Transmedia Design for 3 Screens - Make That 5 (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) - Excerpt

"...Transmedia User Experience

Most companies will probably deploy only 2 UI designs: mobile and desktop. Others might need 3, 4, or even all 5, depending on their industry. Whatever the number, there are two key points to remember:
  • Create separate and distinct UI designs for device categories that are sufficiently different. It's okay to have a similar design for, say, iOS and Android, with only a few modifications to suit each platform vendor's human interface guidelines. But your mobile sites and full desktop sites must be different, just as your mobile and desktop applications should be different.
  • Retain the feel of a product family across devices, despite the different UIs and different feature sets. This requires a transmedia design strategy.
Our experience with transmedia usability is not yet sufficient to provide an exhaustive list of guidelines for achieving a cohesive user experience across platforms. But we do know that it's essential to get the following 4 issues right:
  • Visual continuity. Obviously, UIs will look different on different screen sizes but they should look similar enough to feel like two sides of the same coin. No, it's not enough to have the same logo or the same color scheme. The interactive elements also must have a similar look. Layouts will clearly differ, but users should still feel confident where to locate stuff as they move between platforms.
  • Feature continuity. The smaller the device, the smaller the feature set you can comfortably provide. However, users should still feel that the same main features are available in all locations. Even more important, they should feel that the features work consistently, even if they've been simplified. Let's say, for example, that your e-commerce site offers product ratings. Both your mobile and full sites should use the same rating scale, but maybe your mobile site doesn't let users enter new reviews or doesn't show the full text of existing reviews by default. Designed correctly, however, users will still feel that they get the benefit of the full site's reviews while using the mobile site.
  • Data continuity. The user's data should be the same in all locations. Because of different feature sets, some data might not be available everywhere, but anything accessible in multiple places should be the same. Users shouldn't have to "synch" as a separate action.
  • Content continuity. We know that you must write much more concisely for mobile than for desktop use. But the basic content strategy should be the same; in particular, you should use a similar tone of voice for all platforms, so that you "sound" the same everywhere. For example, children love characters in Web design. If you use them, your mobile site might not have room for all the creatures, but should include the lead characters from the full site. (This will also promote visual continuity: the characters should look basically the same, even when drawn with fewer pixels. For that matter, character reuse also promotes feature continuity to the extent that navigation is based around the characters.)
To conclude: cross-platform UIs should be different but similar.

Learn More

More on visual continuity in the full-day Visual Design for Mobile Devices and Tabletstraining course on Visual Design for Mobile Devices and Tablets at the annual Usability Week conference".

The full-day training course Mobile User Experience 1: Usability of Websites and Apps on Mobile Devices discusses how to allocate features between the full desktop site and a mobile design, and the course on Writing for Mobile Users covers content style.

Like: To Make Students Understand Science, Let Them Doodle in Class - Education - GOOD

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Excerpt from good.is

The push to bring art back to schools could get a boost thanks to a new study that shows kids understand science better when they're encouraged to draw in class. A team of researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia write in the latest issue of Science that allowing students to draw during science class—the same doodling that teachers generally discourage—actually helps kids retain the information being taught.

"To be clear, we aren't talking about allowing students to scribble at will. The improved understanding and retention of information happens when students read a science passage and draw pictures demonstrating the content. For example, if a chemistry student is studying catalysts and draws a quick picture of a beaker over a Bunsen burner—then makes visual representations of the chemical reaction—she's more likely to internalize the concept. In addition, the researchers found that students who draw during science class actually enjoy the subject more than those who only read the text or write summaries of what they've read.

This isn't a completely surprising find, as scientists throughout history have used drawings, diagrams, and other kinds of visual aids to comprehend and explain scientific phenomena. And given that people are more apt to remember something if they write it down, it makes sense that drawing further stimulates the brain's ability to recall information.

The researchers conclude that along with reading, speaking, and writing, drawing should actually be regarded as a key part of science education. But why stop there? Bored students in English class might just give classics like Jane Eyre a second chance if they could doodle the drama going down between Jane, Mr. Rochester, and the unknown figure in the attic. Given all the benefits, let's bring drawing—and doodling—back to class..."

photo via Wikimedia Commons

Cindy Gallop, storytelling and SXSW |via Made by Many

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Excerpt:

"...Not familiar with Cindy Gallop? Buckle your seatbelt and read on…

Cindy's background is brandbuilding, marketing and advertising. She started up the US office of BBH in New York in 1998 and in 2003 was named Advertising Woman of the Year. She is the founder and CEO of www.IfWeRanTheWorld.com, a web meets world platform designed to turn good intentions into action one microaction at a time – it launched in beta with a demo at TED 2010. She's also the founder and CEO of www.makelovenotporn.com, which launched at TED in 2009. She acts as board advisor to a number of tech startups; she also consults, describing her consultancy approach as "I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business".

