USE DESIGN blog

A while ago I wrote a post on different search engines and different ways to represent search results, different being non-Google. Here is another fine example, using the currently-very-in-vogue Coverflow visualisation: Searchme. You can browse through the visuals of the websites without clicking on them and returning to the results list: at least one click less per result and a much better overview!

The speed and fluency of the images are quite impressive. Besides, the search key word is indicated on each page.

Même sans s’attacher à la pertinence ou à l’intérêt des contenus diffusés sur ces cadres lumineux (une publicité, une chaîne d’information, un message institutionnel, une recette de cuisine), avouez que cet envahissement de l’image change notre environnement proche.



Fin 2007, les fabricants d’écrans plats annonçaient des chiffres record de vente en France, presque 5,8 millions d’unités. Or je ne pense pas que seuls les particuliers aient tous décidés de changer leur vieux téléviseur cathodique : le bars ont ouvert le bal avec les dernières coupes du monde de foot et de rugby, chacun souhaitant attirer le public qui ne pouvait se rendre dans les stades, faisant ainsi de ces espaces étriqués et bondés, pour seulement quelques heures, la nouvelle arène populaire.



Depuis tout le monde s’y est mis. Faites le compte du nombre d’écrans que vous croisez dans la journée, moi aujourd’hui j’en ai approché de près ou de loin plusieurs dizaines…



Quelle influence cela va-t-il avoir sur notre vie ? Voyez déjà les gens attirés par la lumière de ces cadres hypnotiques qui, dans une brasserie, passent plus de temps à lever les yeux qu’à regarder dans leur assiette, ou mieux leur interlocuteur. Observez, lors d’un concert, que les lumière bleues des écrans de portable ou d’appareil photo numérique ont définitivement remplacées les lumières oranges de nos valeureux briquets Bic…



Me concernant, certains jours, j’ai véritablement envie de tout éteindre… Et voila que d’autres m’ont devancé et sont passés à l’acte : munis d’un petit boîtier dédié, ils se filment dans différentes zones commerciales, et éteignent toutes les télévisions qui les entourent (YouTube : rechercher “TV-B-Gone”).







Vandalisme visuel, simple blague, volonté d’économiser de l’énergie ? Un peu de tout ça… Si seulement cela pouvait inciter ceux qui nous imposent ces écrans à se poser la question de leur intérêt. Non seulement les 4 par 3 ne sont pas près de disparaitre, mais en plus demain… ils bougent !

Grand lecteur de science fiction dans ma jeunesse, et constatant à l’époque le peu d’innovations présente dans mon quotidien, je me suis un jour demandé si cette “fiction” ne demeurerait pas à jamais réservé à des étagères de bibliothèques remplies de mots imprimés sur des feuilles blanches. Les ouvrages d’Asimov, K.Dick et autres Gibson semblaient effectivement à des années lumières de la réalité des années 80.



Les images même apparemment familières de rues de grandes métropoles imaginaires que Ridley Scott (metteur en scène) et Sid Mead (designer) avaient tenté d’illustrer dans Blade Runner ne parvenait décidément pas à réduire la part de fiction de cette science. A mes yeux et à ma modeste culture, elle n’avait rien de concret et cela en était fort engageant pour mon imaginaire mais tout aussi frustrant face à mon désir de voir mon monde changer.







Or, en cette année 2008, par bien des signes (numérique, Internet, biotech, nanotech) on peut prendre conscience que ces changements sont à leurs prémices. Loin de moi l’idée de tous les énumérer ici, mais un seul est ,je trouve, particulièrement révélateur : les écrans plats qui envahissent nos maisons, nos bureaux, nos rues…



Rappelez-vous ces villes de science fiction, mégalopoles mixant New-York et Tokyo où chaque mur, intérieur ou extérieur diffuse une information, un message, une publicité. Maintenant regardez aujourd’hui autour de vous, dans un bar, à la gare, dans le hall d’une tour de bureau, dans votre salon, dans une pharmacie, dans le bus ou certains metros… Quel mur n’a pas aujourd’hui son écran plat ?



A Los Angeles, un magnat de l’immobilier est tout décidé à rendre réel les croquis de Sid Mead en intégrant des murs d’écrans LCD sur les façades d’immeubles de la ville. Premier signe d’une science fiction qui nous rattrape ? Simple évolution technologique des peintures murales de réclames des immeubles du siècle dernier ?



