turntable / as the table turns

In less than a week, the family and I are heading off on our first family “OE”. We’ll be spending four months in NYC, living in Brooklyn.

For me, this is a working holiday. As it happens, I was contacted by the UN to help redesign their intranet, so I’ll be taking a short sabbatical from Xero. The funny thing is, I’ll be working under former Prime Minister Helen Clark, aka Auntie Helen. Aotearoa represent!

Our kids have never been to the US, so this will be the first time they’ll experience a proper Halloween, Thanksgiving, and fingers crossed, a white Christmas. Plus, it’s the first time they’ll see some of their grandparents, who live in nearby Philadelphia.

Thanks to Google maps, planning this trip online has been awesome. We literally hit the streets and could walk around the neighborhoods with Street View to see which areas were kid friendly. That made a huge difference in our final decision to choose a place in Fort Greene. We could also map out the commute for me to the UN and for the kids to school – with multiple subway routes and commute times. We could also pinpoint nearby restaurants and grocery stores.

Even though I work with this technology all day, every day, that still blows my mind.

Just a few more sleeps until we’re in the Big Apple.

Then, before we know it, right when it’s getting painfully cold, we’ll be back home – just in time for summer.

I’ve always drawn inspiration from game design – it’s an obvious way to make interactive experiences that people enjoy.

For the inaugural Wellington Web Meetup I did a presentation on how game mechanics and the human need to play can be applied to interaction design to transform tasks that are painful and dull into experiences that are fun and addictive.

Here are some more great materials I’ve been collecting on the subject…

• My blog posts on the topic of games
• Other people’s slides on the topic of games and interaction design
• My bookmarks relating to game design

This demo of Parallex, a plug-in for Freebase, shows multi-faceted searches which you can visualise on a map or a timeline. The narrator snidely comments that you can’t do that on Google, but actually you can with Google Experimental, as well as the Google Visualization API. Nevertheless, it’s still pretty impressive.

Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

It’s always made me crazy that phone experiences aren’t better integrated with the desktop. On the desktop you have the space to manipulate large data sets and UI elements very easily and quickly.

There have been feeble, wretched attempts made by Nokia and Sony. I’m disappointed with the integration Apple has offered so far with the iPhone via iTunes. It’s extremely limited and frustrating. The new Mobile Me interface seems promising, but I’m not holding my breath that it’s what I want.

In the video below, Google demos the type of customisation that I’m looking for. At about 3:30 they show how you to customise the phone experience through a desktop interface. Just drag-and-drop content and UI widgets to your phone. Finally somebody has done it right!

This sums it up brilliantly.

As a side note, that’s a cool use of Google Presentations. It took me a long time to notice the “audience” and chat features.

Common Craft has come up with a way of explaining some fairly complex technical concepts using raw stick figure drawings, cut out bits of paper and Mr. Hand. They do quite a good job explaining things in a clear, engaging way.

Google Docs in plain English…

Social Bookmarking in plain English…

RSS in plain English…

The lo-fi approach is brilliant, but the reason it’s really effective is the way they contextualize the technology using ordinary, day-to-day scenarios of interpersonal relationships.

Last month I did my soap boxing tour and Queenstown junket, talking about our design and development process at Xero. Here are my slides…

After seeing my talk somebody pointed me to this video: “The Science and Art of User Experience at Google”. It’s a presentation by Jen Fitzpatrick, manager of the user experience team at Google, talking about their interaction design process. She shares some really interesting examples of how they collect user feedback, particularly how they track usage patterns and monitor support queries.

A usability note on the actual video file: it contains a caption overlay, which is really useful, but it would be much more useful if that text was available to read/search/copy!

Google have released interactive driving routes (found via Human Factors).

I’m certain this is either heavily influenced or entirely based on the Eyebeam NYC Subway map project. It’s using the same Flash overlay technique.

There are more video demos on personalising maps. This lets you add in photos, videos, even ads (see details here).

When I tried mapping across the two islands of New Zealand it also took into account the ferry crossing. Customising it is amazing. Drag and drop simplicity. Right-click context menu. Scroll wheel zooming, with crosshair centering. It’s another piece of mind blowing design from Google.

Grant and I both worked on driving routes for newzealand.com back in the Web 1.0 days. We know how complex maps and routes can get, even in the simplest implementation. That was later updated to include some Flash interactivity first developed by Andy Biggs and more recently given a major overhaul by Barry Hannah which includes extensive geo-coding. They even integrated it with Google Earth.

When I worked on newzealand.com the biggest user request was always more maps, maps, maps. Wisely, Tourism NZ invested a lot of money into building better maps. They could have never predicted (and certainly never relied on) Google developing technology like this. Now it seems like they should be integrating Google maps into newzealand.com, with photos, videos, and driving routes, rather than continuing to use their proprietary system. Of course, they can still take advantage of the database and technology they’ve built, while leveraging Google’s incredible technology and global reach.

Of course, I can only imagine how useful this is on the iPhone. Could some lucky iPhone owner tell me how it really is (cough Wayne cough)? When we were coming up with blue-sky ideas for newzealand.com mobile and mapping were always the big dream. It’s getting much closer to becoming reality, yet it’s still frustratingly out of reach. Especially considering the price of mobile data.

UPDATE: Thanks to Grant for this link to a video demo of Photosynth (the concept I refer to below). It doesn’t get sicker than this…

Two emails went flying around yesterday. One about Google Streetside and a follow up about Microsoft Surface.

My reaction to Surface

Kiosks 2.0 (because kiosks 1.0 were so great)

It was pretty easy to predict video billboards the day that LCD screens became available. Being able to get movie times from a movie billboard (note: not a concept I saw in the Surface demos) is something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time. This “vision” of “surface computing”, to me, seems like a very limited, one-trick gimmick. I think paper thin screens will be far more useful and ubiquitous. I seriously doubt that surface computing – in the sense of a dedicated table – will ever go mainstream. Some underlying concepts are likely to persist – ie, some types of gestural interactions, device synching, but those aspects of Surface are no any way revolutionary or unique to this product.

My reaction to Streetside

It’s stunning. Incredible implementation. Absolutely gobsmacking. I was able to look in the doorway (and window) of my old apartment in San Francisco!!

I went down the street where my old office was and I didn’t recognize it since I haven’t been there in 5 years and things have changed. Very trippy.

And it just works. Click around a few times and you know how to use it in all its glory. Yet, it’s quite sophisticated. Amazon did some streetside mapping that was kind of cool, but Google’s implementation is absolutely jaw dropping. The shear scale of data, the elegant game-like interaction, the speed, the depth, the dynamic contextual layers.

I worship Google.

The only thing I wonder about is the usefulness – whether it’s really worth the effort. It’s an extremely cool experience, I can see a few practical uses, lots of impractical uses, but compared to Gmail or even just street maps, I’m not sure there’s such a big pay off beyond bragging rights and cool factor.

However, combine it with a mobile phone and GPS – then I could see it being extremely powerful. Combine Streetside with Microsoft’s dynamic 3D stitching – then I could take a picture with my camera phone and in realtime it gets posted to Google and it’s a form of personal memory mapping and user generated real time mapping. Google could pinpoint where I was, when I was there, and even show me the photo. If, years later, I meet somebody who was at the same place at the same time then we could see how our paths literally crossed. Of course, there’s all the geo-tagging opportunities (this restaurant was rated by your friend Joe last week, there were 3 late night muggings in this alley in the past week).

Behold the Master Plan