brunobergher::blog

A friend sent me today a link to the just-redesigned website of Boston, Massachusetts base advertising agency Modernista.

All of the content of their website is actually off-site: text in Wikipedia, videos in You Tube, stills in flickr; the site is just a tiny red JavaScript-based menu with an iframe behind it.

Creative director Gary Koepke says in an interview to Creativity:

“There’s such a challenge for ad agencies to be known as digitally savvy and understand what’s going on the medium. We wanted to prove to people that we understand a way that we can have a transparent, open source and highly successful site.”

Well, I think they nailed it.

This approach has at least two great qualities:

• It absolutely expresses how up-to-date the company is, not in terms of visual communication (which should be a commodity in their playing field), but in respect to deeply understanding the way information finds it’s way around nowadays and how open to comments and participation any enterprise must be to succeed in this community-driven world.
• This is a unique solution to their problem, which can’t quite be ‘borrowed’ or ‘be of inspiration’ to the competition. I mean: there’s nothing that can be similar to it: it’ll be either exactly the same or something entirely different. Anything in the middle would be seen as a blatant rip-off. Achieving this in an environment in which stuff is copied all over fast and easily is quite an accomplishment.

I look forward to see how this echoes around the web.

Jeffrey Mindich contributed to this post in the Freakonomics blog over at the NYT website with an interesting story about Taiwan’s solutions to traffic accidents.

About a year ago, in order to reduce the number of accidents in some intersections in the country, they introduced traffic lights with countdowns of two kinds, one in which the light counts down to zero until it turns green, in the other until it turns red.

What’s really interesting is the difference in the results with the two varieties of lights:

• In the first one, countdown to green, the number of accidents was cut in half;
• In the second one, the number of injuries doubled.

People clearly speed up when facing a green light about to turn red, but get calmer when they know in how many seconds it’s going green, and are less likely to gun it.

This translates easily to interfaces. A while ago Chris Harrison published a study called ‘Rethinking the Progress Bar‘, which shows that a progress bar that is slower towards the beginning of the process and faster towards the end is perceived by users as much faster than a linear progress bar, even if the actual time spent in both are exactly equal.

I think these are two practical examples of the same principle:

1. When showing progress to users, make it seem as fast as possible, even if it brings along a slight distortion of the actual progress;
2. Provide the user with practical checkpoints in the process, to discourage her from giving up on a computer-intensive or remotely processed task that invariably takes some time.

Either way, never forget you have an implicit deal with the user of never lying to her: the goal here is to improve perceived performance, not to fake benchmarks.

Apparently, yesterday’s Big Thing was the Awareness test:

Pretty interesting, right? This made me think about the level of thought and craftsmanship we, designers, frequently put into some details. That may be too much sometimes.

Charles Eames said: “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Who am I do disagree with him? Really, how could I ever go against this? The thing is, love details. I truly believe the dedication to seemly minimal things can more than often be the one way to really get a design right; I think the same way when deciding programming approaches to some problems:

But one other thing I do believe, however, is that sometimes designers get to the detail phase before everything else is done. It’s not rare to find a website with great finish, but lacking some essential item in the menu, or perhaps a design that doesn’t make it clear what’s the goal of that site is.

There’s some groundwork that often get left behind in the race for perfect details. And achieving overall beauty should not, under any circumstances, get in the way of detailed usability, legibility and purpose-filling considerations. My point is to suggest that details can and should be prioritized: never ignored, but always contextualized in the flow of a project, coming up when all functionality is right.

Because the result, sometimes, can be in some ways similar to the video: you may do a great job drawing and animating a break-dancing, moonwalking bear, and the user ends up never appreciating the level of work you put into it, because she simply needed to count passes.

The title is a direct quote from the TED page presenting Dr. Hans Rosling presentation back in 2006, as one of the most accurate possible. This may come as old news to some, but my last post on Dr. Jill Taylor’s TED presentation made me realize I should have written something about this at some point in this blog.