This event is open to men and women – in fact, we're gunning for as balanced and diverse an audience as we can muster. So if you're not afraid of strong language and explosions, send an RSVP to itsagirlsclub [at] gmail [dot] com and we will look forward to seeing you there...."

Hollywood Wastes No Time Securing the Movie Rights to Indie Mech Shooter Hawken

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From the site:

"Gamers aren't the only ones impressed by upcoming indie mech shooter Hawken's distinctive style and dynamic combat. Hollywood has taken notice as well, and now there's a movie in the works. A Romeo & Juliet meets District 9 movie.

That's how developer Adhesive apparently refers to the story behind Hawken, according to production company DJ2 Entertainment's Dmitri M. Johnson. His company has managed to snag the rights to the ambitious multiplayer game being created by nine men at the small independent game developer. Apparently a personal recommendation to the developer led to Johnson securing the rights, the team initially hesitant to worry about a movie with the game still in development.

While there is no writer attached to the movie project yet, Johnson does lay out a basic plot.

As for the story, it follows two young pilots from separate clans pitted against one another after a devastating virus has covered most of the heavily industrialized planet surface in toxic crystal, creative director Dan Jevons told TheWrap.

"They witness an event that suggests there is more to the nano-virus than meets the eye," Jevons said. "Now the race is on to discover the virus' origins and true purpose before their respective clans wipe each other out in a final, climatic battle."

But wait, isn't Hawken strictly a multiplayer affair? Where's this story coming from? Adhesive's Jonathan Kreuzer told Kotaku that the game will remain multiplayer, and any movie bits won't necessarily be directly related to the game...."

Very Cool App: Gif Shop Is YouTube For Everyday Animators | Fast Company

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From fastcompany.com:

"Gif Shop, a new app for the iPhone that allows users to easily create, send, and share .gifs, saw 30,000 downloads in its first month (July-August 2011) with 91% on the iPhone 4, 9% on 3GS, iPad, and iPod. It also attracted some intriguing users. Mike Rosenstein, a producer who works with Ben Stiller, has been using it to make an archive of .gifs featuring well-liked actors and actresses, for example.
The cofounder and newly minted app entrepreneur, Daniel Savage, spoke with FastCompany.com this week about what makes these quirky, often instructional, sometimes beautiful animations so enduring, and why his startup may be the new Instagram. Savage is responsible for the Gif Shop concept, brand, and marketing; technical designer Matthew Archer, a creative technologist based in Chicago with previous experience in productivity apps, leads development..."

Very Cool Experiment with Scott McCloud's Infinite Canvas: Building a parallax scrolling storytelling framework | Tutorial | .net magazine

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From netmagazine:

"Stevan Živadinović, the brains behind multi-plane side-scroller web comic Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, walks us through the development of the Parallaxer platform and gives a crash course on turning pencil drawings into transparent-background assets

Reading MS Paint Adventures I had an epiphany: in this day and age, there is little justification in keeping comics within the constraints of early 20th century offset printing. No need for inked line art, or hand-lettered speech bubbles that compete with art for page real estate, no need to pack the drawings into grids of fixed dimensions and print them in multiples of four: those are all solutions to problems we no longer have. So, I took Scott McCloud's infinite canvas and upped the ante by throwing some JavaScript into the pot. The result is Hobo Lobo of Hamelin, a webtime story about a city, its scruples, some rats, a lobo, his woodwind and the stuff that goes down...."

Arthur S Clarke Predicting the Future in 1964: The Futurist's Dilemma via The Technium

In this 1964 clip from the BBC Horizon show, Arthur C. Clarke makes a fairly precise prediction, but one that is only half right. "We'll no longer commute in cities," he says, "we'll communicate instead." He also says, "I am perfectly serious when I suggest that you'll be able to call a man and not know where he is, whether he is in Tahiti or Bali or London." He got that part right, with cell phones everywhere, but on average we still do commute in cities.

However it is the preamble to his prediction, where he hedges his bets, that I think he is the most insightful. Clarke says that if you find a prediction reasonable, than it is probably wrong, because the future is not reasonable; it is fantastic! But if you could return from the future with the exact truth about what will happen, no one would believe you because the future is too fantastic! By fantastic he means issuing from the realm of fantasy and the imagination -- beyond what we expect.

via kk.org