A suivre…

The metropolitan system of my native city, Moscow, was probably my first ‘good user experience’ when growing up. In a country not particularly famous for optimal user friendliness or consumer care, the Moscow metro is until today an example of a truly well-conceived user experience. It is built to last and the quality, as always, is in the details.

First, the Moscow metro is the most beautiful of them all, but this is well-known fact. There are not two stations alike, each has its own character. This is not only beautiful, it helps recognize the stations in a glance. The metro is build for the centuries to come, in marble and granite, decorated with golden mosaics, statues and chandeliers. Moscow metro is impeccably clean. Entering a station, especially in the center, is like entering an underground palace.

The metro plan is clever: it has the shape of a spider. Coloured lines cross a circle. This means that to change you either go to the closest intersection with another line, as all ways lead to the downtown, or get off at the circle and take a shortcut. It is an extremely comprehensive system.

When you arrive at a station, a voice in the train informs you about its name (which is the case in Paris only on one line. In Paris you have to pay attention to the name written on the wall). The tone of voice is nowadays friendlier than it was in Soviet times. The same voice kindly says ‘Attention, doors are closing’ and the name of the next station. Besides, on the stations walls there is a representation of the line you are on, showing all the cross-overs and all the stations of the connected lines. This is an extremely helpful feature.

In general, it is impossible to loose yourself in that system, because the information is abundant. Considering the huge distances in Moscow and how many people take the metro every day, it is a comforting user experience. Unless, of course, you cannot read Russian. Then you’d better start learning it.

Répondre aux nombreuses sollicitations de son mobile, ses mails, ou de sa messagerie instantanée dans toute les situations (travail, rendez-vous, au volant, etc.) est loin d’être toujours quelque chose d’évident. Pour palier à ce besoin grandissant de toujours vouloir garder le contact ; et ne pas être distrait ou dérangé aux moments inopportuns ; le cabinet de consulting en développement de nouveaux produits Kaleidoscope propose un concept nommé “Tame” (”dompter” en français).





L’objet se présente sous forme de cube, auquel l’utilisateur peut attribuer un message personnalisé à chacune des 6 faces. Dépourvu de bouton ou de clavier, “Tame” se configure entièrement via une interface web. Il suffit ensuite d’activer “Tame” et de positionner la face correspondant au message que vous souhaitez diffuser vers le haut. Grâce à sa liaison bluetooth (qui le relie à votre iphone qui bien évidemment est toujours connecté au net :-), il se chargera de mettre a jour votre statut sur l’ensemble des moyens de communication que vous utilisez (msn, facebook, mails, mobile, etc.).


Fini donc les interruptions intempestives au volant ou au travail, vous allez pouvoir travailler efficacement et être à la fois plus prudent en conduisant.

Sometimes search results are like bread buns - they’d better be fresh. Or, as we are in Paris, like French baguette: it should be baked just before you enter the bakery.

One feature I always liked about YouTube is that you can sort your search results by date. This way you can easily see what sort of totally useless stuff has been dumped recently about a particular subject. This useful feature has known some metamorphosis in the past year. First, it was inside a drop-down menu, which I didn’t like but couldn’t get around. Then, for just a short period, it had disappeared somewhere, to quickly come back on the highest level, as a simple link, right next to ‘Relevance’.I don’t know how they do design at YouTube, but here is an example of a design team who somehow listened to the users and deduced a choice list (drop-down) to two basic items: relevance and date. Probably this is what people use most. And they offered it in a more direct way because nobody likes drop-down menus.

The ’sort by date’ link is something I still want in Google. How often do I search and then jump into the first three-four results, only to discover later that the answer to my question was from 1999. Of course, for some questions this doesn’t matter. But for most questions the age of the information is very relevant.

To bypass this problem on Google and get, so to say, the freshest baguette, you need to go into Advanced Search and that is where strange things start happening. In the google.com Advanced Search the field ‘date’ is hidden behind ‘Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more’ group, which you have to expand to use it. On google.fr, however, the date field is the 5th in the form, directly at hand.