So, if you’re not familiar with the fun and outstandingly engaging speaker that is Dr. Rosling—or his work with GapMinder, for that matter—behold one of the best talks you will ever watch:

This is the good stuff. This is as good as data visualization gets. It may lack a bit in the aesthetic sense of it, but doesn’t really make a difference. Because this is dense, useful, mattering information, presented in ways people never even imagined.
I mean, there are a lot of data visualization projects with beautiful results, working with sometimes interesting data, but it dwells frequently in process or tools experimentation. I’m no critic: I’m a huge admirer; hell, I had been actually working on a few experiments of myself. But this is a whole different ball park.

This is the kind of stuff that molds minds, that feeds leaders with the information they need to make good, evidence-based decisions for their people. It’s the kind of tools that promotes the insight that allows populations to demand from their policy makers choices based on the experiences of other countries. That allows people to get their mind around seemingly unsolvable problems and vote and act their way through it.
You add on top of that the passion with which Dr. Rosling’s narrates the development of countries and world events with the excitement of a sportscaster. This involves you with information with enthusiasm in a surprising way.

It doesn’t end there, since in a brief presentation he manages to explain clearly the differences between means and goals, and how we most frequently mix them up, making choices that are not as productive as we think.

That is as good as it gets.

And, as a bonus, Dr. Rosling’s returning talk on TED2007, with some new insights:

Please don’t miss these. You’ll thank me later.

And if you want to check on how GapMinder is doing, check their website.

The good people at TED are nice enough to be already releasing some this year’s presentations, which happened just a couple of weeks ago. One of the few videos they released so far is this perspective-shifting presentation by Dr. Jill Taylor.

She’s a distinguished neural anatomist, which took the unfortunate event of her having a stroke and turned into a life changing experience, of a huge level of unexpected learning, especially for such an accomplished scientist. Direct link.

The ending is what’s core to the presentation, and needless to be commented on, but I must say I found the beginning, with the clear explanations on the differences between each of the brain hemispheres also quite enlightening. Having the notion of what is going on inside, and the fragility of how the brain accomplishes the very sophisticated processes we take for granted every day, well… it makes you think.

(This is the first of what I hope becomes a series of posts on books I finish reading. I hope any of this ends up being useful to someone.)

I don’t plan to review Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability in any new way; 411 people have done it so far in Amazon.com alone. Considering at least 100,000 people have already read this, you can take it for granted that it’s a good book. I guess I’m writing to convince you to read it as soon as possible (if you don’t have already, of course).

Upon receiving it at home, I was surprised to see how thin it is: the Brazilian edition which I bought (I’ll get back to it shortly) is only 127 pages long; it seemed like a very introductory, superficial book. I guess I’m more used to judging a book’s by it’s length than I thought, and got punched in the face with that unfair assumption later on. In fact, the author himself aimed to conceive something ‘that could be read in a single airplane trip’.

Let me just tell you this: just 50 pages on, I was already quoting Krug all day long in discussions at work. His ideas are so simple, make so much sense and are so generic that, if you’re designing/developing interfaces (web-based or not) you’ll see yourself constantly in situations where Krug can help you. His common sense approach just becomes something you take with yourself, and put before the many obscure considerations people end up having when discussing project details.

It’s also interesting to see how the examples in the book—which are only two years old in many cases—are already outdated, while the principles he shares are more up-to-date than ever. His ideal definition of a home page has become the standard template of Web 2.0 sites (big, clear company statements with big call-to-action buttons and links); and even though Krug barely mentions web-apps in the text, everything he writes just fits in perfectly to them.

Summing up: huge recommendation, for anyone involved in sites/software design/development/management/conception.

