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Articles (2012)
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March 13, 2012: Two More Sneak Previews into the HCI Encyclopedia
- March 1, 2012: More Experiments with Skyline Graphs
- February 21, 2012: Skyline Graphs – New Insights on the Horizon...
- February 15, 2012: Sneak Preview Number Five into interaction-design.org
- January 11, 2012: Sneak Preview Number Four into interaction-design.org
UI Design Blinks – Overview (2012)
Updated: April 25, 2012
Welcome
to a new column of brief, blog-like articles about various UI design
topics – inspired by my daily work, conference visits, books, or
just everyday life experiences.
As in a blog roll, the articles will be listed in reverse chronological order – and if the roll becomes too long, I will start a new one.
Please note that I will not be able to maintain the initial publishing speed! The articles will appear at irregular intervalls as time permits and inspiration comes...
See
also an overview of 2010 Blinks • overview
of 2011 Blinks
Recent Additions
April 18, 2012: A Sneak Preview of Wearable Computing
At
the recent "Interaction 2012" conference in Dublin, Ireland, I attended
a keynote by Amber Case. Case calls herself a "cyborg anthropologist" (and
user experience designer) and started her keynote with a definition of
cyborgs. The Wikipedia definition
of cyborgs is perhaps a little easier to understand: "A cyborg,
short for cybernetic organism, is a being with both biological and artificial (e.g.
electronic, mechanical or robotic) parts. Case presented Steve Mann (from
MIT) as a prototypical example of a cyborg. In 1981, he began wearing
computers on his body to augment reality through a view-piece, called
a "wearcam", strapped
around his left eye. According
to Case, this may have been one of the first examples of an extension
to our mental selves. ...
March 27, 2012: A Sneak Preview of Visual Aesthetics
When
I was a student, a fellow student of architecture told me that he attended
a lecture about "numeric aesthetics". I was surprised
that such a topic existed at all and asked him to provide me with the
lecture notes. When I looked at the notes, I was surprised again to
encounter stuff that was familiar to me as a physics student: Numeric
aesthetics has a lot in common with thermodynamics, and as I found out
later, also with information theory (which made perfect sense to me).
In my simple words, this approach was measuring order and disorder in
visual scenes. This reminds me of my own behavior when placing objects
on tables and shelves: I cannot stand when they lie around in an irregular, "chaotic" fashion.
...
March 13, 2012: Two More Sneak Previews into the HCI Encyclopedia
Last
Friday, Mads Soegaard from interaction-design.org notified me that there is another
sneak preview on the HCI
encyclopedia available for SAP Design Guild readers, namely Victor
Kaptelinin's chapter on Activity Theory. Shortly thereafter,
Mads announced another one, namely Albrecht Schmidt's chapter on Context-Aware
Computing, and we agreed to feature the two previews in one combined
UI Design Blink that would be published at the beginning of the following
week. This implied, however, that I had to write the article on the weekend
and that I had to tell my wife and my friends I would be busy that
weekend writing it. And
then I started trembling: If they would ask me what the article and the HCI
encyclopedia chapters are about, how would I explain it to them? My
solution was to write this article as an attempt to answer their potential
questions. ...
March 1, 2012: More Experiments with Skyline Graphs
My
previous UI Design Blink about skyline graphs inspired a response and
also a question from a reader. He sent me a 3D column chart and asked
me my opinion about it. Because the graph contained the values for the
columns, I was able to recreate the graph in Excel so that we
are not confined to the original chart and its specific characteristics
for the discussion here. ...
February 21, 2012: Skyline Graphs – New Insights on the Horizon...
Sorry
for the obvious title of this UI Design Blink, which was inspired by
a paper presentation that I missed, entitled "Telling the Data Comparison
Story Using A Skyline Graph (Instead of Two Pies)". Bill Caemmerer gave
the presentation at the Interaction 2012 conference in Dublin in early
February this year and introduced it with: "Just like every picture,
every graph tells a story, or it should. Frequently the story we want
to tell is a comparison to the past or to our plans, a 'what happened'
story." ...
February 15, 2012: Sneak Preview Number Five into interaction-design.org
It's only February, yet Mads Soegaard, editor of the HCI encyclopedia, has already announced the second sneak preview into interaction-design.org for this year (and the fifth altogether). Mads writes: "We've hit a major milestone with our free educational materials: Our newest chapter is written by NY Times bestseller and Harvard professor Clayton Christensen." While he forgot to mention that the new chapter is entitled "Disruptive Innovation", he did not forget to send us the link to the sneak preview. ...
January 11, 2012: Sneak Preview Number Four into interaction-design.org
It
looks as if the new year 2012 will start the same way as 2011 ended – with
new additions to the HCI
encyclopedia at interaction-design.org. Having returned from the holiday
season, I found already a fresh e-mail in my inbox, in which Mads Soegaard,
editor of the HCI encyclopedia, announced that they are preparing the
publication of a new chapter, entitled "Affective Computing".
And once again, they offer SAP Design Guild readers a sneak preview into
the new chapter, which took Kristina Höök from Stockholm University,
Sweden, 18 months to write. ...
