- word2vec — This tool provides an efficient implementation of the continuous bag-of-words and skip-gram architectures for computing vector representations of words. These representations can be subsequently used in many natural language processing applications and for further research. From Google Research paper Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space.
- What Every Frontend Developer Should Know about Page Rendering — Rendering has to be optimized from the very beginning, when the page layout is being defined, as styles and scripts play the crucial role in page rendering. Professionals have to know certain tricks to avoid performance problems. This arcticle does not study the inner browser mechanics in detail, but rather offers some common principles.
- Cayley — an open-source graph inspired by the graph database behind Freebase and Google’s Knowledge Graph.
- Alice in Warningland (PDF) — We performed a field study with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox’s telemetry platforms, allowing us to collect data on 25,405,944 warning impressions. We find that browser security warnings can be successful: users clicked through fewer than a quarter of both browser’s malware and phishing warnings and third of Mozilla Firefox’s SSL warnings. We also find clickthrough rates as high as 70.2% for Google Chrome SSL warnings, indicating that the user experience of a warning can have tremendous impact on user behaviour.
"ux" entries
Podcast: Design for how the world should work
Josh Clark and Tim O’Reilly on designing beyond screens, and beyond a single device.
Editor’s note: this podcast episode is the first in our new bi-weekly O’Reilly Radar Podcast series. You can subscribe through iTunes, SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.
As the Internet is increasingly embedded into our physical world, it’s important to start designing for physical and intentional interactions with interfaces to supplement the passive, data-gathering interactions — designing smart devices that service us in the background, but upon which we also can exert our will.
In this episode, Josh Clark (in an interview) and Tim O’Reilly (in a keynote) both address the importance of designing for contextual awareness and physical interaction. Clark stresses that we’re not facing a challenge of technology, but a challenge of imagination. O’Reilly argues that we’re not paying enough attention to the aspects of people and time in designing the Internet of Things, and that the entire system in which we operate is the user interface — as we design this new world, we must think about user needs first.
Four short links: 1 July 2014
Efficient Representation, Page Rendering, Graph Database, Warning Effectiveness
Four short links: 6 June 2014
Ethical UX, Personal Robots, Sharter URLs, and Magical Devices
- Ethics and UX Design (Slideshare) —We are the thieves of time. This excellent talk challenges you (via Aristotle) to understand what a good life is, and whether you’re designing to bring it about. (via Keith Bolland)
- Pepper Personal Robot — Japan’s lead in consumer-facing robotics is impressive. If this had been developed by an American company, it’d either have a Lua scripting interface or twin machine guns for autonomous death.
- shrturl — spoof, edit, rewrite, and general evil up webpages, hidden behind an URL shortening service.
- Lessons for Building Magical Devices (First Round Review) — The most interesting devices I’ve seen take elements of the physical world and expose them to software.[…] If you buy a Tesla Model S today, the behavior of the car six months from now could be radically different because software can reshape the capability of the hardware continuously, exceeding the speed of customer demand.
Theming in Kivy
Adding consistency to Kivy's Python UI tools
Kivy has a wonderful set of built-in widgets that can be extended in numerous ways. They have very useful behaviors, but their look and feel may not integrate well with your App or the platforms you are targeting. Kivy doesn’t support theming out of the box right now, but if you poke around enough, there are a range of options you can use to customize the default look of widgets without having to define your own inherited versions of them.
I’ll first introduce you to Kivy’s image atlases, which are less mysterious than they sound, and are important groundwork for understanding theming in Kivy. Then you’ll learn two different ways to do manual theming in Kivy, with an eye to future automation.
Introducing Atlases
To understand theming, you must first understand atlases. An atlas is essentially a collection of distinct images combined into a single image file for loading efficiency. A JSON file describes the location of the separate images inside that master image file so that Kivy can access them directly. If you’ve ever worked with CSS sprites, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the following example should explain everything.
Four short links: 25 April 2014
IoT UX, Tilty Library, Local Govt Dashboard, and SF Dreams
- UX of the Internet of Things — a Pinterest board of IoT designs and experience.
- parallax.js — Javascript library for tilt, shake, etc. interactivity on iPad. NICE demo.
