I noticed these wonderful accessibility “point symbols” on the Eden project website. They are pictorial depictions of words… icons, which are used for to assist people with low literacy, learning difficulties or where English may not be their first language.

Enabled using AJAX the user interacts with the site text by rolling over a word which highlights and displays associated symbols. Despite the symbol illustration production values being fairly low, they succeed in their simplicity to communicate meaning.

^ Eden project’s point symbols

The system has been developed by Widgit online, with more than 7,000 images covering a vocabulary in excess of 40,000 words.

I’m a fan of this kind of contextual interaction. At times the way to interact may not be obvious, but once learned it allows greater information density within the same display area. There are limits of course but for simple tasks giving the user some additional contextual help and feedforward benefits their experience.

The New York Times implement a sweet little dictionary. By highlighting a word, a question mark bubble appears that enables the user to look the word up.

^ New York Times dictionary lookup

Another incidence of contextual interaction is over at Ask.com’s search results. Rolling over the binocular icon displays a thumbnail of the destination website.

^ Ask.com search result feedforward

If you’ve seen any decent implementations of these ideas drop a link and comment below.

People often talk about finding inspiration for their everyday work by looking outside of their immediate industry or practice. I agree with the sentiment, it broadens personal outlook and is more likely in my opinion to present new ways of thinking and doing that can filter back into the day job.

The video below illustrates this line of thinking perfectly. Tinker Hatfield is a talented guy - Nike’s Vice President of Innovation Design - who trained as an Architect and transitioned to Product Design whilst working at Nike. He is responsible for the classic Air Max and drew significant inspiration from the Pompidou Centre. “If I had not seen the building I might not have suggested we expose the air bag and make it visual and let people see inside the shoe.”

Having the idea however is only one part of innovating… as he goes on to say, it also takes courage to see it through “When you do something different you have to have a pretty thick skin, people are going to take shots at you. They are going to criticise what they don’t understand.”

It’s an inspiring short, have a watch, thicken up your skin and go see a new bit of the world.

^ “Respect the Architects” by Thibaut de Longeville.