Perry

Hewitt

Author: Perry Hewitt

  • Farewell, “click here” – the disappearance of chrome

    Chrome is an umbrella term for the navigational elements throughout user interface design. NN Group offers a useful description of chrome at all layers of human-computer interaction, from operating system to website to mobile app. Fun fact: Google’s browser derives its name Chrome in part from this term since it attempts to minimize visible UI chrome — most notably by merging the address and search bars.

    Visible chrome is disappearing fast from many interfaces for desktop and mobile. Why?

    First, because our interface interactions are increasingly designed by and for digital natives. People who have grown up with “traditional” mouse/click, and then moved to touchscreen, and then moved to gestural interfaces powered by Kinect or Leap Motion aren’t going to need or want a lot of superfluous instruction.

    Next the the capabilities of technology fuel the disappearance of chrome. Think about the vanished “save” button in applications like Google Docs or Evernote. All your stuff is in the cloud, and it’s autosaving. There’s a task we don’t have to remind you to do, and a button removed.

    Finally, the rise of mobile has made us more conscious of real estate value. I can remember the collective sigh of relief when web designers in the late 1990s or early 2000s were liberated from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 — look at all those pixels we could commandeer! Now we’re increasingly cognizant of and designing for the reality that most experiences will be mobile first. Mobile for content consumption and commerce transaction are a new norm, and mobile design now affects what your “desktop web” looks like.

    A couple of website examples of the fading away of chrome:

    Back in 2005, Apple had to tell us what to do when we got to the home page:

    2005 apple home

    By 2013, Apple can offer a single clean horizontal navigation bar, and a large, visual carousel without any obvious forward or back arrows:

    2013 apple home

    Or take a site designed to appeal to a wider range of audiences: New York Public Library. In 2005, there was a lot of upfront and explicit instruction about what users can do on the page:

    2005 New York Public Library

    By 2013, there’s an assumption that users know how to directly manipulate the content to get the information or experience they want. There’s a single nav bar at top, but otherwise the first view surfaces the content and prompts interaction.

    2013 New York Public Library

    User interface design remains a balancing acts of many variables — navigability, clarity, form factor, appeal, and a content strategy you can support. Scaling back the chrome in these interfaces lets us reclaim valuable real estate, but it’s important to make sure usability doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

  • Friday 5 – 06.21.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Facebook, as widely predicted, rolled out a comprehensive Instagram video offering. Instagram opted for a 15-second format — practically longform compared to the mere 6-second Vine. Will 13 filters, editing capability, and a stabilization feature topple Vine?
    2. Twitter purchased Boston-area Spindle. The mobile-only discovery app had a talented former Microsoft team behind it, and will add an important location data layer for Twitter.
    3. Highland Capital Partners announced a $25 million fund to jumpstart Leap Motion development for “solving human scale problems” in sectors including education, healthcare IT, big data, and productivity. There’s a post-mouse world coming, and 3D mobile tech will need developers to beef up the application ecosystem.
    4. WhatsApp now has more than 250 million active monthly users. Messaging is a crowded space, but it’s already bigger than Twitter and has the telcos concerned.
    5. Fascinating read for marketers and scholars alike: English is not the dominant language of the web. Ethan Zuckerman explains how this understanding changed Global Voices editorial approach.

  • Try it: Make the movie of your personal data

    We’re all posting, tweeting, and sharing more than ever. How might all this micro-content we publish on the social web be boiled up into a story? I came across two interesting services that make a movie from your shared content: Vizify for Twitter, and Foursquare time machine.

    First, Vizify for Twitter lets you create what they’re calling an animated portrait of your Twitter activity — kind of a greatest hits reel for your account. Here’s mine and here’s where to make your own. You authenticate through Twitter, then Vizify finds the  tweets that have resonated the most, and creates an animation with audio. There’s a degree of customization — within the categories of photo, text, and video you can switch up the selection or delete an item. There are different soundtracks you can choose from based on a semi-cryptic set of icons.

    foursquare visualizedNext, Foursquare time machine (co-branded with Samsung Galaxy 4) offers a slick fast-motion visualization of all your checkins. Rather than a highlights reel approach, this app tells you the full story. I had some trouble getting the stats to render, which might be a good thing as the restaurant:gym ratio over the past four years seemed problematic. Some of the motion is fun — your travel across geographic distances is rendered via plane or occasionally flying saucer. This application is positioned as a set up for The Next Big Thing, which is improved predictions of where you would like to go next. Foursquare has amassed a significant urban data layer without a clear revenue growth model — useful predictions might be one path to monetize that data.

