The New York Times began a beautiful series in January 2009 called One in 8 million. It uses photo and audio to convey an emotional narrative about the life, hopes, fears and desires of some of the people who inhabit New York City. It’s elegant, it’s touching, it’s incredibly well done.
During the last months we have been working with Verkami to articulate and conceptualize what they wanted to become one of the best crowdfunding platforms out there. We designed it and are happy to announce it is now open to receive projects from all over the world.
The great thing about sites like Verkami is that while connecting creators and audiences, they take down the middleman, empower artists and turn into wonderful spaces where to spot truly smart and creative initiatives.
Some of the design elements we like the most
A detail from the creator’s admin page (project is still up and running):
and when the project has finally reached it’s original funding goal:
For those interested in the development, Linking Paths added the programming muscle.
Take a sec, check it out. No excuses to bum around: start a project or become a patron and make great projects come true!
I was watching a conference by Amanda Cox, graphic editor at the NYT, when it suddenly made me think of interaction design (at least when it comes to newspapers) in completely different terms.
Making something, data in this case, more or less interactive is another way for a newspaper of making a point, taking a stance. Interactivity is suddenly seen as an editorial tool (selecting which data to show, how to show it, what amount of detail it should go into). Interaction design has suddenly immense journalistic value: it all comes down to “how can newspapers (their curatorial expertise) help you, reader/citizen, understand this”. In that sense, it’s just as valuable as say, an Op-Ed piece. The purpose, of course, is entirely different.
What do I mean by this: good interaction design (and good narrative story telling at that) turns raw data into enlightening one and so, for a newspaper to put a big effort into making that information not only available but interactive, speaks volumes of the editorial value behind it. It’s not surprising that the NYT has a team of 25 people working on a deadline to accompany important stories.
Would I be stretching it if I said that somehow, interactivity (in data visualization) resembles accountability?
Pretty interesting if you are (or consider being) a Spain-based good interaction designer looking for a new challenge:
We are looking for an outstanding UI-UX Designer to help us transform an industry, shaping and driving the overall user experience and visual appearance of our online products & services.
We are an amazing small group of talented people (having fun everyday) in an award winning online start-up out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a fast-paced, creative, high energy, informal atmosphere. We are backed by international investors (a $1,000M Venture Capital fund who is also behind twitter), featured in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and have offices in Boston, USA and Valencia, Spain.
Our good friends at Vizzuality just released Old Weather, a beautiful and useful project in which some of your spare time can make a difference:
Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
Here’s the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have them do things like reduce the available memory for the software to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at software when things failed in the field.
In addition, I read their “competitive analysis” of the iPhone. It was a short powerpoint deck that proceeded to lay out all of the reasons why Nokia did not have to change what they were doing at all. They even included “developer annoyance at the App Store submission process” as a reason why the iPhone would ultimately fail (this was around the time that the 3GS was released, so they had no excuse).
Bottom Line: Nokia is a hardware company that hates software.
Aza Raskin just posted the latest proof of concept on search for Mozilla Firefox: Panorama Search. Check the video:
It looks like instead of focusing on touch manipulation or voice interaction they are clearly into productivity derived from keyboard interaction. You know, those thenths of a second you grasp when avoiding moving your hands from the keyboard to the mouse and back to the keyboard.
It kind of reminds me of Ubiquity (remember?), which was released two years ago.
What do you think? Are you convinced by this keyboard approach?
Mark Adams, managing director of Vitsoe, states it very clear when talking about their furniture. They make furniture that’s timeless because they don’t believe in recycling, they believe in designing adaptive systems that can be rearranged over time to suit different needs and scenarios.
the concept is to reuse your furniture…we see recycling as a defeat
Modularity and no-aesthetics as design is my big obsession when designing interactive products (mostly websites). It’s not about designing a good website, it’s about designing a system of elements that can be arranged in certain ways and that can fulfill the company needs over time and for different reasons. If done well, when there is a need for some module that’s not designed, its shape, look and behavior comes out of intuition, it’s evident. My goal is to leave something in the hands of my client that will be there in 4 years, probably rearranged, perhaps with more pieces but within the same system.
When I fist read the Ten Principles for Good Design (that was back in 2004) I was shocked. It was like a revelation that made reconsider all I knew about information architecture and HCI. Here are the ones that hit me harder:
4. Good Design helps a product be understood
6. Good Design is honest
7. Good Design is durable
10. Good Design is as little design as possible
I deeply believe that honesty and beauty are two of the most important values in design. We put as much as we could in the redesign of the Search Results page of Minube for flights and hotels and the result has been good. Here it is:
Our assumptions
We (both minube and us) put extreme attention to what information mattered the most and made it stand above the secondary data. These were our main assumptions:
Price matters most than company.
Price (usually) matters most than hours.
There is the cheapest and then the rest.
Airlines are better recognized by their logos/colors than by their names.
Some things don’t need to be a in a filter: price ranges, airline, websites searched, etc.
Those with flexible dates need a different way to look at it.
It’s easier to redo the search than to refine through ajax.
Flight and flight back are consecutive, so let’s show them consecutive.
It’s likely that your choice will be among the first 10 results (although you may want to see more).
White space helps people identify choices, it makes everything clearer.
Boxes help you separate between different types of content.
It’s better to show just the essential data.
Old and new versions side to side
Minube is always quesioning how they do things and how these things can be improved. I like to say that at Vostok we are not good at innovating but at improving. The old version was good. But good as it was it could be, and should be improved. Here you have both versions side to side:
Facts prove it
We know the new one is more beautiful and more honest. Facts prove it. Raúl (Minube’s CEO) told me about the A/B Test results and the main indicators doubled in the new one. You should check Raúl’s post in Spanish about it.
We both believe
It’s a great thing we have clients who share our believes. Working with minube is always of great pleasure. We have a relationship based on trust and shared values. They also think that beauty and honesty are two of most important principles of good design.
