maetl

Interaction

Fun is no longer a priority

What US Game Developers Need to Know about Free-to-Play in China.

Reconsuming Ideals

Portigal Consulting talk about the analog human and the digital machine.

Mad Lib Forms

The only “right” approach is tweaking a design based on a feedback loop of observation.

Both useful and meaningful?

On the frequency of Facebook redesigns, and user reactions.

Understanding Uncertainty

It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.

Equity, Autonomy, and the Asymmetry of Attention

Personal branding - building online equity through ones own internet identity - has become a prime movement in the recent trend towards renegotiating the conventional relations between employer…

Webstock 08: The Age of Frameworks

Many of us are still conditioned to think of design frameworks in terms of grid systems, Swiss graphic design, and rigid corporate identity systems. The problems with these are similar to the problems…

Twitter The Wave

Is the popularity of Twitter best explained using the psychology of addiction and gambling?

A Pattern Language for Moderation

Clay Shirky on moderation strategies: Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding…

The standard is rising

It's good in Wellington at the moment. I'm just glad that I am going to be able to sleep this weekend (unlike those about to unleash the 48 Hours!). But there's a lot going…

Will Diaspora Fail?

The huge amount of public anticipation and scrutiny of their activities is not going to be particularly helpful.

Disintegrating Digg

Fragments, factions, and turf warfare may force Digg to accomodate greater personalization of content.

Social Traction

The explosion of conversation-driven web applications in today’s world is a sign of technology beginning to fold in upon itself.

Un-favrd

Twitter as performance; Dean Allen ruminates on the end of an experiment.

Understanding Uncertainty

It's hard to step away from our assumptions and actually consider the experiences that non-technical people have using the web.

Bringing out the worst in people...

From Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?, which discusses the declining value of blog comments and social news sites: A funny thing about these sites is that they know about this problem.…

Carmack on positive brand experiences

I think one thing that's kind of worth recognizing is that if somebody played a mobile game, and if they think "Orcs and Elves, that was a great game", and it's in the context of, "this was a great…

Charting Change over Time

Grant has been doing some great stuff over at Xero, with an account balance view that enables fluid browsing of the time range by adjusting the width of the scroller control. This is a good technique …

Porn Attention Data

Talking to a friend the other night who remarked that she thought surely most people still use the internet for porn, just like always? Which got me thinking about the latest movements towards logging…

Disputing Anomalies

Thinking more about Wikipedia, and the kind of content disputes that seem to demarcate in terms of specialist/expert vs non-specialist/layman, led me to wonder whether there…

A Simple Model for Sharing

How to leverage the power of personal websites to share private information with your direct personal contacts.

Experiment Driven Development

A new skillset for interactive designers, who must now take direct evidence into account with every design variation that affects user flows.

Incentives Invite Abuse

Rethink the expectation that people will use a service for that which it is intended.

Sampling Twitter

From a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users, it would seem that men follow men, and nobody tweets. As you might suspect, this is a textbook example of ‘participation inequality’.

Hovering Intently

Late to the party, I know, but it's worth pointing this out, as an addendum to previous ranting. hoverIntent is a jQuery plugin that replaces the standard on/off hover switch with a delay, triggering…

An Uphill Battle

Tantek is fighting an uphill battle in his quest to rid the world of email. Email is ingrained, ubiquitous, and everywhere. Every person that regularly logs on to Hotmail or Gmail contributes to this…

Ponoko Goes Public

Wellington based startup Ponoko went public today, in conjunction with the TechCrunch event in San Francisco. Some of you may have seen bits and pieces at the Dowse recently, or even come across…

The problem with CSS dropdown menus

This technique been mentioned in passing for a couple of years now, and recently seems to be gaining a fair amount of attention. Many web designers love the idea of building dropdowns like this.…

Only Send What You Need

Managing RESTful AJAX operations is an open problem. While I say that aspects of managing HTTP requests, and designing UI feedback cannot be understood in isolation and must…

Patterns of Flow and Responsive UI Design

Was lucky enough today to attend a talk by Ben Bederson, who presented his work on Interfaces for Staying in the Flow, and examples of software that he has developed …