Today at Apple’s WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple had a bunch of Cinema Display monitors mounted together on a wall showing what looked to be some sort of pulsating canvas. But a closer look revealed that it was actually a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate, creating the effect.
I saw Björk's guy play this at her show when I saw her in Detroit just a few weeks back. It was really amazing, at her show they had cameras set up to show how the synth operators were using this. It really makes you think what the word interaction means.
Garrett Dimon recently wrote about ambient indicators. (His blog is great, by the way.) More specifically, he talks about how OS X deals with notifying the user of document changes on the close button (ambiently). But he also touches on how this applies to Web Design/Interaction Design:
Changing the color, typographic characteristics, or similar visual options does not reliably convey that information to all users.
This sentence lit up like a lightbulb; all these years I’d been spouting the words myself, yet somehow I managed to overlook how I apply this principle to my own work.
I recently used something like this in a menu <a class="selected" href="/">home</a>, when in reality I should have been using something like the following: <a href="/"><strong>home</strong></a>
The menu was showing changes with the selected class, but not in lynx, or on a screen reader. Using <strong> is just as easy to style, yet conveys ambient information, whereas a class does not, without a stylesheet.
This brings up a good thought. Why don’t screenreaders take in to account simple typographical information conveyed in CSS stylesheets? Do they? I don’t know; but they could and perhaps should. Especially when applied to the instance I’ve stated here. Just because I used a class instead of a <strong> element doesn’t mean I or the user should be struck on the wrist.
It just goes to show, that even the littlest nugget of information you’ve heard over and over again, can pass you by, or allude you.
Grand Valley gives you a list of academic programs from A-Z by displaying all the letters in the alphabet. Problem is, when you click Z, it just tells you “there are no sites associated with this letter.”
Don’t let me click on a link just to tell me it doesn’t exist, don’t put it there in the first place.
