No Cost for Culture

I kid, that’s not what it’s called - but it is useful for stalking! Google maps has a new feature that is flat out amazing. It’s called ‘Street View’ and it’s just that - type in an address, click the street view button and the little icon and a photo pops up showing you the building/streets/whatever that’s at the address. A street-level photo. And not just that, you can click and drag along the image to get a full 360-degree view of the street you’re looking at and you can even virtually ‘walk’ down the streets to see what else is in the neighborhood. The icon on the map will update to show you which way you’re moving.

Note that this doesn’t work in Chicago yet - so I’ve been stalking the streets of San Francisco today. For example, let’s visit the Tonga Room! Just go in the hotel, walk downstairs, and you’ll be in a tropical paradise.

This is potentially awesome and scary in a variety of ways, of course.

Awesome: I can check out neighborhoods I’m interested in moving in to to see what’s nearby, how the building looks from the outside (if I can figure out which one it is!) and talk a virtual walk around to get a feel for the neighborhood.

Awesome: Landmark-type directional people will have a handy way to see where exactly they’re going if they’re not familiar with the area.

Not awesome: others will know exactly where we live and people that value their privacy may get ‘caught’ by google’s big bro cameras. (However in Chicago between surveillance cameras and police cameras, we’re pretty much under surveillance whether we like it or not).

From an interaction design standpoint, this is a lot of fun!Google has thought of almost everything I might want to do - like can I pick up my little guy and make him go somewhere else? Yes! Can I click and hold on the picture to keep moving down the street? Yes! Can I decide to move a perpendicular direction when I’m in an intersection? No. But, when I get to the intersection the photo has overlays that tell me the streets I’m at so I can just move my guy on the map to the street I want to explore more.

So now the question is what’s the technology involved here? Is some creepy van driving up and down the streets of San Francisco taking pictures of each and every street that exists? Are there little drone helicopters flying low down streets and taking 360 degree pictures? Will this ever become a countrywide-or even awesomer-worldwide feature? I guess time will tell.
Here’s a little blurb about street view from webware.

And a blog post from a googler about the feature - it’s in 5 cities!

Yes, I was watching 60 minutes again this Sunday and on comes a great story about the One Laptop Per Child project. I’ve seen the interface Sugar before - a whole new operating system was developed for this laptop so that it could be understood by anyone, anywhere (or at least this is the big hope) - actually here’s a video of it! (my wordpress blew up when I tried to embed this video)

I’m really excited and inspired by the whole thing. The MIT professor who spearheaded this project travels all_the_time promoting this project and trying to get the laptops in the hands of needy kids. And this sucker is totally rugged, and product-or-not, I’d say it’s innovative - in fact its platform is essentially the idea that knowledge is power and even if kids aren’t getting a great-or-any education, maybe having access to the world through a laptop will help.

You can read a lot more about the laptop and the 60 minutes segment on 37Signals’ site.
Now on to my main point: a big issue that came up during the 60 Minutes segment is that OLPC, which uses AMD processors is facing fierce competition from for-profit companies such as Intel who want a piece of this gigantic, underserved market of 3rd world countries with little-to-no technology. They’re trying to steal business away from OLPC and get their computers in the hands of kids worldwide.

I was thinking OLPC and its fiercest competitors should have a usability-test-off. Get kids that haven’t touched a computer before to try to accomplish different tasks on the various computers and see which UI works best. This is at least how some countries or schools (or whomever the powers that be are) should decipher which computer to go with, instead I imagine it might come down to empty promises or perhaps bribery.

I’d love to help with the usability-test-off myself, but most of all I can’t wait to see how this plays out and I can’t wait to see how the world changes as a result of One Laptop Per Child.

So I think my blog might jump the shark a little bit this week - I thought about blogging about this real estate website Redfin that I saw on 60 minutes on Sunday (the 60 year old in me loves 60 minutes), but I’m not sure what to say, except “neat”.

I’m kind of a sucker for any/all map+whatever mashups that are out there and this one saves you on real estate commission to boot. I can vicariously live through future-kelly and say “420k for a 1bedroom TIC in San Francisco sounds reasonable” and then I remember that it would be just me and Joel pulling in the dough to pay for it. No tenants to help pay the mortgage.

Hey, speaking of tenants (this is where I jump the shark), mine are moving out. Yes, I am a landlord of exactly one apartment (if anyone’s looking for a 3bedroom, 2bath apt in Pilsen for $1100, you know who to talk to) and I’m in the midst of showing it this month in the hopes of renting June 1st. So in the shower this morning I remembered to leave a note for our tenants letting them know that I’d like to show the apt this weekend. Except, of course, I forgot to do this once I got out of the shower.

So I was pondering this just now as I went out for lunch and I realized that if I just had a magical shower notepad, I could jot down notes, ideas, and to-dos to my heart’s desire when my mind seems to be the most active: in the shower (for reference, the shower is where i got the brilliant idea that a certain project for one class could be repurposed as a certain project for another class thus lessening some workload). Maybe Nadine’s magical pen can help with this - or maybe there’s a semi-permanent, but still dry-erase-esque technology out there that could assist with this sort of thing? It seems like a dumb enough idea that people would go for it.

I just heard about restickable dry erase paper which sounds totally awesome and I want to randomly stick all over my house. I have one smallish square dry erase board, but I need more. I like it much better than paper or computer for brainstorming.

Sometimes it’s nice to take a step back from whatever projects you’re knee-deep in and start fresh. Work on something else, hone your skills on something you’re not so involved in. Or just look at things from a new perspective.

I was reminded of this today, because I came across Cooper’s Interaction Design Test (pdf alert) for prospective employees. This is a two-part test: first, we redesign the table creation steps in Word, and second, create a design for a phone.
They say, “We’re most interested in your conceptual design decisions and how they affect the interaction and interface design of the product.” I’ve found that this is really the ‘magic’ in what we do - first, how do we take research and effectively translate our findings to design, and second, how does design translate to interaction? It involves a lot of distillation of ambiguity into organization.

Speaking of such exercises, I’ve seen IDEO ask potential employees (interaction designers or human factors specialists, I believe) to sit somewhere for an hour and observe people in a public space and come up with observations of patterns of behavior and ways the space could be improved. It’s a simple enough thing that we could do almost anytime, and I like that it takes us away from glowing screens for a while.

What are some other ways we can practice different skills without having to make a commitment to a long and involved process?

Given that we’ve been working on different types of documentation like site diagrams, user flows, and wireframes, I’ve been thinking about and researching different ways of representing these deliverables.

My project Finabler is a web application that I imagine being interactive and drag-and-droppy, but also retaining many menu-structures and functionalities that are more common in desktop applications, and I’m still kind of at a loss as to how I’ll represent things that are functional, but not pages unto themselves.

Anyway, looking through the software prototyping book for our prototyping class, I came across a dependency diagram, which I thought was a great way to get ideas down for user/task flow and how things relate to one another. (sorry I can’t find a good example online - check out the book, if you’ve got it!)

I also found this ye olde User Task Model that I thought was interesting, in a holistic way. It helps to put our scenarios into action in a way others will understand.

And a couple months ago I came across Todd Warfel’s Task Analysis Grid, which he shares the template for on his site. It uses scenarios, tasks, and subtasks to outline how the functional requirements of a system will be met. He also puts a human face on it and includes a term I love, and I think it says so much - Pain Points! What are we trying to fix? Anyway, this document seems like a great way to streamline our documentation.

Finally, over at Boxes and Arrows, Andres Zapata talks about using guided wireframes in powerpoint to tell the story of how a rich internet application will function.

What methods have you found to be useful?