iPhone OS Service Menu
Chris Clarks excellent idea delivers functionality, which remains discoverable, fits into the existing workflow and solves one of the remaining problems of copy’n’past in the iPhone OS. What’s not to like about it?
Sexy Skills of Data Geeks
In his excellent article on the rise of the Data Scientist, Nathan of Flowing Data writes:
Even if you’re not into visualization, you’re going to need at least a subset of the skills […] if you want to seriously mess with data. Statisticians should know APIs, databases, and how to scrape data; designers should learn to do things programmatically; and computer scientists should know how to analyze and find meaning in data.
There are many more nuggest of insight in his post, and I fully agree with him, that - what he terms - Data Scientists will become increasingly important.
I have lately been talking a lot about “IA for the Layman”, my idea that certain skills will have to become common teaching, so people will be able to cope with the increasing tides of data in their personal life.
But IA may be the wrong term, or rather an oversimplification in this context. As Nathan mentions, Ben Fry covers quite well what skills are actually involved and how they form different aspects. So maybe I shouldn’t call it “IA for the Layman”, but rather “Be Your Personal Data Scientist”.
Source: flowingdata.com
Rethinking the Inspector
Very creative rethinking of the traditional palette by Plasq co-founder Keith Lang. Probably not something I can imagine for the Creative Suite, but It sure would be handy for iWorks. Especially since it would create a bridge toward quasimodes in the touch interface version of iWorks (for more on this, see Gestures)
Source: uiandus.com
Gestures
Again, a thorough article by Lukas Mathis, this time on complex gestures in touch interfaces.
He points out that once a gesture becomes so complex that it doesn’t resemble any real world action associated with the task anymore, it’s not much better then a CLI.
In the next months and years, defining how complex touch interactions are done will be a major war zone for the Human-Computer-Interface field.
Maybe that’s something Apple sees too and tries to define from the very beginning. Since this is very much about UX, I’m glad Apple is leading the charge here. Still, it will be interesting to see how this unfolds, as we are once again on unknown terrain, not paving cow paths anymore.
Source: ignorethecode.net
Graphic designers have the intention to grab an emotional response visually. While Interface designers have the intention to grab a logical response mentally.
Michael Dick, creative interface designer.
As I mentioned in my posts “On the Quality of Business Ideas”, it needs both emotions and logic, and both on an above average level, to create something of quality.
Source: m1k3.net
Google Prediction API
A developers magic 8-Ball. May still produce interesting results.
Although it makes me wary to trust yet another set of data to the great google machina, it is an interesting opportunity to use all the experience and know how google gained in evaluating data.
Possibilities afforded by such technical opportunities may actually one day become more then just hapless sprawls into the direction of the semantic web.
Source: code.google.com
The Psychologist’s View of UX Design
Good stuff.
Source: uxmag.com
First Person User Interfaces
Combines most of my late posts about future ux into a handy presentation. So, either this stuff is glaringly obvious, or I think like a Yahoo bigwig… :)
Source: lukew.com
Jesse Schell (@jesseschell, former Disney Imagineer, game developer and professor at Carnegie Mellon university talks about “Design Outside the Box”.
Although this talk is already six months old (which, by internet-time, means 2 years) we only now begin to see a more widespread pondering of concepts like FPIs, game mechanic oriented social networks (like foursquare and gowalla) and augmented reality applications trying to connect the real world and the virtual world in interesting ways.
I think his depiction of the future may be a bit black and white, but it’s visionary and in many ways spot on.
Source: g4tv.com
Especially the part about Cognizance is a nice visualization of how raw data turns into wisdom, aka From Noise To Pattern.
Source: Flickr / parthclicks
