Cool IU and Ergonomics type examples?

DublinWriter

One of the things that mosts interests me is the field of UI Design, ergonomics and data visualisation.

I'd like to ask anyone out there to stump up any examples they feel are particularly exemplory in this area.

I've seen a lot of interesting thin-client stuff recently done with Ajax that look very promising.

One of the older examples I can think of is the old defunct push-technology PointCast interface, ten years later and no-one has touched it.

Another particularly cool interface I've seen was for the Visual Thesaurus product, which is based on the crazily expensive Thinkmap SDK.

Anyone got any favourites?

Evil Phil

Here's a good article on web design: http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-2.0-design-style-guide.cfm

joe_chicken

Not sure if you're just talking about web UIs but this is a pretty cool file manager (This video just shows photos, but it can show other files too)
Low Fat

DublinWriter

joe_chicken wrote:

Not sure if you're just talking about web UIs but this is a pretty cool file manager (This video just shows photos, but it can show other files too)
Low Fat

Many thanks! That's the kind of thing I'm after, something that makes you go 'wow' in the first 30 seconds (please don't confuse my notion of 'wow' with the current Vista marketing campaign).

I do like that low fat thingy, but it seems a little 'clunky' in terms of performance, or maybe thats just the framerate in the YouTube vid. Check out the Visual Thesauraus demo I posted and the way associated words 'explode' or 'blossom' out when you click them. It has an 'organic' feel about it.

I think there's a certain laziness when it comes to UI design, primarily hamstrung by developers wanting to whack something together really quickly using the Win32 control set.

aidan_walsh

primarily hamstrung by developers wanting to whack something together really quickly using the Win32 control set.

I'm not convinced that thats it. I think its more that neither developers nor project managers yet fully understand the importance of a good UI - one that lets the user do just enough straight up, but also one that looks and feels good to use. Top that with the unwillingness to hire a decent designer to do the UI, rather than letting the developers (or at least those with a sense of visual design) handle it.

As a contribution, one interesting project that I saw a while back was Don't Click It, a UI prototype to work entirely without having to click anything. Its (IMO) a very limited area of usefulness, and definately one thats more prone to error and requires more care to operate than the WIMP alternative.

joe_chicken

DublinWriter wrote:

I do like that low fat thingy, but it seems a little 'clunky' in terms of performance, or maybe thats just the framerate in the YouTube vid

Yeah, was wondering that myself, the guy who made it has a pretty good example of it on YouTube, but you have to put up with his shìtty voice over

I do agree about the lazy UI thing, considering the amount of processing power we have, you'd think they'd be able to come up with something better than what we had 20 years ago...

Not to say I don't agree with Aidan, but there are enough good designers, beta products,project managers, testers and about 30 years of solid UI experience under our belts that it shouldn't be that hard.

Peteee

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/11/10/the-office-2007-ui-bible.aspx

A good overview and details into the thinking behind the new Office 2007 User Interface. A great read.