I was given a taxidermied pigeon from @lukehelliwell after its starring role in a photo shoot.

Curious to see how the live pigeons would react to it I decided to reunite pigeon with its friends at Hyde Park. Here’s what happened.

^ Pigeons first introduction to his friends at the park

^ An edited version at high speed. Pigeon gets mauled by a dog and scares a child…

So it seemed to me that at the start the other pigeons were too busy foraging and the swarm of birds arriving too frenetic for any of them to be particularly bothered by “Pige-God” however after this initial furore they approached cautiously and appear to sense that there was something not quite right about this one. In the first video you can see the other pigeons crane their necks and back up a little (1:37) after initially rushing for the bread. Ultimately though they didn’t really care and just wanted food.

If any ethologists happen across this post I’d be interested in a more scientific explanation. Also if there is anybody with mad animatronic skills that can help me 2.0 Pige-God do get in touch.

The value of “Continuous” scroll - elsewhere called “infinite” scroll - raised it’s head again yesterday after performing an image search on Google and the same one on the newly launched Bing. Both address image searching which as a designer can be one of the most time consuming and sometime life draining activities.

It is an activity with few shortcuts but many pitfalls. Unlike document searching, when looking for an image, particularly on Image banks such as Getty and Corbis (both of whom use pagination), it is often about encapsulating a mood and attitude or harmonising with an existing colour set. Composition of the shot is also important. Expressions and body language critical. Image banks don’t cater to the user effectively for these oft subjective metrics which means the user has the unenviable task of wading through “pages and pages” of ill fitting results.

Bing.com makes it a little easier by porting over their Live search implementation of continuous scroll. It is the same thing Apple have been doing at their shop for a while. Essentially pagination is removed and the entire data set is returned in one monumental vertical scrolling list. The clever bit comes thanks to AJAX, which incrementally loads items only when they are within or just about to appear within the viewport.

Corbis unfortunately retain pagination in it’s just launched re-design. In this context the choice is clear and it is not pagination.

Pagination necessitates horizontal (previous | next) and vertical navigation. Continuous scroll factors out the horizontal making it simpler for a user to orientate themselves to the information.

Pagination breaks up the user experience with it’s intermittent page refreshes and load waits. Continuous scroll however is inherently a seamless, smooth experience and with incremental loading means less time waiting which means browsing at speed.

With pagination the user’s memory capacity can get maxed quicker as they need to remember which image they liked, the quality of it as well as which page it was on. Admittedly the image banks address this issue with ‘Lightboxes’ however these normally require registration/login which is not applicable to Bing’s image search. As an aside, what would be cool is to think of these multi-column monsters as a fruit machine (one arm bandit) and “hold” images that are suitable for closer consideration.

The RSI peeps also prefer less clicks which can work in the favour of Continuous scroll.

On the downside long scrolling lists can increase eye fatigue…think of watching the world streaming past from a train window. Long scrolls can also be a little daunting and make signposting the content start and end more difficult…will this thing ever end!.

Google reader is a good example of the continuous scroll. Interestingly this deals with textual random data, not just images as discussed above.

There are hurdles of user expectation and performance to negotiate and above all the implementation should focus on the content and context. It nonetheless is a cool interface pattern worth considering next time you are dealing with large data sets.

If pagination is your thing or the context is different which fits this approach then adopting these simple techniques can make it a more pleasurable experience.
1) Show the maximum number of results that will fit the users screen without scrolling.
2) Fix the pagination controls in the same position on every page. This means users can hammer the clicker to page through at speed without moving their mouse.
3) Provide a “Show all”
4) Check out the pagination 101for more basics and loads of examples.

More discussion can be found at IxDA

Continuous Scroll
Pagination Vs Scrolling

The other weekend was a beautiful Spring day. Sun in the sky, warm and perfect for browsing a local second hand book sale taking place in something that resembled a scene from Miss Marple. Among the jostling grannies were some fantastic finds from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to “The Seven dials Mystery” by Agatha Christie and Vigina Woolf’s “The Common Reader.” All original Pelican classics, dusty and yellowing from the hours.

