March 28, 2008
Information Design Watch
From Dynamic Diagrams
Design for Understanding
All of these articles first appeared on our Information Design Watch blog. Please visit the blog to view additional entries not included in the newsletter. You also can register and comment on most posts.
In This Issue:
MARKETING & DESIGN
- Rube Goldberg in Amsterdam
- Let the Penguin Explain
USER EXPERIENCE
- User Experience: Crash Test Version
- MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind
TECHNOLOGY
- What Does "Capable" Mean in Redmond?
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
- Contractors Needed for Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design
MARKETING & DESIGN
Rube Goldberg in Amsterdam
Posted by Henry Woodbury
HEMA, the Dutch department store has an clever Web animation built on a fake product page. Just click through and wait.
Then, after you watch it, click sturr door and send the link to your friends. Some may even go to the actual online store.
Let the Penguin Explain
Posted by Henry Woodbury
In a few weeks an AOL penguin will begin educating users about advertising cookies. Here's a sample storyboard from the ad campaign:
A penguin?
USER EXPERIENCE
User Experience: Crash Test Version
Posted by Henry Woodbury
One exhibit at the New York Auto show is a car like this:
The point is to show off the Ford Taurus's five star crash rating. What makes this interesting as information design is that it's literally a) a car crash and b) interactive:
Show goers will be allowed to sit in the post-crash Taurus to see what a crash test dummy sees after a 35-mph meet up with an offset concrete barrier.
It is easy to forget in the online world, but the best user experience is being there.
MOMA's Design and the Elastic Mind
Posted by Lisa Agustin
At New York City's Museum of Modern Art, the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition "focuses on designers' ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores, changes that will demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior, and convert them into objects and systems that people understand and use." The online exhibition features 300 examples of design innovation in several categories, among them Thinkering ("productive tinkering"), Super Nature (technologies based on biological systems), and Extreme Visualization, which includes universcale, a Flash site describing the size of objects in the universe using an "infinite yardstick" extending from a femtometer to a light-year.
TECHNOLOGY
What Does "Capable" Mean in Redmond?
Posted by Henry Woodbury
A recent number one most emailed article from the The New York Times home page is about operating systems, of all things. Specifically, it is about users who upgraded to Windows Vista and "got burned." Users like Mike Nash, a Microsoft Vice President, and Jon Shirley, a Microsoft board member.
These stories come from Microsoft internal emails, acquired in a class action law suit. At the heart of the dispute is disagreement over the meaning of the word "capable."
Originally Microsoft planned to label Windows XP PCs with sufficient hardware and graphics power to eventually run Vista as "Vista Ready." To avoid hurting sales of lower-end computers, Microsoft created a new classification, "Vista Capable." This supposedly "signal[ed] that no promises are made about which version of Vista will actually work."
An internal Dell report exposes the folly of this idea: "Customers did not understand what 'Capable' meant...."
DYNAMIC DIAGRAMS NEWS
Contractors Needed for Research, Information Architecture, Interaction Design
Posted by Henry Woodbury
Dynamic Diagrams is seeking to develop new relationships with user experience contractors to supplement our full-time staff.
Please follow the link above or refer to the Careers page on our web site for details.
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