- Gov.UK Local Government Dashboard Prototype is Live — not glorious, but making the move from central to local government is super-important. (via Steve Halliday)
- How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors are Shaping Your Future (Smithsonian) — SF writers create our dreams. “Techno-optimists have gone from thinking that cheap nuclear power would solve all our problems to thinking that unlimited computing power will solve all our problems,” says Ted Chiang, who has explored the nature of intelligence in works such as The Lifecycle of Software Objects. “But fiction about incredibly powerful computers doesn’t inspire people the same way that fiction about large-scale engineering did, because achievements in computing are both more abstract and more mundane.”
Four short links: 23 April 2014
Mobile UX, Ideation Tools, Causal Consistency, and Intellectual Ventures Patent Fail
- Samsung UX (Scribd) — little shop of self-catalogued UX horrors, courtesy discovery in a lawsuit. Dated (Android G1 as competition) but rewarding to see there are signs of self-awareness in the companies that inflict unusability on the world.
- Tools for Ideation and Problem Solving (Dan Lockton) — comprehensive and analytical take on different systems for ideas and solutions.
- Don’t Settle for Eventual Consistency (ACM) — proposes “causal consistency”, prototyped in COPS and Eiger from Princeton.
- Intellectual Ventures Loses Patent Case (Ars Technica) — The Capital One case ended last Wednesday, when a Virginia federal judge threw out the two IV patents that remained in the case. It’s the first IV patent case seen through to a judgment, and it ended in a total loss for the patent-holding giant: both patents were invalidated, one on multiple grounds.
Four short links: 4 February 2014
UX Fundamentals, Mozilla Persona, Pi Tests, and The Holodeck
- UX Fundamentals, Crash Course — 31 posts introducing the fundamental practices and mindsets of UX.
- Why We Love Persona And You Should Too — Mozilla’s identity system is an interesting offering. Fancy that, you might have single-sign on without Single Pwn-On.
- Raspberry Pi As Test Harness — Pi accessory maker uses Pis to automate the testing of his … it’s Pis all the way down.
- The Holodeck Begins to Take Shape — displays, computation, and interesting input devices, are coming together in various guises.
Accessibility: Why I Hate Checklists
A truly accessible website is both accessible and usable
Every time I give a talk about making accessible websites, I get the following question:
“What checklist do you use to make sure a site is accessible?”
My response always surprises them:
“I don’t use a list.”
Why not? There are so many lists out there that I could be using! Practically every US government agency has a checklist published on their site, and several non-government sites offer checklists of their own. With so many free resources, why do I ignore checklists?
Knowing and Understanding Your Audience
Measuring impact and changing behavior
I had the opportunity to sit down with Laura Klein (@lauraklein) and talk about the importance of creating effective user experiences. Laura is a UX expert and consultant. She stresses the need to figure out what works by talking to users and determining what works through usability testing. She’s also author of O’Reilly Media’s UX for Lean Startups: Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design. It hit home when Laura told me, “If people aren’t getting it, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Key highlights include:
- How to figure out what works, so you can avoid a poor user experience. [Discussed at 0:19]
- It’s important to avoid porting a traditional process to a new product and service. Instead you need to think about how to design a new and natural experience. [Discussed at 2:16]
- Think about context when designing new processes. [Discussed at 2:37]
- The first step in creating a successful UX is knowing and understanding your audience. [Discussed at 3:49]
- Using these principles beyond web sites. In all good UX applications, the goal is not to notice the interface. [Discussed at 5:16]
- It’s critical to observe people, so you’re not assuming a knowledge base. [Discussed at 7:35]
- The importance of A/B Testing. And how design is not an art; it’s trying to solve a problem. [Discussed at 9:54]
- How the build, measure, learn lean methodology fits with UX design. It’s all about measuring the impact and changing behavior. [Discussed at 11:11]
You can view the full interview here:
Related:
Purposeful Design Principles for Behavior Change
How to design products and services that help users change behavior
Steve Wendel (@sawendel) is the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet where he develops applications that help users take control of their finances. He’s also currently writing Designing for Behavior Change. I recently sat down to talk with Steve about the importance of testing and iteration, role of psychology, and resources and tools.
Key highlights include: