I was stuck for a couple of extra hours at the airport in Dulles and I noticed this amazing visualization of the Internet from AT&T Labs and a company called "Lumeta". Yes, I know these have been done before, but rarely with any sense of aesthetics in mind. Alas, some extensive searching revealed no aditional information on this monstrosity (it is rather large). It is one of those things you'd really like to get a copy of, but for some reason, a company smart enough to map the Internet is not smart enough to put an URL on the poster to follow up on their creation. Something this cool deserved a "How We Did It" type of explanation somewhere. Oh well. If you are in Dulles or Reagan airports, be sure to check it out. It color codes major nodes and networks, and that faint gray "haze" is actually thousands of labels for major servers in the network. A great marriage of science and design.

And apologies for the quality of the picture. It was taken with my phone.

I'm in the NASA generation... meaning I grew up when space exploration was THE most thrilling news covered in our solar system. It also means that I'm probably a bunch older than you... but we'll proceed anyway.

I recall gathering with my family in the living room, watching our single TV set:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - 0 - BLAST OFF!!!!!
ROAR of unbelievably powerful rocket engines. HUGE Saturn V rocket engulfed in smoke and flames. INCOMPREHENSIBLE forces inching untold tonnage slowly upward, breaking away from gantry tubes, somehow going straight upward, hurtling its miniscule human cargo toward exciting exploration and discovery missions in outer space.



Not coincidentally, we all just got past the most famous recurring example of this type of cultural artifact:

10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
Woooo Hooooo! Yelling. Noise-making. Kisses. Champagne. Affection. Reminiscing. Resolutions.

Countdowns are Cool!
Read on and learn how to Rock Your UI! >>

Immerse yourself in the web's best elections coverage at AOL News - Elections '08!

This election will go down in history as the most highly contested and publicized presidential race in our country's history. And to bring our users the best, we at AOL News have launched the most comprehensive coverage, delivering you real-time national, state and local results.

So, as you prepare for the long wait at the polls, do your candidate research for your presidential choices (I hope you've figured that out by now) all the way down to your local county seats and ballot measures.

Candidate News: John McCain | Barack Obama

Get the latest Election '08 Results: Presidential | Senate | House | Governor

State Results: Virginia | New York | California | select your state.

Be sure to also read the latest political commentary at political machine and live blogging from Mo Rocca on his newly designed web-site -- Mo Rocca 180 -- it's only half as tedious as the regular news.

Objectively measuring design is critical to a product's success. Usability testing and tracking are powerful tools to evaluate your design with data from real users, and now AOL Designers have another tool at our disposal. With the help of Forrester Research we have created the AOL User Experience Checklist. Building upon the great work of Forrester's original Web Site Review Scorecard, we've added evaluation criteria specific to AOL and our design standards .

Best practices evaluated in the list include messaging to users, navigation and way-finding, visual and architectural hierarchy, and task efficiency.

I am recommending that every product be evaluated once a year at a minimum for a baseline. Then teams may revisit their report and score as improvements are launched.

Please note that a perfect score is exceedingly rare and the goal should be to always be improving the score. If the score is always moving in the right direction then we know our experiences are always improving as well.

AOL folks can find the checklist on our design guide here:
AOL UX Checklist

I've had a few weeks now to play with the new Web enabled application from Google, known as Chrome. Some, including Google, call it a Web browser.

I respectfully disagree.

If it is only a Web browser, Chrome leaves a lot to be desired. Despite promised improvements (like the basic ability to organize your bookmarks), its stripped down interface has a long way to go to compete with the feature sets of Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer. But, then, it may not be Google's goal to create an application for browsing the Web.

Consider it's name: Chrome. In the world of user interface design, we call the buttons, backgrounds, icons and other graphic bits of the interface "chrome." And that's exactly what Google's Chrome is: it is the chrome ( lower case "c") for Google's current and future Web based applications.

And I'm not the only one who seems to thinks so. I remember just ten years ago when Marc Andreesen had the same idea and threw down the gauntlet, stating that Netscape would replace the operating system as the vector for users interacting with computer applications. It did not quite turn out that way, but maybe Google will be able to pull it off.

Maybe.

Our team of designers and engineers has been steadily working on a re-launch of our portal in October that really pushes AOL into some new places. And this is just the beginning! Here is a link to the info on TechCrunch. More details coming soon but the new page has features such as RSS, mail, and soc|net aggregation, customizable navigation, and some other surprises. Stay tuned.

For those of us that think visually and like to click on pictures (ok, that's most of us btw), PicLens is a pretty amazing app that brings the Web to life as a visual medium. Just download the extension and PicLens turns image and video feeds from top sources into an interactive "wall of media" that animates smoothly across your screen. So smoothly, in fact, that you may actually get motion sickness playing with it (like I did).

