

See more good stuff over at his blog.