Permanence

In amongst the jumble I discovered an old jewel, a 1945 impression of “A Book of English Poetry - Chaucer to Rossetti” which had secrets hidden between the covers.

A small black and white passport photo was attached with a short inscription on the first page inside the cover. A man in his 30’s or 40’s sat in what I guess is his front room, the edges of the photo faded away over time, give a glimpse into the books history and sets the imagination off into other lives and eras. What was the connection between him and the Jannice to whom he gave this book? How did the book come to be here? Which poems did he read to her?…

^ Inscription found on the inside cover

As a designer I’m well aware of the gradual erosion of the printed medium in communication. This book however reminded me of the wonderful quality of print. The tactility and substance of the object. Something that changes with age as the pages begin to yellow and the smell of life permeating its leaves…we imbue it with character through ownership. The ability to alter it and eventually its fragility.

Digital products with Soul

It makes me wonder what would it mean for digital products to take on some of these characteristics? There is a soul to this book. Meaning conveyed through design, smell and touch but what marks this and some of the other older books out is the aging process itself.

Could time affect and enhance the emotional response of users?.. I think it could as within the fabric of social interaction people embed personality into systems that remember, that connect. It is the ability of a site to reveal, enable and promote this exchange that engenders its digital soul.

Finding the right page

The other delight was the way the book dealt with navigation. At the back of the book are two look up tables; an “Index of authors” and an “Index of first lines.” I love the way the latter is defined. It considers the perspective of the reader and how they may know only a snippet of a famous opening to a poem but not who it is by. In much the same way that I remember a song lyric but not the band who sang it and punch the line into Google, this indexing system addresses the reader’s mental model and provides a way for them to navigate the information.

^ UCD indexing

^ UCD indexing. [+] click image to enlarge

I attended an inspiring interview with Nolan Bushnell at BAFTA last night. A wildly successful charismatic character, in an unassuming kind of way, Bushnell of Atari and Pong fame took us on an informal excursion into his innovations in gaming c1970 through to his current uWink business.

Avoid missing ball for high score

The common thread which ran through his anecdotes was one of unfailing optimism and self belief coupled with a fascination for play. He built the Atari console after being unable to convince an established game publisher to take on Pong - ball missed; Chuck E.Cheese because he understood that kids do not want to sit still and talk quietly at diner but want to run around and cause havoc. Chuck E. Cheese now turns over $1bn a year.

It was refreshing to hear about these adventures. Like many designers intent on developing interesting ways to engage with people, his ‘let’s just do it’ attitude is what we seek out in others and often precisely what is needed. The experimentation of investigation that leads to new understandings any connections.

Engineering in fun

His work is the precursor to so much of modern gaming, many view him as the founding father of computer gaming. The underlying sense of philosophy to games and motivation can be seen directly in today’s Nintendo Wii. When Bushnell talks about social gaming he is interested especially in the embodied physical social experience rather than the distributed network experience of online gaming, predicting the continued growth and development of gestural interaction to a point where participation is simply a matter of moving ones body to effect change, negating the need for an additional input controller.

Other stories included his decision to incorporate “reflexing” into gameplay. Everyone is aware what it is like to play a game against a more skilled opponent. It’s great to improve your own game but also a little demoralizing. Bushnell introduced a simple handicap system whereby the difficulty of play altered in response to the players skill. So in multi-player Pong this meant that the more a player hit (“hogged”) the ball, the shorter their paddle became until it eventually disappeared. This meant that the player had to depend on their team mates.

When asked about his preference for modern game pads compared to the joystick he found that players could excerpt a massive amount of energy when they are getting beaten and there was no way to make an affordable joystick robust enough to withstand the reflected punishment or as Bushnell observed “Physics killed the joystick.”

