You can find out more about the LilyPad project here: http://lilypond.media.mit.edu/

And you can purchase your own LilyPads here: https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/135

To begin with it tries to assume what things are and are not productive for you, but you can change  websites or software to being a different level of productivity, and that changes the way that these graphs look and how it calculates your productivity.

And although some of my “not productive” time is productive because I’m chatting with other developers who are helping me out, I still think this is a great product with a ton of potential to help you out in knowing where your time is really spent.

At any rate, when I asked my Rescue Time contact how they came up with such wonderful visualizations, he pointed me toward and excellent tool. Data Driven Documents from GitHub (http://d3js.org/).

This resource is just, amazing. You can get the code for the graphs that they show, and they have all sorts of examples. I think this will really make my next dashboard a step above. And these guys have really done their research! When they talk about bullet charts, they even talk about Stephen Few, and how he created this type of chart.

And the best part is, it’s totally free! It’s an excellent resource that I will be using a lot of in the future. Thank you Rescue Time!

Do you know of any great resources out there for usability, user experience, or design? Let me know in the comments below and I will review them in future posts.

The idea for the interactivity is really interesting, but the actual follow through was poorly done. As you hover over letters on the website you get different pop ups.

The implementation problem is that they use different letters in their name to make these items pop up. There’s no cognitive mapping as to why these pop ups should be connected to the letters that you hover over. Also, if you look at the image at the top you can see that some letters are just slightly more white than others and those are the ones that you can hover over in order to find the information. When you go to the slight this is not readily apparent. My first time through I moved my mouse down to find out if there was something under contact and a bunch of things popped up, which was startling because I was not expecting it. Further, there is nothing clickable on this site aside fromt he contact button. If I want to know more information about them or get away from the busy site, I cannot as this is their only page. Lastly, some of the text is big, some small, some boxes are scrollable, some make the whole page scroll, there is a large lack of consistency in the page.

How a marketing group who makes content and websites can have a website with such low usability and such a confusing user experience, I’m not entirely sure.

I would suggest that if they want to keep the interactivity that they have, that the letters that you can hover over for more information are apparent, that the pop ups are smaller with much less text, and that they then have links to further information and at least a portfolio. I can go to another marketing firms website and view a portfolio to decide if I want to contact them or not. If I cannot see your portfolio, I have no reason to contact you in the first place. Especially with a website where I get lost, frustrated, and ultimately do not wish to work with you in the end.

However, being that I have no vehicle in Atlanta, and bookstores not being readily available, I’ve been trying to look up books online by subject and content. This is apparently much easier said than done. Search engines for Amazon and Barnes and Nobel are set to search by authors and titles, not by content. Sometimes they go so far as to look at the description inside the book, but so far my searches have returned little to no useful information. With the thousands upon thousands of books in the world written in the English language, I find it hard to believe that no one has told a story about going away on an internship or business trip for a long period of time and feeling homesick. So I’m left to believe that it’s a problem with the way the search works.

So what do you do when technology isn’t quite helping you find what you need? What happens when search engines aren’t helping you? Well, you search for a new search engine.

First on the list of things I found was a site called Which Book (www.WhichBook.net) where you slide some bars and it attempts to find you a book in line with those topics.

While it has an attractive design and it’s easy to use, I’m looking for something a little more directed.

The next website is called What Should I Read Next (www.whatshouldireadnext.com). Which I found less cluttered than Book Lamp (also, book lamp couldn’t find books I liked), but it only asks what book you like and suggests similar books. That’s helpful, but I’ve not read a book like the one that I want right now.

There’s not a whole lot else out there that I could find. If you know of a good book search engine that you like, feel free to comment on this entry and let me know. I’ll check it out and post it here later.

So, I turn on the console, and I go to find the store thinking that’s where I need to start. And if you didn’t know, the menu system is horribly organized so that takes longer than necessary.

See that button there on the bottom that has no label on it that’s buried in this menu? Yeah, that’s the place you buy games. So you click on that, and you go to the store, and click a button that says PS3 Games, and you get this horribly complex menu.

At this point I’m thinking…. okay, I can’t just find a listing of available games so I’ll search. I click on the little search icon and get…

Which you have to click on to get a text box. Maybe I’m missing something and people can get keyboards for their PS3, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the normal case, so this extra click is completely unnecessary.

Their text input area isn’t the easiest thing to use either, especially when they ask you to put in your email address and @ is buried in the symbols menu. At least they have the prediction on the side, although I don’t know why my name is a prediction for jou…..