    There are many important concerns about, as The New Yorker puts it, the way we are all pole dancing on the internet. And as the Guardian pointed out last week, even just your online metadata tell a revealing story. Nonetheless it’s fascinating to see the kinds of movie-scrapbooks we can create today with the content we’ve explicitly produced and have opted in to share.

  • Friday 5 – 06.14.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Twitter quietly opened its analytics platform for general use. Now even small publishers can view and track follows, unfollows, and clicks to gauge performance of an account, and even download a CSV.
    2. Facebook embraced the hashtag. This development has been greeted by many as the ultimate victory of advertisers over users. I agree with this Atlantic piece —  the pound sign doesn’t signal the apocalypse as much as a desire to engage users more through search and organized conversations and, yes, help those advertisers.
    3. It can be tempting to rush to new technologies to pursue the grail rather than optimize what you have. This book excerpt details how the Obama campaign enjoyed success by optimizing a technology people love to declare dead — and by overcoming a dread of being annoying.
    4. Kids like the handhelds and grownups like the tablets, according to Pew. Tablets  skew toward higher household incomes and educational attainment, but apparently there’s no significant difference in tablet ownership between men and women, or among different racial or ethnic groups.
    5. Did you think it was only your preteen obsessed with Snapchat? Apparently it’s the summer of Snapchat for Wall Street bankers as well. Looks like the startup may have a shot at being worth the 100M round it’s rumored to be raising on a half-billion or so valuation.

  • Try it: 3 ways to tell a story online

    Compelling content is a differentiator in a world where everyone is an online publisher. That content can take entirely new forms: data visualization (like this recurring developments site from Beutler Ink) or inspired curation (like Brainpickings by Maria Popova). And of course multimedia plays an ever larger role in online storytelling. Last year’s groundbreaking New York Times feature on the avalanche at Tunnel Creek has even turned snow fall into a verb.

    New apps and platforms are springing up to entice a wider range of people to try multimedia and interactive storytelling. Three to consider:

    1. Storyteller
    Last week Amazon released Storyteller, a quickly and easy way for writers to storyboard their scripts. The scripts have to be in Studios but the service, still in beta, is free (except for a 45-day option). This feels like a grown-up version of xtranormal, and a way for writers to more quickly envision the creative potential of a script. Best of all, you can use the tool to storyboard others’ scripts in a more public and collaborative environment.

    2. Tapestry
    When not ruining our lives with Dots, the people over at betaworks have been polishing version 2.0 of Tapestry. Tapestry is a mobile app aimed at beautiful, short-form storytelling. I gave it a try — the admin user experience is clean and simple on the admin side, and the consumer experience of tap to-advance on mobile is oddly addictive kind of like, well, Dots.

    puppy story

    3. Zeega
    Finally, more interesting developments in interactive storytelling over at Zeega. Originally a collaboration at Harvard, Zeega is now among the first cohort of media entrepreneurs over at Matter VC. The platform enables slick integration of audio and video, and has attracted a creative community masterful with found assets. There’s enough complexity to be able to create pieces for a recent exhibit at SFMOMA — but it’s also a way to have a lot of fun with your ABCs and the Jackson 5.

    The most encouraging thing about all these apps is the way they are lowering the technical bar for creative storytelling online. It recalls how blogging liberated text publishing from the webmasters and multimillion dollar content management systems in the early 2000s. These are three to watch — and to try.

