Chris Hanrath » Interface

UX Pattern Explorer

Chris — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:53:01 +0000

Check out Quince a new ux pattern explorer by Infragistics.

There are no good tools that make these patterns usable, and there isn’t much community to speak of around them. We at Infragistics thought that we could help and fill the gap – helping to make UX design patterns more findable, more discoverable, more usable, and, we hope, more communal and social.

Product distribution visualization

Chris — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:14:32 +0000

Glimpse.com has a nice feature that visualizes the available product distribution in a price range to refine the search. When adjusting the slider, a pop-up immediately indicates an estimated number of remaining products for the refined price range. (See Example)

Windows 7 Tray Progress Bar

Chris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:46:03 +0000

Windows 7 now visualizes progress right in the system tray even when the window is minimized. I like it!

Citation Infoviz

Chris — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:43:35 +0000

I just discovered a neat interactive beta visualization for citations in scientific publications that i found on isiknowledge.com

Really? …I mean seriously Microsoft?

Chris — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:56:54 +0000

Today i experienced an absolute showstopper even though I have been pretty satisfied with Windows Vista so far. For the past time as long as i remember the “Off” Button to the left of the “Lock” Button has been setting my Laptop to Standby.

Today – when leaving the Coffee shop – the same button suddenly decided to shut my system completely off with all my applications running. What would Nielsen say? Where is the Consistency, Recognition and Error Prevention?

Data is the Public Good

Chris — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:30:18 +0000

Due to my recent interest in information visualization i have been reading hundreds of blog posts related to gathering data and representing it the “right way”. One big challenge when visualizing data is to actually find datasets that can be parsed. I found an interesting blog post on data as a public good that has some interesting points about public data sets.

http://blog.fortiusone.com/2009/01/28/data-is-the-public-good-data-is-the-infrastructure-data-is-the-stimulus/

You can find some interesting websites related to information visualization if you look at si649 tagged items on delicious. I am still looking for data set resources, but so far datamob.org seems to be a great place to start.

NY TimesPeople

Chris — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:09:00 +0000

The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

Expedia Labs

Chris — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:03:57 +0000

Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

Verizon 411 Improvement

Chris — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:28:00 +0000

I was calling Verizon 411 the other day, they connected me to the desired phone number and as it has happened before nobody picked up the phone… So i repeated to call 411 to get the number once again. This time i was positively surprised, because as soon as i dialed, i was asked if i want to be reconnected to the last number. Great! This is what i call user experience.

Wundrbar – a new kind of search bar

Chris — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 01:49:28 +0000

A sweet new user interface for any kind of search request.

Welcome to a new kind of search bar! Wundrbar is a next generation
search bar that lets you control your personal accounts and launch any
kind of web search. For example, you can manage your online calendar,
start a flight search, update your twitter status, and much more. And
you can do it all from the same search bar.

[ wundrbar.com ]