I was involved as web consultant and designer for the rebranding of The British HCI Group to “Interaction”. This involved the complete transfer of all content from their old website into the Drupal CMS and redesign based on their new image. This site was optimised for AA accessibility, a simple user experience and of course, SEO. In fact, I’m proud to announce that searching for HCI on Google actually results in my site being second place, after Wikipedia!
Nice excerpt from “Humane Interface, The: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems” by Jef Raskin, found from looking at a new Mozilla UX designer’s concept of mobile zoom web browsing + gestures.
If you wanted to design a navigation scheme intended to confuse, you might begin by making the interface mazelike. The maze would put you in a little room with a number of doors leading this way and that. The doors’ labels are usually short, cryptic, or iconic, and they may change or disappear,[1] depending on where you’ve been. You cannot see what is on the other side of a door except by going through it, and when you have gone through, you may or may not be able to see the room you’ve just left. There may not be a way to get directly back at all. Some rooms may contain maps to part or all of the system of rooms, but you have to keep track of the relationship between the map representation and the rooms you are presented with; furthermore, maps are not well suited to situations best represented by three-dimensional networks. The rooms in this description correspond to computer interface windows and web sites, and the doors are the tabs, menus, or links that are provided to bring you to other windows or sites.
As legends and stories from ancient times inform us, humans always have been notoriously bad at mazes. If we could handle them easily, they wouldn’t be used as puzzles and traps. When using a complex program, I often find, deep in a submenu, a command or a check box that solves a problem I am having. When I run into the same problem a few weeks later, I cannot remember how I got to the box with the solution. We are not good at remembering long sequences of turnings, which is why mazes make good puzzles and why our present navigational schemes, used both within computers and on the web, often flummox the user. Many complaints about present systems are complaints about trying to navigate. Partial solutions, such as “favorite locations” in browsers, have been created [2]. But what we are truly better at is remembering landmarks and positional cues, traits that evolution has bred into us and traits we can take advantage of in interface design.
This works until you have so many that you cannot remember what they all are; then you need a “favorites of favorites” or another scheme to keep track of them.
Why I blogged this: everyone remembers how to find things in different ways. Some people think their ‘mess’ is actually organised. Others organise by colours. Some of these issues span into my research interest of how spatial representations can increase/decrease the way we perceive the activities of others. For example, if a buddy’s location is indicated on a topographic, spatial map, would this make you feel a different connection to if they were represented in a hierarchical list?
My poster for Mobile HCI 2008. The main aim of this poster is to illustrate my findings regarding location disclosure privacy in mobile awareness systems. Location deception is a real practice, so I argue here that any UI supporting location disclosure to real people should support the ability to manipulate exactly what others see. Mobile tactile interfaces support gestures that would be a natural way to move location indicators around in the UI. The poster illustrates examples that show the user’s current location as a draggable point surrounded by an also draggable circle. The more points on the map that this circle envelopes, the more ambiguous the representation of location seen on other users’ screens.
This is an interaction model that I believe will pave the way to more usable automatic, mobile location disclosure interfaces adobe cc 2015 master collection mac pharmacymg.com. If access were controlled by allowed-lists, the interactions required to select who can see what, and when, is multi-faceted, which causes a whole load of problems, including users perceiving the system to be more complex, therefore abandoning use altogether.
Under this model, when users want to blur their exact location, they simply create a larger bounding box around their current location. Who cares if people know you’re ‘somewhere’ in the city? During times when you feel more social, you simply reduce the size of the box. If your buddies know you well enough, they should be able to infer where you’re likely to be even if they don’t know your exact location. Then, the good ol’ phone call comes in and the system becomes a context-setter and conversation starter…