Carl Muckenhoupt in a comment on See Different, a MetaFilter thread about alternative maps.
(via blech)
Is this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/friends/
(I am a designer at Flickr. This post is largely taken from a proposed redesign I sent out last year.)
Virtually every time someone asks if I’ve seen a new photo on Flickr, I first cringe a bit, then reluctantly say no—it’s always no, because the page dedicated to showing new photos on Flickr, Contacts > Uploads, makes it impossible to easily browse those new photos.
There are a lot of problems with this page. For brevity’s sake, I’ll mention the big ones.
And remember, these are just the biggest problems. The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.
The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back.
The ideal redesign would, at a minimum:
For the TL;DRers, every suggested improvement supports these two goals: clear context, and easy navigation. Users want to know what* they’re looking at, and then easily go wherever they want to go next.*
Flickr can have a serious competitive advantage if they make photo uploads easy to see and navigate: everybody likes photos, and likes seeing themselves in photos, and it’s even nicer to see photos all arranged on a page without visual cruft like status interruptions and article links. It’s also crucial to have different ways of viewing the photos: chronological is important, but so are groupings by date and contact type.
In other words, Flickr still has the ability to kick ass in this arena. They just have to build it.
*By which I mean what, who, where, when, and who else, usually in that order.
*Usually scrolling down to look at more photos, to be honest.
—Timoni
This is good to keep in mind the next time you read an article berating you for not continually taking pleasure in the “magic” of some device or another. Your brain simply isn’t equipped to be continually delighted by one thing over and over again.Aesthetic appreciation is the most interesting form of enjoyment. Science fiction writers call it “sensawunda.” It’s awe, it’s mystery, it’s harmony. I call it delight. Aesthetic appreciation, like fun, is about patterns. The difference is that aesthetics is about recognizing patterns, not learning new ones.
Delight strikes when we recognize patterns but are surprised by them. It’s the moment at the end of Planet of the Apes when we see the Statue of Liberty. It’s the thrill at the end of the mystery novel when everything falls into place. It’s looking at the Mona Lisa and seeing that smile hovering at the edge of known expressions and matching it to our hypothesis of what she’s thinking. It’s seeing a beautiful landscape and thinking all is right in the world.
Why does a beautiful landscape make us feel that way? Because it meets our expectations, and exceeds them. We find things beautiful when they are very close to our idealized image of what they should be but with an additional surprising wrinkle. A perfectly closed off plot, with just a couple of loose threads. A picture of a farmhouse, but the paint is peeling. Music that comes back to the tonic note and then drops a whole step further to end on an unresolved minor seventh. It sends us chasing off after new patterns.
Beauty is found in the tension between our expectation and the reality. It is only found in settings of extreme order. Nature is full of extremely ordered things. The flowerbed bursting its boundaries is expressing the order of growth, the order of how living things stretch beyond their boundaries, even as it is in tension with the order of the well-manicured walkway.
Delight, unfortunately, doesn’t last. It’s like the smile from a beautiful stranger in a stairwell - it’s fleeting. It cannot be otherwise - recognition is not an extended process.
You can regain delight by staying away from the object that caused it previously, then returning. You’ll get that recognition again. But it’s not quite what I would call fun. It’s something else - our brains rewarding us for having learned well. It is the epilogue to the story. The story itself is the fun of learning.
A person may delight you, for example, all of your life, but they will delight you with new and interesting things, or by doing one thing rarely.
—Timoni
Microsoft’s Courier Tablet | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.
If you haven’t watched this video yet, I definitely recommend it. I find it reassuring—it indicates that even if the technology isn’t currently available, we all apparently want the same kind of portable, book-like personal computer.
One thing that’s strikingly missing from this demo, though, is examples of sharing info. I rarely want to save an image just for my own personal reference; I’ll put it on delicious or Tumblr or ffffound or Twitter, tagged, with context, but available for anybody to see.
Awesome feature, well designed.
@Facebook Launching Status Tagging for Friends, Pages, Events, and Groups Today — brit
That is an AWESOME feature.
We may then be tempted to describe interactions using what can be seen on the screen: posts, messages, ratings, votes, and so on. But that would be to miss out completely on the relationships, the intentions, motives, communication, symbolic interactions, and other aspects of social interaction which transcend empirical evidence. Not to mention time, which is such a critical dimension to social interactions. For all social interactions involve references to past activity and create opportunities for future activity. Relationships are nothing if not the orientation we take to others over time, moreso perhaps when we are absent from each other than when we are present.
Social Interaction Design: Beyond Use, from Gravity7
As a user experience designer, I thought my job was to make things not suck. Until recently. As technology has evolved, human behavior has evolved along with it. Since behavior is the basis of user experience design, my job has evolved as well. Now, my job is to make things people love. At the 2009 IA Summit, Karl Fast articulated the value proposition of user experience design with sparkling clarity. “Engineers make things,” he said, “we make people love them.” And then he held up an iPhone as an example.
This is a crucial change, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience Design, from Johnny Holland - It’s all about interaction
This is directly related to something I’ve been pondering a lot lately: namely, how to easily differentiate—and explain the difference to uneducated aduiences—between unexpected delightful interactions and unexpected bad interactions.
Obviously the key difference is supporting what the user intends to do versus what you want the user to do. And even if you choose the former path, there’s a problem associated with assuming too much about what the user wants to do.
Example: having a car automatically unlock when the owner’s within a certain range is a nice anticipatory feature, but having the car start up as soon as the owner gets inside is assuming too much about what the user intends to do. Result: The owner is startled and confused. Eventually, the owner will be used to the car automatically starting, but will be continually irritated, not pleased, every time they go to the car just to get something out of the glove compartment.
Mencius Moldbug on Unqualified Reservations: Wolfram Alpha and hubristic user interfaces
The problem with the design of AA.com, however, lies less in our competency (or lack thereof, as you pointed out in your post) and more with the culture and processes employed here at American Airlines.
…
But—and I guess here’s the thing I most wanted to get across—simply doing a home page redesign is a piece of cake. You want a redesign? I’ve got six of them in my archives. It only takes a few hours to put together a really good-looking one, as you demonstrated in your post. But doing the design isn’t the hard part, and I think that’s what a lot of outsiders don’t really get, probably because many of them actually do belong to small, just-get-it-done organizations. But those of us who work in enterprise-level situations realize the momentum even a simple redesign must overcome, and not many, I’ll bet, are jumping on this same bandwagon. They know what it’s like.
[ Mr X, Lead IA Guy at American Airlines, from Dear Dustin Curtis ]
It strikes me that websites may be a good visual indicator of the internal workings and philsophy of a company. It certainly shows more about a company’s processes and values than, say, their letterhead or offices.
Also, Mr. X makes an excellent point about redesigns on large sites. They are a _huge_ pain.
Nice tutorial on how to create the sense of motion on page resizes. I’d really like to use this sometime.
At these numbers, Tumblr needs to start rethinking how they show favorites and reblogs.
Must peruse. (Lots of related-to-social dataviz.)