Do French people search more often by date? Were they complaining to Google about this? Was the English population of the planet willing to content itself with yesterday’s baguette?

Why have this difference? Google knows.

Sur son blog “Petitinvention”, que je vous invite vivement à découvrir, le designer Mac Funamizu poste un billet dans lequel il pousse la métaphore du dossier encore un peu plus loin. Simple mais efficace !





Autre proposition, fonctionnelle ici ; l’utilisation de la 3D pour naviguer dans une arborescence de dossiers et de fichiers. Pour l’essayer c’est ici!





Si naviguer sur les deux premiers niveaux s’avère plutôt agréable, le système atteint vite ses limites en cas d’arborescence compliquée et cela malgré l’utilisation de la profondeur de champs. L’expérience n’en reste pas moins intéressante.

One thing by which you can recognize a true Parisian: he is very quickly annoyed.

To go to work I take a small electrical bus called the Montmartrobus. You are supposed to get in through the front door, swipe your pass or ticket and exit through the back door. This morning an old lady came in through the back door, as other passengers were getting out.
‘Sorry’, she said to the driver, showing him her pass, ‘I got in through the other door.’

The driver was a true Parisian. He got immediately thoroughly annoyed.

‘You see?’ he exclaimed. ‘This is what I mean! You are supposed to get in through the front door, not the back door! This way the counters can register how many people are boarding this bus! If everybody just walks in through the back door the people back in the office will think there are too few passengers and they will give you less and less buses! I am not worried about myself, I will not be out of work, but YOU, you soon will be out of buses!’

‘I am very sorry’, said the old lady. ‘I will not do it again.’

But the driver was passionate about the future of public transportation. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘You will be sorry when you have no buses and it will be all your fault! Not just for you, for everybody!’
‘I said I was sorry’, said the old lady, getting out at the next stop.

And the interaction designer in the back of the bus thought that she just had seen a very interesting use case.

Related reading:
The Connected Bus
Deutsche Bahn Launches Touch&Travel

The difference between internet and shopping is that you cannot walk in and just gaze at things. Before you can do that, you are obliged to to search for what it is you want to gaze at. Internet used to be mostly text-oriented and so is every search. But there is more than just words out there.

Daily Slurp offers website search by color. When would you search a website by color? When you are a visual designer and want some inspiration. You can search by a combination of a main and an accent color. What is strange, however, is that the search itself is not offered by choosing a color on a pallet, but by choosing the name of the color in a drop-down menu, like ‘red’. Sooooo boring. Not only every visual designer knows that there are millions of colors of red, but scientific research has shown that every human being sees the colors slightly differently.



The discovery of Daily Slurp prompted me to see, if there are more ways to search than just by keywords. Retrievr offers an image search by sketch. However, my drawing of a red tulip gave me everything BUT a red tulip, so I suppose the engine can be improved.



FindSounds offers extensive help when searching for a sound.

There is a number of question/answer based search engines. An especially lively example is Ms. Dewey.

Besides, there is a number of search engines, which make an effort not as much as to offer an alternative search method, but to present the results in a more meaningful way. And when you try one of those, you find yourself thinking that Google results page is really nothing more than the stuff thrown in your face with the message ‘You figure it out’. For instance, Hakia presents the results in thematic chapters. If you type in ‘tango’, it will deliver you History, Founders and Innovators, Musicians, Venus and so on, including some illustrations. This is what I would call the encyclopedic search. However, if you type ‘interaction design’, it just gives you the plain old list of results. I wonder why.

Kartoo offers a relationship-based results page.



And then there is personalized thematic search such as this demonstration. Aetna Healthline proposes a search concerning your specific medical symptoms, including pushing the information to the user to give him/her a complete picture of the condition and its consequences.

When you travel and need to find a hotel, there are multiple criteria by which you choose one. Price, of course, but also the geographical location, closeness to certain interesting landmarks or even how noisy is the street outside your window. Searching for hotels on the internet can be very time consuming, looking at hotels’ pages, comparing prices and photos. The website Trivop has now found a solution. Now only it allows you to search hotels quickly on the map of the city (Google Maps did that already), but it offers you a video of the hotel exterior and interior.
Currently those videos are made by professionals, but the website claims that on short term travelers themselves would be able to post their videos of hotels to help other travelers.