Sacrificial RabbitCode. Art. Perversion. Madness.

Tags related to tag interface

Monday, June 12. 2006

Calgary Transit and Interface Design

I recently got a shock the other day. Calgary Transit has decided to update their website, and giv eit something of a face lift. Specifically, the "Schedules" section is being completely changed.

This. Sucks.

Old Interface - even this small you can see what is happening. (click to enlarge)

Currently, if you want to find out when your next bus comes, you enter in your stop number, route number, and click submit, and you're taken to a page with a list of the next 5 stop times. The stop times are easy to read, and the font size is just the perfect size. It also displays an arrow with how long before the next bus comes. Furthermore, if your next bus comes within 20 minutes there is an icon of a guy walking to the bus. If it comes in 10 minutes, then the iconthere is a running guy. With one quick glance, you can see when your next bus comes. The interface is easy to see, easy to use and easy to consume—especially if you are in a hurry.

New interface - badness, (click to enlarge)

Come July 3rd, this will be replaced with an "improved" interface. This interface is so bad that I will be finding out my next bus via telephone from that point forward. What makes it so bad? First of all, the typeface is too hard to read. The type-size is too small, and the color is a tad obnoxious. Second of all, there is no friendly icons to show you, at a glance, where you are in time, in relation to missing your bus. And the final thing, and quite possibly the worst, it tells you what time the bus comes, but according to who? The bus comes at 8:35AM. Is that 8:35 on the CT server? The time set on CT's CEO's watch? An atomic clock? My computers time? Very annoying.

This is a good example of what to do, and what not to do. Sadly, it seems CT is moving backwards.

Update: I could hardly trash-talk the CT website and not actually send them an email stating how I felt (Thanks to my baby who also made a suggestion). If I want the new CT website to be usable, I needed to take responsibility for it, so I did in fact send them an email right after posting this entry. They sent back an email saying that they forwarded my email to the supervisor. With any luck, this story will have a happy ending—I'll keep ya posted.
Posted by jonnay in Art at 11:41 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)
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Thursday, May 25. 2006

Physical Interfaces

Even if you aren't really into comptuers and assorted geekery, you must check this out: Smacbook Pro. This is by far one of the coolest, most intuitive human - computer interfaces I have seen in a long time.

I want one that when I smash the desk in fustration, my computer blinks a kawaii sad face and says "I'm sorry" and a cute little tune plays, with bouncing rabbits and flowers. Some kind of digital valium for when Internet Explorer is giving me (and every other web developer in the world) the bum-shaft.

Posted by jonnay in Code at 08:30 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, October 17. 2005

Weblog Usability and Sacrifical Rabbit

10 Sins of Blog Usability

  1. No Author Biographies
  2. No Author Photo
  3. Nondescript Posting Titles
  4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
  5. Classic Hits are Buried
  6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
  7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
  8. Mixing Topics
  9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
  10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
    11. Jakob Nielson is the guru of website usability. Being a guru he has his fair share of devout disciples and detractors. That being said, his ideas are good and are at least worth listening to, if not putting in to practise. In fact, sometimes his rules are worth breaking, and the test of a good rule is whether or not its worth it to break once in awhile.

    He has trained his attention to the world of blogs recently. This is a quick 10 point list of blog do's and don'ts. Very useful. Here are his 10 points and how I stack up:

    1. No Author Biographies

    Check. I have something of a "What is sacrificial rabbit" section buried in my navigation that one day soon I am going to do something about (honest). But I don't have a personal biography. Need to fix that.

    2. No Author Photo

    Check. No excuse either with an awesome photographer for a wife.

    3. Nondescript Posting Titles

    This is something in common with a lot of blogs. A catchy, but nondescript headline, and I am way guilty. I am already trying to fix that however. At the same time, blogs—especially the personal kind—are a perfect format for weird and catchy headlines. I probably won't follow this rule religiously.

    4. Links Don't Say Where They Go

    This is bad. Again, this is the way things are done in the blogsphere. I am going to stop doing this. It is dumb, bad, and clunky.

    5. Classic Hits are Buried

    I don't really do this one. All of my entries are tagged, and tagged pretty well, so it makes it easy to find posts about bdsm, scheme or my meta mumblings. I need to work on the tag interface to make it even easier still however.