Related links

Google tech talks: Nolan Bushnell

The event was being recorded so I’ll post a link here when it is online.

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here’s the video link http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/nolan-bushnell,727,BA.html
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My TV has been malfunctioning recently to create beautiful visual glitches. I’m enjoying the idea of it becoming an autonomous art generating machine. The glitches remind me of Brian Eno’s 7 million paintings, Autechre and Casey Reas’s generative art amongst others. Each of these artists use algorithms with a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. The process produces a cornucopia of results which although preconceived programatically often render random unforeseen artifacts as the program runs. Their talent is in giving this randomness meaning.

Variables

The computer as a result becomes part author in the creative  process. As a designer who writes code, I find this approach to creative expression fascinating. There is an exactness to programming. Syntax is formal and a rogue ; or missed { means the difference between an idea compiling or not. It is scientific. On the other side there is subjective beauty. An oft unquantifiable, emotion response. It is artistic. The computer has engendered a new breed of creative. A technological astuteness with a sensitive dependence upon emotional conditions.

There are however few truly original talents who manage to balance the left and right hemispheres with apparent ease which is not surprising given many people’s natural bias for one or other. I’m thinking of Maeda, Levin, Nakamura, Rokeby. I asked David Rokeby about this diversity of discipline.

The one off

When compared to hand rendered work, programs can run infinite times producing precisely the same result each time. The hand of the computer is plain to see.

Hand rendering however cannot achieve this and as such displays wonderful qualities of uniqueness, the one off. The hand of the human is plain to see. .

In some ways randomness is a way for the programmer/artist to imbue a sense of one-offness. It can bring sterile exactness to life, add unknowns and in doing so reveal a more humanistic sense of involvement or as Rokeby explained more poetically;

Happy accidents

So as the TV continues to blink, stutter and scramble through an episode of Stars on Skates or some other guff the broadcasters typically push out I’m rather more interested in the ingenious patterns a malfunctioning chip has happened to create.

Below is a collection of some of these which made “Homes under the Hammer” actually worth watching. Do I get it fixed?… not quite yet.

If you have examples of creative serendipity drop a comment below.

I’ve developed a technology induced tic and i don’t think I’m the only one. let me explain… Technically mediated spaces, real and virtual, provide wonderful ways to communicate, source information and so on. Anyone(thing ;]) reading this is no doubt sensitive to the fact that technology is changing the way we live, behave and interact.

A watched pot never boils

I’m fond of such technology and seek out services that can help me stay in touch with friends, conduct business, learn new things. The common set-up of these ‘background services’ requires that I add a means to be reminded when the status of the service changes. This frees me up to continue with other activities and ideally makes for time spent more productively.

It’s how you say it

The question for interaction designers is how to alert the user when the status has changed. For background services that present no requirement for immediate action such as such as email, twitter, mobile messaging, RSS feeds and iChat the balance has to be struck between alerting the user and interfering with what they are doing. i.e Non-modal. Or in non-geek-speak, glanceable.

If you think about email, that is the little envelope icon that appears on the application icon in the dock ( or system tray ) and the transient new message preview.

The Twitterific client uses a similar technique by changing the colour of the application icon when new tweets arrive. My landline answerphone turns on a red light, iChat blinks the active conversation in the browser title bar.

The company Ambient Devices trade solely in this space. The most ingenious of their products being the umbrella which automatically checks the weather forecast and glows a light in the handle to indicate inclement weather.

This form of feedback is filtering into diverse environments. A physician clinic for example is using it to improve the performance of their physicians by enabling patients to rate their appointment experience and visualising the results as colour fields in the waiting room.