     

  • Friday 5 – 06.07.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be uncluttered and functional. Here’s an interesting interview with the team.
    2. In case Mary Meeker hasn’t convinced you, mobile behaviors continue to indicate that there’s a lot more upside ready to be monetized. YouTube announced that its mobile ad revenue has tripled, and revealed that 40% of U.S. video views are on mobile.
    3. HBR offers an elegant envisioning of the state of email — which is not dead, but evolving. Each year workers spend the equivalent of 111 workdays dealing with the frustrations of email, and its clunky utility is not going away anytime soon.
    4. Similarly, calendar functionality feels like it could get a lot better. Sunrise launched back in early 2013 to reimagine calendar via lush design and smarter data sources —  here’s hoping its new 2.2M round will continue to advance the product.
    5. Personal security is a headache. The system of requiring human brains to come up and remember ever more human-unreadable passwords is unsustainable. Looking for a better way? David Pogue offers a comprehensive review of Dashlane as one solution.

  • The politics of spelling

    matzoh ball
    knaidels or kneydels or dumplings

    What you call things clearly matters: global warming or climate change? High fructose corn syrup or corn sugar? Terrorist or freedom fighter? The knaidel/kneydl debate after the Scripps spelling bee is a reminder of the origins and implications of agreed, canonical spelling. Dara Horn writes an illuminating NYT Op-Ed about spelling as a political statement in Jewish Identity, Spelled in Yiddish.

    Spelling in the early Soviet Union was even more perverse. There, government control over Yiddish schools and presses led to the invention and enforcement of a literally anti-Semitic Yiddish orthography by spelling the language’s many Semitic-origin words phonetically instead of in Hebrew. (Imagine spelling “naïve” as “nigh-eve” in order to look less French.) It was an attempt to erase Jewish culture’s biblical roots, letter by letter.

    History is commonly understood to be written by the victors, but it’s interesting to think about the cultural and historial roots underlying in the way we spell.

    Photo credit: infowidget

     

  • The perils of context collapse

    Social scientists call this “context collapse.” A joke that you make among friends would not be understood if you made the same joke among, well, everyone else. And even when you say things to a group of like-minded people — say, at an obscure conference where attendees might be tweeting or taking video — you can no longer assume that the thought will stay in that context.

    — Mike Rosenwald in an interesting Washington Post opinion piece, Will the Twitter Police make Twitter boring? This article garnered some backlash as well as thoughtful dissent from Alex Howard on the value of Twitter as social media watchdog.

    free speech area
    It can be easier to spot relevant context in the physical world

    It’s worth pausing on this idea of context collapse, especially as we interact online in more decontextualized, default-public settings. It’s not only the distant nature of all internet interaction, but the way social networks have over the past decade have created quasi-intimate settings (Look! Another baby picture!) while simultaneously removing physical context of your current social sphere (I’m wearing a suit, in an office.). Today, social networks are places where you can interact from the palm of your hand with your boss, your brother, and your barista — all at once, 24 hours a day. It’s a new normal for both communications and context.

    While Facebook  privacy settings and Google+ circles exist, the reality is that few use them to a significant level of granularity, and Twitter defaults to public. As content creators we’re charged with figuring out the new social norms that apply — and as consumers we’re learning to strike the balance between appropriate call-outs for bad behavior and online vigilantism.

    Photo credit: arbyreed

  • Digital afterlife data policy

    Beyond the variability among states and companies, it’s worth asking if access to data post-mortem should extend beyond family members and enter some kind of publicly accessible data repository, which data scientists and presumably anyone else could explore. In presenting this concept, Brubaker used the word “donate,” not unlike a person permitting organ donations after death.

    – Jordan Novet, Dealing with data after death ain’t easy. Here’s why.

  • Friday 5 – 05.31.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. If you click one link this week, let it be the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slides. It’s a terrific state of the internet summary, with insights into mobile upside (still!), wearables, and the hockeystick rise of digital, tagged content like photos, video, sound, and data.
    2. Security’s not sexy, but it’s essential as we store more and more info online. Kudos to Evernote for their recent adds of two-step verification, authorized apps, and access history.
    3. Speaking of verification, Facebook finally offers verified pages for brands so users know the pages are legitimate. It’s a gradual rollout — more info here.
    4. If you manage a content management system as an admin, work as a content strategist, or just post information to the internet, check out Karen McGrane’s terrific DrupalCon keynote. It’s a great balance of evangelism and understanding the messy content world we live in.
    5. Do women and men use social media differently? RWW reports on some Microsoft-sponsored research with some interesting observations about gender. Women report more social media use for collaboration on work products, and men report more use for professional networking.