1. Two Twitter case studies (that have nothing to do with Iran)

If I only had a nickel for every time someone asked me what a person can do with Twitter…

Well, here are two good examples:

Tim O'Reilly spoke recently about how he uses Twitter as a publisher to build a community. Not to amplify his own status, but to support things and people that he wants to see more of in the world. "Create more value than you capture", he says. It's the same philosophy that made his media company successful and it continues to work for him on Twitter.

Not to be outdone, Amanda Palmer of the Dresdon Dolls used Twitter to make $19,000 in 10 hours using auctions and by organizing impromptu donation-funded gigs.

2. Design Tips for Crowdsourcing Applications

There's a nice piece from Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab about how the UK's Guardian newspaper used crowdsourcing to quickly catch up to a rival newspaper's scoop, creating a website where readers helped filter through thousands of pages of government expense reports in a matter of hours.

A few quick UI tips I gathered from the article:

1. Keep the choices limited. The Guardian didn't ask people to write a report or notes for the pages, just click one of four buttons to rate it. This made it accessible to more people and helped them move through many pages quickly.
2. Make it a video game. Graphing progress and posting it on leaderboards helped motivate readers with a sense of accomplishment and competition. (similar to my.barackobama.com)
3. Pretty bird. Analytics showed people looked through more pages when they were accompanied by a picture of the person in the report. In their words, it turned a boring .pdf into a detective story.

3. FTC to Patrol Blog Swag

Aside from the occasional lawsuit, product reviews on blogs are unregulated. The Federal Trade Commission plans to change that soon.

It seems many companies gift bloggers with money or free product for a review and many writers do not disclose this in their articles. Although the companies don't tell the bloggers what to write, it's certainly a conflict of interest. So marketers and bloggers beware: if you don't follow ethical practices, the FTC may come knocking.

4. How do you design a package for a product that (technically) doesn't exist?

The Book Design Review asks an interesting question: who makes those fake book covers for books that aren't released yet?

Danger Mouse had a similar problem with his new album Dark Night of the Soul, when his record label refused to release it due to contract disputes. Unable to legally sell his music, instead he sold an "album" containing a custom-printed blank CD-R , encouraging his fans to download a leaked copy and burn it themselves.

It's an interesting design type to consider in this age of digital downloads. Without a physical package, what does the "cover" or "box" look like for a bunch of bits? Maybe that's an emerging design specialization....

If you haven't read Jared Spool's superb analysis of how Amazon made $2,700,000,000 in new revenue just by asking, "Was this review helpful to you?" you really should. In fact, if you are in any way part of the business of user interface design, his blog, Brainsparks, is quite regularly an amazing resource.

I myself am in the user interface business from time to time, and regularly enjoy his posts, although I rarely find occasion to blog about them. I tend concern myself in my writing with a slightly different aspect of user experience.

When I read the post in question, I wondered -- as I sometimes do -- whether or not I could add anything to it on BlogLESS. As often enough happens, I decided that my commentary would be superfluous. But then I started thinking about a little throw-away parenthetical in Spool's article, and had a (*erm*) brain spark. Here's what Jared says about the problems of chronologically ordering reviews at Amazon:

For small numbers, chronology works just fine. However, it quickly becomes unmanageable. (For example, anyone who discovers an established blog may feel they've come in at the middle of a conversation, since only the most recent topics are presented first. It seems as if the writer assumed the readers had read everything from the beginning.)

Detail of Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)

I thought to myself: that's a really good point. I do think that bloggers need to come up with persistent ways to summarize the key arguments or threads made so far on their blogs. I imagine that this would really help anyone potentially interested in reading BlogLESS, and I know it would really help me as a potential reader of other blogs of substantive content.

Any thoughts on a sensible way to do this from any of our UI friends will be appreciated.

I ffffound this image somewhat instructive. The toolbar got bigger six times, and then all of a sudden got smaller.

Photoshop evolution

Pull up on the cap to reveal the speaker and increase the volume. Lower it to reduce volume and turn the radio off. Twist the cap to change the station.

Natural mapping elevated to fine design. Bravo.

Via

At this year's disappointing E3 convention, just about the only buzz from the Nintendo keynote was the announcement of the Wii MotionPlus. It's a gyroscope module that plugs into the base of the Wiimote which is supposed to give it 1:1 responsiveness. In other words, the players' motions in 3D space are duplicated in realtime on the screen.

But wait-- doesn't it do this already?

Not exactly. Most people don't realize that the current Wiimote, which uses a combination of an infrared camera and a three-axis accelerometer, is actually not that accurate at translating players' motions. Instead, the Wii relies heavily on software to interpret the data and implement the player's intentions. As anyone who owns a Wii can attest, it's not always very good at this.

Current Wii games, like Red Steel, here, rely on pointing and relatively simple motions. This offers a fair illusion of responsiveness, but is far from the 1:1 accuracy that the MotionPlus promises.

So now, nearly two years into the Wii's product cycle, Nintendo is up to it's old tricks-- with a new twist, perhaps. Sell the Wii as the cheapest next gen platform, then make people buy extra peripherals to get a fully-functional system.

It's an interesting strategy, really. Pirates may be able to make copies of the new Wii Sports, but what about the hardware it requires?

In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.

– Maggie Wittlin, Seed Magazine

An attractive 'average' face generated by the Face Research Lab

Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.

On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).

We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.

On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.

Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".

A simple Gestalt 'Figure-Ground' puzzle

So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).

The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.

The HCI Bibliography site has posted - on a shareware license - a full copy of Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction by Clayton Lewis and John Rieman.

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