“Only two sites have the glanceable dashboard. ‘Our assumption is physicians will change their behaviour to get more green lights’”

I wonder what this colour-and-shame/carrot-and-colour?! approach does for the physicians motivation. What would it be like in a different scenario? e.g. at the design studio where I work clients complete a project scorecard, which rates performance across a few metrics, after the project is complete. The success of the idea depends on the granularity of the implementation. A company-wide performance beacon would engender collective responsibility and involvement to make sure the light stays green. However broadcasting personal traffic light performance would most likely do the opposite and create cliques and resentment as people get branded. “I wouldn’t use her for that project she’s a red.”

Technically afflicted

So what about the tic. Well in effect I have become the regulator in the system and checking for updates to the twittering bird and mail icon has become second nature. Being the curious type, if the status has changed i’m more likely to check it, notwithstanding pressing issues which can be a real distraction. Less often but nonetheless apparent are phantom tingles, thinking my mobile is vibrating in my pocket to let me know I have a message. I don’t think it’s time to call the doctor yet but perhaps going off radar now and again will provide moments of solace and less eye darting. maybe. bark.

For a ongoing intranet consultancy project I undertook a set of stakeholder interviews as part of the research process. As we headed into the stage of assimilating the mass of gathered information - and there is a staggering amount of it - into a clear set of recommendations from observed patterns, I wondered if there was a way to visualise the interview content with the notion that it may enable further understanding.

Reading between the lines

To this end whilst wading through recordings of stakeholders, I converted them into tag clouds. Using TagCrowd, a Tag Cloud generator, I upped a transcript from each interviewee.

The resulting clouds, ignoring words like “oh”, “going”, “anyway”…,  whilst not scientific (and not the point) give an intriguing look at the content of the conversation, its themes and the ideas that are high, possibly subconsciously, on the interviewee’s agenda. It also made apparent common patterns across different interviewees.

As a supporting device I like them. Whilst independently inconclusive they give the designer a way to communicate, in an engaging visual way, to other people involved in the project the areas interviewees are gravitating towards.

The resulting images were  also well received by the client. I’m sure in part due to their simplicity. It is a diagram amidst dendrograms, tables of stats and other analysis that can be  easily digested and as such opens conversation.

Below are some of the generated tag clouds. I’ve blurred out a few client sensitive words.

^ Interviewee 1

^ Interviewee 2

^ Interviewee 3

Prospecting for gold

To compliment tried and tested formal methods I am an advocate of creative experimentation as part of this clarifying process. The willingness to peer into the problem without a clear route to the solution and knowing that it will take a bit of poking around, some dead ends but the chance of discovering something with value makes it worth pursuing. Having the time to do this however is difficult to manage which is why i think it is best done in the early stages of the process for two reasons. Firstly, if there is nothing springing from the well you can cut the activity and resolve solutions with existing methods. Secondly, the freedom from rationalised existing solutions helps to keep thinking expansive and experimental.

If you have applied existing approaches in unconventional ways or have made discoveries through serendipity post a comment.

The other day I read an interesting article about the NetFlix challenge that is very much the Zeitgeist for me so I thought I’d put it out there…net enabled recommendation engines will become critical to our everyday life activities. Your chosen engine’s result set / ‘suggestions’ will become as valuable as a good friends’ opinion when searching for that thing.

The engines

You might have heard about the NetFlix $1m recommendation engine challenge. No-one has won it yet, two years later. One of the stumbling blocks are films like Napoleon Dynamite which are proving to be very hard to predict preferences for. All good personalisation services out there have some kind of recommendation engine. I’m thinking about Apple’s Genius feature in iTunes, Amazon’s people who bought this…, Gmail ads, Last.fm’s musical neighbours..the list rolls on. In fact even Ocado just mailed me saying they have launched a service of this ilk. Awesome. I can offload a bunch of thinking.

Give and take

What these engines / algorithms are doing is taking search on a step from that of a generalist aggregator - if we both type “Palmer Eldritch” into Yahoo the same set of results come up. In fact Google, as usual, are leading the way in Search with their SearchWiki by allowing users to personalise the results using the ‘Remove’ and ‘Promote’ controls added to each result item. Over time actively helping Google learn what I think of the results will generate a set of preferences that enable it to bring me more appropriate results. Nice.

