emily conrad

I thought this was impressive- reMap (bestario.org) displays and organizes the entire encyclopedia of visualizations from visualcomplexity.com.

What’s so great about this site is the filtering behavior initiated from the tag nav at the bottom of the page. No tag cloud! Great solution. But you have to point your mouse to the bottom in order to trigger this function. Also, points for having each step it’s own URL, easy to backtrack and email a specific link. Well done.

By the by,infosthetics reports that, VisualComplexity is so impressive, that its author, Manuel Lima, is nominated by Creativity magazine as “one of the 50 most creative and influential minds of 2009″, while he also was chosen as a speaker at TEDGlobal2009.

bestario.org

An article from A List Apart that goes in depth about the importance of order and traditional aesthetics in web design. Great read that emphasizes the positive impact and trust gained from users when a site is attractive.

“A body of web user experience research shows that website users are powerfully influenced by aesthetics, and that positive perceptions of order, beauty, novelty, and creativity increase the user’s confidence in a site’s trustworthiness and usability. Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.”

(Wouldn’t be complete without a diagram….)

The visceral (“gut”) processing level reacts quickly to appearances. It’s the visceral reaction to web pages that researchers measure when they detect reaction times as fast as 50 milliseconds. It’s crucial to understand that these instant good/bad visceral-level affective responses are largely unconscious: it can take seconds or minutes to become consciously aware of your first, visceral reaction to a stimulus—particularly a stimulus as complex as a web page.

Behavioral-level processing involves the more familiar aspects of usability: it responds to the feel of using the site, the functionality, the understandability of the structure and navigation, and the overall physical performance of the site. At this level, users are consciously aware of their attitudes toward the behavior of the system, and their reactions (pleasure, for example, or frustration) play out over seconds and minutes as users interact with a site. It’s at this behavioral level that techniques such as eyetracking are most powerful and trustworthy, because they offer detailed moment-by-moment evidence of what users consciously decided to look at and do to fulfill a given task.

Reflective processing of reactions is the most complex level, and typically involves a user’s personal sense of a site’s beauty, meaning, cultural context, and immediate usefulness. Reflective processing often triggers memories and encourages pragmatic judgments about the overall aesthetic worth and value of what a user sees. Eyetracking and traffic logs are irrelevant at this level, but user interviews can give you insight into your user’s reflective judgments.

As a technologist, and electronics enthusiast, I’ve noticed a huge push in the DIY movement for arts and crafts. As a mom, and in the spirit of Ruth Handler, I know I want my daughter’s toys to be made for her needs. Spinning off the concept of personalization, I began recording my voice, my husband’s voice, and our family members who she knows and loves but does not see them as much as we’d like (we’re in NYC, my family is from Ohio).

The toy exists as a prototype; a box with yellow square, blue triangle, and red circle. When my daughter picks up the red circle, she hears her grandmother’s voice say “red circle”, and the blue triangle is her grandfather’s voice, and so on. There’s also a place beneath the circle or triangle for her grandparents pictures so she can make the audio visual connect. Everything is wooden (except the electronics), and all paints are non toxic. My daughter, who is 2 yrs old, loves it!

The big idea, and differentiator, behind this toy is the audio – it’s your voice your child hears, you’re the one teaching them even if you can’t be there all the time. And it’s a way to connect to family members who may not be near by. The child will still hear her family member’s voice and recognize the picture. What grandparent wouldn’t want that?

Many of the toys she plays with now (Leapfrog’s Learn and Groove in particular) showcase anonymous voices singing ABC’s or teaching colors. And for a while she would spend hours with these toys! I have been working with a child psychologist who has emphasized the need for a child to hear her mother and father’s voice for comfort, but little is known of this connection other than comfort. Seems to me, our loved one’s voices play a huge role in our development.

At this point the prototype is up and running and I’m working on a next iteration of the interface and would like it to be more “in the round” and to tell stories, as opposed to a box top with shapes (though Melissa and Doug seem to be doing just fine with this idea). I want to make it easy for parents to record their own audio, and fun so the child learns through play.