Like most interactive things it really has to be experienced to be appreciated. If you have ever felt that image or video search should be more compelling than this one is certainly for you. I recommend everyone on my team try it out. Though if you haven't wanted a more visual, interactive Internet than this plug-in will probably go into the "cool things" bookmark graveyard you never go back to visit. I do believe the new "Shop Amazon" feature is a stretch though.

Speaking as the General Manager of PIXCETERA, this one is a tough act to follow I must admit.

At a Digital Media conference I attended yesterday, the CMO of comScore shared the following fact:

Of the general mobile phone market with web browsing capabilities, only 14% actually browse the web on their phones. However 90% of iPhone users browse the web.

Wow.

Mobile phone companies have been pushing their web browsing phones into the marketplace for years, yet not until Apple created a better experience -- a better design -- could usage increase this tremendously.

We saw a similar result when we launched an updated navigational system in our StyleList site several months ago. Our traffic rose ten-fold the very day it launched.

As we evolve our web sites, let us take note. Success is not always about getting new features into the marketplace. Sometimes the greatest success can come from inventing new solutions to radically transform current features into even greater effortless and delightful experience.

Wordle is poetry design meets thrift store shopping. Take a bundle of words, a quote, a shopping list, a love letter gone awry, and ingest the sentences into wordle. Your words are regurgitated as a well designed and seemingly organized thought cloud. Wordle randomly mixes and matches font, layout, color, language, and your input, into a gallery piece or a printable design.

I started creating one a day, documenting my daily food intake. That guilty bag of blue M&M's suddenly became sandwiched between coffee and asparagus and perpendicular to turkey instead of hanging over my head.

Another company with a name that looks like a typo.

Apture is a killer new publishing application that lets you hook interactive multi-media modules from the Web onto your editorial. It has to be experienced to be really understood, so, for example, if you were writing a blogpost on the Aurora Borealis and wanted to provide definitions, pictures, and video from top sources like Wikipedia and YouTube, you could do so with just a couple of clicks. And then your audience gets to experience multi-media and related content on your website.

It's rare I say "wow" these days since I'm steeped in the Web all the time, but I have to say that this particular capability is stunning in its implications. Now ANYONE can have a site that is supported by some of the Web's top content providers (the Web 2.0 ones, that is).

Here are some examples of media stitched into a sentence (overdone for effect):
"The Summer's reigning blockbuster is still Iron Man, with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hot on it's heels. Me, I'm now rooting for The Incredible Hulk. And Will Smith's Hancock has yet to take a bow."

OK, the sentence is bad, but the multimedia in-page is really differentiating. Only real flaw is if there is no great content on any of those properties accessible within the application. For this type of interactive plug-and-play experience I can sure live with that.

I love this little video expressing the value of twitter as "real life". It's simple communication around a not-so-simple topic for many. Clicking more at the end of this video will take you into a primer on "social networking". Hey, not that most people reading these words need this type of thing, but the simple cut and paste paper approach is really engaging as tutorial. And sometimes we just need a reminder that not everyone lives and breathes this stuff like we do. Thanks for Geno Yoham for passing it on.

Last week at the Voices That Matter Conference, I was privaleged to attend a great presentation on how to give great presentations. Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, wowed the crowd by creating a compelling and informative presentation using Power Point (actually he was using Keynote, but Power-Point has become the "Band-Aid" of slide software). Unlike other information design experts (ie. Edward Tufte), Garr has a lot of hope for Power-point presentations, but with a few helpful suggestions (paraphrased here):

Since our website redesigns last year, our main pages have been re-fitted with a promotional module called "Cards on the Table" (or "CoTT" for short). This was a replacement for the classic "Dynamic Lead" module (the usual giant animated picture with text that seems ubiquitous on programming websites across the Web). I based the design on the simple notion that quickly exposing a site's value at the top of the page was a good thing for a time-starved audience. Since users don't have time for animations and rarely use controls to see more promotions, we had to come up with a new strategy to reach an audience skeptical that our sites had value. This post explains the design challenge of the new dynamic lead from a variety of angles and the outcomes.

please click "read more" for the goods...

At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.

"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.

"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."

Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.

Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.

"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.

Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.

The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.

Well, considering that that experience has little to do with words, I'll just say "check it out"...



But, if you like to read, the site says: "VUVOX is excited about the coming introduction of a new personal expression platform - called COLLAGE. This dynamic media creation suite will enable everyone to easily turn their photos, videos, text and audio clips into interactive story panoramas." At last someone finally built one of those. Been waiting... Thanks to Jonathan Meyers for the tip.