^Personalise your search engine

This type of exchange is uncomfortable for many people. It necessitates that we submit our personal choices and preferences to a privately held company, often times one that it relatively unknown to us. It raises questions such as; how will this data be used? who else will access to it? is it secure? what are the ethics of the aggregating company?

In light of this there is certainly a measure of trust that must be apportioned to the aggregator and as a consequence the residual benefit that it provides must be perceptively higher. As these services become more common the threshold for concern is likely to reduce as people become more used to deep mined personalisation in much the same way as online shopping has become ordinary.

Connected services

Facebook. The monolith. Launched Facebook connect last summer, its version of OpenID. This service lets you log into multiple disparate site with one central universal login. The idea is to wave goodbye to a plethora of passwords, which is potentially great for the user experience too.

So Facebook collect and post your activity to your wall – privacy setting permitting. This is great for the uber social sharers and also enables Facebook to start to mine your personal preferences even more so than before, supplementing their currently already abundant social graph. This gives them a great opportunity to fire content and services directly at your cerebral cortex however, given its central aim to connect people, the way they have implemented this data is still rudimentary. Speaking to friends who are daily users the adverts are often not relevant and the “People you might know” are generally people they don’t want to know.

As noted with Last.fm this kind of thing is already happening and dating sites make their living from it although Facebook (and BeBo, FriendFeed et al) have the opportunity to do it better as their data sets traverse many facets of a persons character and interests.

Interestingly this thinking has been applied to Twitter, with the recent Mr. Tweet service although i’ve not spent much time with him yet.

Speak to me like you know me

It’s out there, it’s happening but the software still feels like an algorithm. The successful service must be smart although it shouldn’t pertain to know it all. It should allow the user to amend returned suggestions and learn from these. The suggestions should be timely and have at its core appropriateness. Appropriateness of context and goal. It needs to know about the user, what mood they are in, what’s coming up on their schedule and how that could impact their preferences. It needs to be sensitive to the things the user finds offensive and talk to them as their friend might.

If anyone has used a great recommendation service or is creating one I’d be love to hear about your experience.

I rediscovered some video clips on my old phone in the transition to iPhonedom. Love this one. Captured on a lunch break in St. James’s Park, May 07. Blissful.

c15 years after writing about the ingenious top-down build methodology used on the then under-construction British Library for my undergraduate study, I finally made time to visit the now completed building.

Designed by Sir Colin Wilson this modernist idyll sits back from the perpetual rush of the Euston road. Its hard lines are attenuated by unfashionable red brick that give form to an urban ship buoyed against the recently renovated and relinked St. Pancras station.

Standing in the forecourt space I was initially underwhelmed expecting to be awed, especially given her size. The building did not impose itself but on reflection, why should it. The exterior space should support the needs of the visitors and their activity. I imagine this to be a lunchtime salvation in the warmer days for local workers and patrons who would be able to enjoy the feeling of calm space free from the office.

Upon entering the atrium the story changes. The layered slanting ceiling runs away rising to its height introducing an expanse of calm order where one immediately feels a guest in the imagination of a master craftsman. And it just gets better.

The artificial lighting is blended with the natural light to create a peaceful, uplifting environment with variances throughout that turn up and down the intensity so patrons can situate themselves in a space that most suits their preference.

Wilson’s understanding of the purpose of the building as a busy library and community hub is evident everywhere. His sensitivity for this makes using it not only easy but pleasurable and brings people together in serendipitous natural collisions. A lunch table is often occupied by people previously unacquainted, which is how i happened to have a surprising conversation with an author Laurence Shorter.

There is a good vibe to the place and for a public space in central London this is not easy to achieve. It is the kind of space i remember fantasising about when i was freelancing and would make, in fact it probably is, a wonderful remote office especially as they have recently opened up the broadband wifi connection.

^ Restaurant and working space at the British Library