Daniel Naumann

I’m not really sure how useful it is, but it certainly is interesting to see 11,000 tweets plotted over 24 hours – all relating to a “good morning” tweet. The colour coding shows what the time the tweet was sent (green is “early” while red is “late”).

This data visualisation reinforces the preconceptions of have of the USA – people around NYC get up and go (heavily green areas) while people over on the LA/San Fran side of things are a bit more laid back (a lot of red).

Taken from the infosethics blog

I don’t understand why ATMs are so poorly designed. These are customer facing devices and represent an extension of the company/brand. It’s like having a slow, rude and dumb person at the counter (some people might argue that you do find this, but usually the bank tries hard to have smiley customer service staff – even if they force them to smile).

I haven’t seen other ATMs with this problem, but the ANZ ATM makes you enter the “.00″ when entering a withdrawal amount. Why make me press 3 more buttons to tell it I want zero cents? It doesn’t even dispense coins so why do I need to tell it? I think all ATMs in Australia only dispense $20 and $50 notes. Why not have a $20 button and a $50 button and just press them for the number of notes you want of each denomination? You could perhaps have shortcut buttons for large amounts (ie. $600).

Another issue that I’ve discussed with people is why the withdrawal amounts don’t get customised. A reasonable number of people that I’ve asked about this withdraw amounts that aren’t preset (ie. they have to enter the amount with the key pad), but it’s almost always the same amount. Why doesn’t the ATM see that the last 20 times you’ve withdrawn the same amount and give you that option to withdraw it again?

There really is no (good) excuse why ATMs are so bad.

Here’s some friday funny for you (yes I know it’s only thursday but I have friday off, so it’s friday for me).

A slightly tenuous link to UX, but here’s a flowchart that shows the structure of the chorus to Total Eclipse of the Heart. I just thought it was an interesting way to represent it (and that someone even though to do it).

Thanks to bennyg for this (via twitter)

Most UX people can’t stand CAPTCHAs (I could probably say ‘all’, but there is most likely one out there that would make me a liar).  For me at least a CAPTCHA says, “I can’t be bothered to try and work out who’s a spammer, so I’ll just assume all my users are spammers and make them prove they’re not”. That’s a terrible attitude.

I’ve found a lot of anecdotal evidence, but here’s an informal study that shows some numbers. This study looked at conversion rates for sites over a 6 month period – 3 months with CAPTCHAs on, and 3 with it off.

The results? It did reduce spam by 88% (91 conversions to 11), ok that’s reasonable, but it’s still hasn’t stopped all the spam. Of more concern is that it reduced successful, after factoring for failed spam, by 3.2% (estimated). Maybe that’s not earth shattering, but if you’re in e-commerce and potentially you’re losing 3.2% of your revenue just to reduce spam, then I wouldn’t be happy.

Thanks to UX Australia for bringing this one to my attention.

Holograms are certainly taking their time becoming useful. I remember seeing them as a kid (at least 20 years ago) in a video game arcade. Holograms in every day use were just around the corner…

Now some researches from Shinado Lab (at the University of Tokyo) have taken it a step further by allowing a user to *feel* the hologram. The first step is to track your position (or your hand’s position in this case) using 2 wii remotes – this allows the user to interact with the hologram, ie. move your hand and the hologram can move in sync. Then they use an ultrasound device the lab developed to allow the user to feel. From my understanding (which might be wrong…), the ultrasound device uses multiple beams and where those beams cross, a pressure change occurs that can “felt”.

It’s hard to describe, so maybe you should just watch the video and read their description. Truly amazing stuff!

Thanks to Sri aka Monsterumble for this one (via twitter).

Have you always suspected that the media over reported on swine flu? Yeah me too. Sure, it’s a serious topic that needed some coverage, but they kind of got carried away. The Information is Beautiful site gives us our evidence – a news timeline showing the number of news stories for a variety of topics including Y2K, bird flu, Mad Cow disease, etc. Yep, you guesses it, the number of stories on swine flu eclipsed the other topics.

Thanks to bennyg for pointing this one out (via twitter)

Masking your password in the UI seems to be of little value anyway, but most applications seem to do it this way, and I’m sure users expect it (probably out of habit more than logic). So if you still want, or need to, have password masking, here’s a nice little visualisation of the password.

The idea is that a multicoloured image (like a tv test pattern) appears next to the field. The user will find it easier to recognise the colour pattern and know whether they entered their password correctly. Of course if you have lots of passwords, then you’ll have lots of coloured patterns to remember…

Found on infosthetics.

I’m not entirely sure why power plugs are design as they are, but it certainly doesn’t seem optimal. You need a rather large power board to fit 3 or 4 of them together. Here’s a great design that has a simple change and saves a huge amount of space as well as still fitting the current plug if needed.

Thanks to Monsterumble (aka Sri) via twitter.

A friend has pointed out another augmented reality app (as a follow up to my last post on the topic), but this time for the iPhone. I had read about it a little while ago as a demo, but it looks like it’s out now (or about to be) in the App store.

The app shows you where the nearest tube station is (for London). Hold up your iPhone and you see the London landscape via the camera on the phone. The app then overlays which tube stations are in the current line of sight and how far they are. Move the phone around to see other stations in other directions. Very useful for the winding streets of Old London Town.

Thanks to Kenzor for this (via twitter).

Most augmented reality apps that I’ve seen have either been simple demos of future work, or of novelty value only. Priority Mail however has a neat app that helps you chose which packaging/box you need to select. It does this my superimposing it’s box sizes over your package that you hold up to your camera.

I think augmented reality has great potential so it’s good to see this field developing – quite rapidly too.

Thanks to Tim O’Neill for pointing this one out (via twitter)