February 5, 2010, 2:07 pm
Brainstorming A History of the World
by Lisa Agustin
Rattle offers its first blog post on developing the user experience strategy for “A History of the World,” the companion web site for the BBC Radio 4 series of the same name. Written and narrated by Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, the radio program travels through two million years to tell the history of humanity through 100 handmade objects from the Museum, ranging from a stone chopping tool to the cell phone. The web site enables exploration of these objects in detail, but also gives users the opportunity to participate by commenting on the collection or uploading images from their own personal collections. Rattle’s initial post walks us through general principles from their brief (e.g., “some use of participatory media”), the resulting strategic goals (e.g., “focus on attracting, rewarding, and promoting a small minority of contributors”), and its initial brainstorm of features (e.g., “select 10 objects to represent the History of Me”). Now that the site is live, it will be interesting to read future installments to see how these initial high-level goals and blue-sky thinking compare to what was actually developed.
February 2, 2010, 1:21 pm
Easy = True
by Henry Woodbury
An interesting article on “cognitive fluency” offers this great infographic:
Reporter Drake Bennett leads with the fact that “that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names.” He continues:
Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author (my emphasis).
However, the flip side of easy equals true — or “an instinctive preference for the familiar” as Bennett defines the concept — is that to generate reflection or curiosity, you may need to make things less familiar. It’s a good thing we know how to do both.
February 2, 2010, 9:43 am
Rendered in Neat Circles
by Henry Woodbury
Popular Science links to another interesting information graphic on space exploration. This one, designed by Michael Paukner, illustrates the number of human-created objects orbiting Earth — and assigns responsibility:
You can view larger versions on Paukner’s Flickr page.
The title of my post comes from the Popular Science URL: see-space-debris-cloud-surrounding-earth-rendered-neat-circles. Ironically, this summarizes the problem with the visualization. Despite the attractiveness of the graphic, the neat circles show linear values by area, making precise comparisons completely impossible.
The donut shapes created by the overlapping circles also confuse comparison. Take a quick look at the darkest circles– that for space debris — around the United States and Russia. The United States is bigger, but by what order of magnitude? We see a lot more black — a thicker torus– but the actual ratio is just 1.2 to 1.
January 30, 2010, 9:23 pm
Real-Time Bus Location
by Henry Woodbury
Using GPS and Google Maps, MASCO — the Medical Academic and Scientific Community Organization, Inc., of Boston, Massachusetts — offers this elegant real-time bus map for its shuttle service. The map shows buses in service, their location, and their direction of travel.
For folks waiting at the bus stop, the service is accessible via web-enabled phone at http://shuttles.masco.org/m.
January 29, 2010, 4:21 pm
Why Hospital Data is Growing: Genetic Testing, EMRs, and the “-Ologies”
by Lisa Agustin
As a UX consultant with clients in the healthcare arena, I’m not unfamiliar with the kinds of data needed by employees on a hospital intranet, or by current and prospective patients on a public site. But I’m usually more concerned about the best way for people to find this information, rather than where it’s coming from and how it gets managed.
So I was especially interested in the Global Information Industry Center at UCSD’s eye-opening report on data growth in hospitals. (If the group’s name sounds familiar, these are the same folks who recently concluded that Americans consumed 3.6 zettabytes of information per day in 2008). Eleven healthcare IT executives (nine from major medical research-focused medical centers and two from medical insurance organizations) were asked to estimate their future rates of growth and identify the reasons behind it.
Author Jack Robert identifies the following as the six main drivers of growth:
- Image Technology. The number of images generated by each “ology” (radiology, cardiology, etc.) is growing both locally and centrally. The ability to create thinner and denser slices of organs makes for huge images; a single slice can be as big as 1 gigabyte.
- Web 2.0 Applications. Web-based software that enables a medical team to provide care collaboratively is a growing trend. An example of this: medication list management, where every care team member has the ability to list, delete, or annotate a patient’s list of medicines.
- Clinical Decision Support for Physicians. Physicians are treating more patients, and thus have less time to spend with each one. As a result, they expect instant, anytime access to data and specialty applications to help in their decision making process. This means a heavy reliance on electronic medical records for patients (see next).
- The Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The number of hospitals and physician offices using this is currently small, but wider adoption is expected in the coming years for two reasons: the realization that the current healthcare system is too expensive, and the federal stimulus incentives that will be given to hospitals and clinicians who demonstrate “meaningful use” of EMRs by 2011. The what-if scenario of an EMR for every person in the U.S. is staggering in terms of data size.
- Health Networks. These community initiatives will connect physicians, hospitals, health centers, labs, and patients electronically, building upon the capabilities of EMRs by collecting information from multiple medical sites, processing it, and providing it to physician offices.
- Genetic Testing. Genetic testing for high-risk patients will serve as another potentially huge source of new data, given that “there are now 2500 diseases for which there is a genetic test.”
The main problem with this growth is how best to manage it all. Much of the data is decentralized (especially in the case of research data), difficult to backup due to the increasing size of databases, and replicated by default (e.g., the processing of a blood workup means information is duplicated and stored in multiple places). But while there is no easy answer on how to address the exponential growth of medical data, the one hope is that the end result is improved and more efficient care for all patients.
January 20, 2010, 6:32 pm
What Price Content?
by Henry Woodbury
The New York Times has announced that it will initiate a pay-for-access model starting in early 2011. The general framework is to give visitors a limited number of free articles each month before invoking a flat fee for unlimited access. Print subscribers will also have unlimited access.