At this point I figure I just came out of the text entry area and I should just be able to hit enter to move on just like on my XBox, right? Nope. You have to move your cursor down to the search button, because apparently this set up is created for someone using a mouse and keyboard that I don’t have. And I get….

A bunch of stuff related to the game I want, but not the game I want. Thanks guys. The game is further down the list. Why wouldn’t it be the first thing? It matched what I input best. Also, don’t let the “all” pulldown menu fool you, the only other thing in there is “title” and that doesn’t change the outcome of this search. I tried that. So I scroll down the list and find my game.

Oh, my great search is over! Wait… no…. it’s not (these pictures were taken after I finally figured it all out, so “download” used to say “Buy It”. I go to click on “Buy It”, and it says I need to sign up for the PSN network. It doesn’t take me to where I can sign up or anything, just tells me that I haven’t signed up for the network, so I can’t buy this game. I also can’t put it into my cart so I don’t have to do this all over again.

So I think to myself, I’ll sign up online so I can use my computer and a keyboard. Which would have been a great idea if their website wasn’t down for servicing at 6pm (Pacific) on a Tuesday. So I have to get back out of the place where you buy games and back to this menu.

Where I get to fill out a ton of random information about myself so that they will let me play one game. Including, where I live (they don’t need to know but they won’t let you not fill it out), my first and last name, etc all using the same input I used for searching on their online store.

I got to go back onto the store, go through the same hoops to find the game again, and then give them more information, which actually didn’t purchase the game so I told my boyfriend “I bought the game…. I think.” But I had not. So I had to go back into the store, click the buy it button again, so I could finally get to….

SUCCESS! And then I wasn’t sure I would be able to find the game on my console once I was done. So thanks PSN, the comics that make fun of you for constant updates and difficult use aren’t lying in the least. What took me 30 minutes to do on your console I could have done in 5 on XBox360. Mostly because their menus make sense, they have an alphabetical listing of their games, and when I click buy and I need to sign up for something, that “Buy It” button is connected to the forms I need to fill out in order to purchase the game and filling out those forms actually purchases the game.

This is why you’re in the corner unplugged most of the time while XBox gets new games every month or so.

Alright, off to play Journey. Until next time.

So CHI2012 this year was pretty awesome. Held in Austin Texas, and even though the water made me sick for some reason, still a fun experience. Also, I didn’t take hardly enough photos.

I showed up early because I was a part of the workshop on healthcare and aging as that’s where my presentation was. I met a lot of awesome people with great projects for elder care including (but not limited to) some girls from Standford who rocked a program called MILES which is a lot like our smart phone program called PUCK that prompts the user to do certain things. Ours also does activity recognition. Also, a couple of women from England who filled us in on how to get your focus group attendees to be more talkative. They say offer tea and cakes, I think in America it’s coffee and bagels or donuts. And a company who makes a tablet for reminding users of things they need to do throughout the day.

Then the conference started with far too many talks to go see with many of them conflicting! But I went to every session to see something and often hopped from room to room. The opening speaker really got us off to a good start, Margaret Gould Stewart from YouTube who talked about how we share media and make it our own.

Then, off to the talks! I mostly did elder care, healthcare, or video games (simply because they’re fun). I learned a lot about video game development, for all ages, and how to design better for our older adults. I have a few pictures, but the ones that turned out well were all from the talk where they had a TV and snow globes with pictures of local area things and when you put the snow globes on the TV it played a video that helped the user to bring up old memories. It was all very interesting.

I learned other things, like that crowd sourcing your data may not be a great idea. That older adults like to play video games if they emulate things they’re used to. That video game tutorials are only necessary if it’s a complex game. And that someone made an app for your iPad that uses the camera to orient itself to the way you’re facing (but that’s not out yet). SOOOO much!

It ended with a talk by Hugh Herr from MIT who made a mechanical prothetic leg that emulates the way your ankle and knee work so that walking feels normal. It was some of the most amazing tech I saw the whole conference.

If you can’t tell in the picture (look closely) he’s wearing two of them, because he lost both of his legs in a climbing accident. It was an incredibly moving talk.

This and much much more are the reasons why CHI is my favorite conference of the year, this year AND last year. I may not be a computer scientist or engineer, but it’s great content, great parties, and I always feel welcome at this conference. If you’re in the area or are interested at all I highly recommend it.

Yeah, horrible pictures. I’ll work on that. At any rate, it’s a really great advertisement in that it’s fun and makes people smile as they walk by. But also horrible because I don’t remember who the advertisement was for. Not that you can read it in my pictures. But it’s a great idea for getting people to notice your ad when they’re in a hurry and not really paying attention to the ads on the walls.

Pretty awesome.

Until next time!