    6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation

    Does no calendar count? For diary/journal like blogs, the calendar navigation system works and makes sense. But for a topical blog like mine, it is basically pointless.

    7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

    Guilty. My frequency has gotten better though. I am going to try to pre-load articles though, so I have at least a post every day.

    8. Mixing Topics

    Jakobs thought is that a blog should be a single topic and a single topic only. I don't buy that. Not in the least. I would own at least 8 or 9 blogs at that point. Posting daily to 9 blogs gives me the willies (posting daily to a perversion blog would give me a different kind of willy). I am not really sure how to approach this. I guess dialog is the key. So for you code fanatics, do you enjoy the smattering of music and perversion posts? Likewise for you perverts. Do my ramblings on electronics and programming languages bore you, or are they at least entertaining. Would it make sense to split up Sacrificial Rabbit? My belief is a resounding "NO". But what do you think? Leave a comment or two.

    9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss

    So guilty I need a spanking. It is not so much that I forgot, but rather that I didn't care, and the action is no-longer reverseable. Really, its not that I spend a lot of time talking shit about people on my blog. I may write about what people say, but I don't spend time on who people are. The biggest issue might be everything under the "perversion" tag.

    10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

    Nope. I have the eminently cool blog subdomain, that is sure to become passe at any moment. I'll still own it then too.
Posted by jonnay in Meta at 11:52 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
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Thursday, July 8. 2004

Signature Survey... Seeing the Forest of your source-trees

Browsing Wiki led me to Signature Survey, a paper by Ward Cunningham. This is absolutely awesome. Amazing. I wish I had seen this before attacking the insane codebase at work. Ahh well. C'est La Vie.
Typically a browsing mechanism for large, structured programs will expose a small part of the program in response to some form of query, possibly as simple as picking from a list. However, when examining an unfamiliar program one needs to get a feel for the whole program at once. To meet this need one is better off writing a custom tool for viewing the whole program.

Listening to:
public eyes - gregory isaacs (2:58)
Back To Mine - Underworld

Posted by jonnay in Code at 00:28 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)
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Thursday, March 25. 2004

Interaction, Interfaces and Sound

I like to browse through Wards Wiki. You'll never know what you find over there. Today, I found BeekSpeek which is all about the noise pollution that our computers constantly spit out.

It is particularly bad on the interweb, especially "designer" websites where every freaking high-class (re)design needs the IDM soundtrack they ripped from their most recent acquisition at the independant record store.

I have my own soundtrack thanks. Sometimes it's called silence.

AlistarCockburn had something particularly interesting to say...

At an HumanComputerInteraction conference some years ago, someone mentioned adding sound; person from the audience said, "I don't like all those extra noises coming from my neighbors machine"; then someone piped in with... "You want something really subtle. You don't pay attention to the sounds of people walking down the corridor, until you hear the unmistakable shuffle of your boss. You notice it right away, and nobody else does. That's the kind of sound effects you want." Which reminds me of a generalization that I noticed a few years ago - computer programmers operate in saturated colors and sounds. The world operates in pastels and very unsaturated colors and sounds. Watching an artist arrange colors on the screen was instructive - the artist chose proximate, faded colors, where most computer people choose varied, saturated colors. The same thing is operating here with sounds.

Which Brings up The Microsoft Sound Brian Eno Created.

I have tried to build/architect sounds for the user interface, and I found all of them basically un-useable after a few days. (It really was a case of eating my own dog food). It is difficult work. You want sounds to cut across any other aural distraction, but at the same time, not be distracting in of themselves.

The best success I ever had was at one of my old jobs where I was doing some web-based Java development. The IDE I was working with let you attach sounds to build events .. (build passed, build failed, etc.). To which I applied cut-up pitched/sped up (160 BPM) versions of the Think (about it) break. It worked well enough.

Maybe I should get back into that aspect of composition. Lately my time has been fractured, so It's hard to set aside a block of 6 hours to compose a track. but 2 or 3 to work on a sound? Could prove fruitful.

Posted by jonnay in Music at 09:17 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)
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