To a user, every click is a time-value liability. Every tab is a waste of time and space. The key is to reduce the amount of clicks needed .

Mozilla’s Ubiquity is concerned with reducing the time and space it takes to transfer user relevant information.

Do I trust that Mozilla will reduce the time-value liability incurred by the many modern managers of heavy data flows? Maybe.

The project is headed by Aza Raszin, Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs and founder of founder of Humanized, Inc., and  Songza. As an interface showcase, including habituatable pie menus instead of linear menus; few icons; a high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction[1]; undo instead of warnings[2]; and transparent messages [3] designed not to break the user’s train of thought. In the week after launch, Songza was used to play over 1 million songs.

Raskin is also the creator of Algorithm Ink, a port of the Context Free Art to Javascript. It has had artwork created by such computer luminaries as Ward Cunningham. Yesterday Vihn showed me Algorithm Ink at Aboutus.org (where Ward Cunningham currently works). It was very curious and elegant.

04.14.2008 by LukeW

Stephen Anderson’s Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design presentation at IA Summit 2008 provided suggestions for new sources for inspiration for interface designs.

* Check out Stephen’s slides from his presentation
* Default Thinking: look at competitor sites in a vertical for inspiration. But your customers visit sites outside of your industry, and bring those expectations to your site.
* Default Thinking: these are the tools I have to work with (Windows controls, etc.). There are other places for inspiration like consumer electronics, games, TVs, other digital interfaces.
* Today’s hardware changes make almost anything possible.
* Software changes: silverlight, android, adobe air. Lots of desktop and Web intersection.
* Natural behaviors are better than learned behaviors. Scrollbars requires us to move down to move something up. Except when learned behavior enables us to perform better.

Inspiration Examples

* Use model of Club Penguin to organize enterprise application. Look beyond the surface- look at structure of game.
* How to accommodate all levels of users & deep customization? Floating windows can bring up controls as users need them
* Think outside the UI box. Don’t need to be constrained by it
* How to accommodate multiple workspaces? iPhone button in tiered workspaces
* Design with less space. Songza: stepped radial menu on song list.
* Picnik: tabs replaced by contextual menu items. No need to remain visible at all times. Think about moments – do you need all the features all the time?
* In the new FireFox browser, back button it bigger than forward as it gets more use.
* Think in conversations. How do we communicate context?
* Make it visual – communicate context, information
* Jing: screen capture utility
* Cookthink: integrated tag cloud browsing
* Schematic: panning across different parts of site