February 2006
Amazon now has what they’re calling a “product wiki” on each product page. It’s basically a single user-editable chunk of the page. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
I assume this’ll be old news in a few minutes, but Yahoo recently released and open-sourced their previously-internal set of UI design patterns and JavaScript widget library, as well as a companion blog:
Yahoo! User Interface Blog
(with a nice live search bar)
Yahoo! Design Pattern Library
Yahoo! User Interface Library
Congratulations, Nate!
All experiences can be measured along three scales: Social, Intellectual, and Visceral (or Heart, Head, and Hands if you want something catchy). For example:
Drinking in a bar:
Social: high
Visceral: high
Intellectual: low
Watching a sunset:
Social: depends
Visceral: high
Intellectual: depends
Reading a book:
Social: low (unless read out loud)
Visceral: low
Intellectual: high
Video game:
Social: depends
Visceral: medium
Intellectual: depends
Online community:
Social: high
Visceral: low
Intellectual: varies
Are there other parameters beyond the 3?
This helps explain what’s so exciting about location-aware applications: they promise to overlay the intellectual and social strengths of network-mediated interactions with meatspace. Either that or we’re all just zoning out looking at tiny mobile screens, wondering how the UI got so f***ed up.