While The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times both charge for access, the Times is significantly more popular:
NYTimes.com is by far the most popular newspaper site in the country, with more than 17 million readers a month in the United States, according to Nielsen Online, and analysts say it is easily the leader in advertising revenue, as well.
While analysts point out that this gives the Times ample resources to adjust their scheme if they start losing readership, the Times‘ revenue problems reflect a broader reality. Yet if the newspaper does succeed in setting up a successful micropayment model, other media sites will follow.
Looking forward, I can easily imagine the Times using the leverage of its popularity and reputation to cut deals with major ISPs. People already pay for different packages of cable television channels. The same broadband providers could apply the same business model to charge for a package of subscription web sites. If it works for The New York Times, ESPN will follow.
The low-hanging fruit is the smart phone market. For a few nickels a month, Verizon or AT&T can provide the subscription tied into the app that accesses it.
UPDATE: The Times offers a Q&A. Most interesting is their determination to accept incoming links from other web sites:
Q. What about posting articles to Facebook and other social media? Would friends without a subscription then not be able to view an article that I think is relevant for them? — Julie, Pinole CA
A. Yes, they could continue to view articles. If you are coming to NYTimes.com from another Web site and it brings you to our site to view an article, you will have access to that article and it will not count toward your allotment of free ones.
January 20, 2010, 10:33 am
The Known Universe
by Lisa Agustin
Check out “The Known Universe,” a stunning animation developed by the American Museum of Natural History that takes the viewer on a journey from The Himalayas to the afterglow of the Big Bang and back again. The video is part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s exhibition “Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to the Evolving Universe,” on view until May 10, 2010.
January 12, 2010, 3:42 pm
Death by Aggregation
by Henry Woodbury
In an interview for his book You Are Not a Gadget (scroll down) technologist Jason Lanier looks around and sees Internet dystopia:
Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced….
Web 2.0 adherents might respond to these objections by claiming that I have confused individual expression with intellectual achievement. This is where we find our greatest point of disagreement. I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness. Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a descendant of a 1970s technology called UNIX. If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all.
Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of “closed” shops where individuals create something and polish it before it is released to the public. Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.
At The New York Times, John Tierney takes Lanier’s critique and runs with it — in a different direction. Where Lanier seeks to change the software technologies that undermine individual content creators, Tierney questions the net culture of intellectual property theft:
In theory, public officials could deter piracy by stiffening the penalties, but they’re aware of another crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it.
UPDATE: Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit reviews You Are Not a Gadget in today’s Wall Street Journal. While agreeing in part with Lanier’s critique of the failure of the aggregate model to reward creative individuals, he points out that social media applications are popular because they are fun – and not just for geeks:
Mr. Lanier is nostalgic for that era [the 1990s] and its homemade Web pages, the personalized outposts that have largely been replaced by the more standardized formats of Facebook and MySpace. The aesthetics of these newer options might be less than refined, but tens of millions of people are able to express themselves in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. And let’s face it: Those personal Web pages of the 1990s are hardly worth reviving. It’ll be fine with me if I never see another blinking banner towed across the screen by a clip-art biplane.
January 12, 2010, 11:13 am
Historic New England Centennial Site Now Live
by Kirsten Robinson
Historic New England has launched a Centennial microsite to celebrate their 100th year of preserving New England’s history and to highlight centennial projects that they are creating in conjunction with community partners throughout the New England states. Key site features include an events calendar, photo galleries and slide shows, and video oral histories.
Historic New England selected Dynamic Diagrams to create the user experience for the site (research, information architecture, visual design, and XHTML and CSS coding). We worked with our development partners to implement a Plone content management system (CMS) that provides Historic New England — for the first time — with complete control to create their own pages.
The Centennial site is also a preview of things to come. Watch this space for a future announcement of Historic New England’s redesigned and enhanced main web site.
December 22, 2009, 12:20 pm
Hiding Text in PowerPoint
by Lisa Agustin
I stumbled on this odd post about the use of PowerPoint in the college classroom. The basic question is this: How do you help students who rely on your PowerPoint slides as a study aid, especially if they missed the class? Some academics are aware of PowerPoint best practices, but Julianne Dalcanton suggests the following as a way to help students without breaking the rules:
My trick for [giving students the key points without cluttering the slide] is using black text on a black background. The text doesn’t show on the screen, but it does show up when printed as a handout, since the black background defaults back to white. Thus, you get the following:
Dalcanton should rethink her approach. Hiding the bulleted text so it will appear when printed wrongly assumes everyone will want (or remember) to print it, and using a black background with red text results in poor legibility (not to mention encouraging a nice nap if the lecture takes place in a dark room). In short, she’s sacrificing a good presentation for the sake of printability. Other problems with this slide:
- The graph is key to the slide and should be bigger. Remove the box that surrounds the question, since this is visually distracting. If the question itself is a key point, hopefully a subsequent slide answers the question.
- The language in the bottom-right comment needs the speaker to provide context. What does “This” refer to–the graph? If it’s important to connect energy loss with calculating the age of the universe, spell this out explicitly.
- The bullet points are better placed in the Notes area, but Dalcanton isn’t a fan of this feature (see comments following her post). If the bulleted text must be kept in the slide, it shouldn’t be sized for presentation, since this is a waste of slide real estate. Instead, use a smaller font, and move the bullets to the bottom of the page. Then use a color other than black for the font and matching background color (we used white, and this prints fine).
Our quick redo shows the presentation version on the left, and the printed version on the right. The bulleted text is in ten-point font, and legible when printed.