* Note on the Brazilian edition: if you’re a fellow Brazilian, avoid the AltaBooks edition at all costs. Really. Run from it like you’d run from the devil. Page layout is terrible, with no margins whatsoever, reaaaaaaaaaally long sentences, the footnote references are all screwed up, a lot of bad translations. In many cases the book tears apart the usability principles Krug is explaining in that very page. I’m thinking of warning him about this, if can manage to get in touch.

If you can read the English in this blog, you deserve a good edition—as I believe the original one is. So go for it.

I’ve been programming for just a couple of years. I have barely no desktop development experience, focusing only in web sites and applications. Mobile apps? Even less.

So I’d think: “how excited could I get watching Apple’s iPhone SDK launch keynote?”. Well, I’m surprised with myself. I’m blown away with them.

If you haven’t watched it yet, please do, or this will make no sense at all.

When Google announced the Android platform it seemed like a milestone, that the standardization of the APIs would be the solid foundation upon which developers would create the mobile apps of the future. I remember talking to my co-workers how I found it interesting that this niche event felt like a moment that would change things to come.

But now, this is a real turning point. OK: it’s a closed platform, only works with two specific devices, depends on a yet-to-be-tested distribution channel*, but, in my truly humble opinion, has what it takes to shape the future of mobile computing. Or even of the entire computing experience.

The keynote was only opened and closed by Steve Jobs—therefore mostly free of his RDF—and filled with useful, tempting information. Each round of explanations about the layers of the iPhone OS made me giggle, finally laughing out loud with excitement when Scott Forstall said the API included full access to the accelerometer (with X, Y, and Z axes!) and multi-touch events. It’s just top exciting.
And the SDK is free.

I just find it amazing that the presentation left me with a weird, uncontrollable desire to start writing Objective-C. Oh, now I need a Mac. : )

* Well, if you don’t count the iTunes Music Store, which is now the #2 music seller in the US, and works much alike the App Store.

… it could probably look like something this:

(It’s a homage/exercise by an art student, by no means comparable to Saul’s work, but definitely worth watching.)

I am a huge fan of the design of movie titles, so much my graduation project was actually a book (some 250 pages long) on this subject. It never went on to publishing, but is one of the most joyful things I’ve ever worked on; I hope someday I can get back to it.

Be sure to check the ‘related’ videos list in this video’s page, which showcases some of his work, including my favorites—Anatomy of a Murder and Ocean’s Eleven (1960).

While at it, try to watch ‘Why Man Creates‘, a short film made by Saul and his wife Elaine Bass about creativity, which won the 1968 Academy Award for short documentary.

The IE team announced in their blog that they’re changing they’re previously stated position that IE8 would use version targeting by using HTTP headers or meta tags to choose the way a page should be rendered. That meant that if even if the browser had a much more standard compliant rendering engine (they passed the ACID test!), developers would have to explicitly tell the browser to use the new engine. This has been widely covered, such as here and here.

But they ended up deciding things differently, and now the browser will default to the new engine, much more reliable than the IE6/7 one (standards-wise). Developers will still have the option of targeting specific browser versions with headers/meta tags, but sites that are already deployed will not have to be changed at all to take advantage of the advances in the new Microsoft browser.

Apparently it’s one of many consequences of the recent publication of Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles. It doesn’t matter what the reason is: it’s good news anyway!

Last week Ted Patrick wrote that they’re working in Adobe on a project to compile any kind of C/C++ code to ActionScript, making it runnable inside the Flash Player.

I’m not sure I understood this completely. Because if I got it right, this means that an infinite amount of platform-specific, legacy code will suddenly become cross-platform without any software that the basic AIR runtime. Ted says they’ve successfully ported Quake I, and that it ran OK.

This could be the beginning of a really big change in the entire software scenario, and seems worth a lot of buzz.

So maybe I got something wrong, but it seems pretty revolutionary stuff, isn’t it? If you’re reading this and by any chance could clarify this
to me I’d be very, very pleased. And forgive me if I got something wrong.

Update: sorry for the duplicated post. ScribeFire ain’t as reliable as I thought.