I saw Hayao Miyazaki's anime Spirited Away last night. Fantastic! Great story and impressive graphical style using a fine mix of traditional cartoon, oil painting, filtered digital imagery, and photorealistic 3D rendering.
Character drawings looked as simple as Saturday morning cartoons, but body expressions and motions for Chihiro was really good. They must have studied how young teenage girls behave very carefully. Same amount of detail wasn't apparent in rest of the cast, but I was too busy looking at the background scenery to mind.
My favorite character was No Face, a masked ghost that starts eery and then shift your emotions through friendly, suspicious, disgusting, pitiful, and finally content as the movie progresses. Witch's baby brat was funny when it turned into a fat rat, but not understandable. So, No Face Rules! I recommend Spirited Away strongly.
I wrote about how gender differences, specifically gender-specific intellectual blindness, might affect UI design and asked how it might affect new breed of file system designs like Longhorn's. Scoble, Longhorn evangelist, didn't see what I was talking about. So I explained in a comment:
"The difference is in how strong the association between information and surrounding context is.
My theory is that men tend to remember more accurately how, when, and where they last saw or interacted with what or who regardless of whether it makes sense.
On the other hand, women tend to be better at remember structure that makes sense to them and is likely to shuffle things around until it does and do so again when it doesn't.
Could be total bullshit, but could have a huge impact on file system design if true. Frankly, I would be surprised if Longhorn UI team didn't consider the differences between men and women even though I have yet to come across any extensive research on the subject in respect to HCI design."
Marc Canter then picked up the thread, detailed and expanded the meme to include age differences with a liberal amount of chest thumping:
"You're kidding right Robert? What's the difference between men and women? I would have thought your many wives would have taught you that already.
How 'bout color, shape, sound, smell, attitude, aesthetics, family approach - just about everything that makes someone a human. In fact the ONLY thing men and women have in common - is that we both eat, shit and breath.
So what does that have to do with user experiences (which include UI, built-in content, web services, community, context, etc.) ? Well that's ONE of the things we've been working on - going on 11 years now.
Soft, pastel, intuitive, friendly = female
Hard, primary, intellectual, comradery = male
The best Microsoft ever got to was long and short menus. What? You're not spending enough on R&D? Where's the innovation? Where's Nathan Myrvold when you need him? Isn't that what .Net is about? Can I hear you say "Hailstorm?"
Well now you have a reason to tell them (that's YOU) to invest in us - and we'll answer all your questions.....
We've been doing the R&D Microsoft, Xerox, MIT, Interval Research - SHOULD have been doing. Now it's time to productize.
Don Park has it right - there WILL be deifferent version of Longhorn for men and women. But also for young and old. Left and Right. Up and down."
Right on, Marc. Scoble then took the ball and ran in the direction of his interest:
"Marc Canter is always a fun read. He's the guy who started Macromedia. Yes, they did kick Microsoft's behind. Let's see, Microsoft tried to lock in developers into our own proprietary DHTML tags and failed, but Macromedia's Flash format is all over the place. Who won that battle? What caught my eye about Marc's weblog today? Where he exclaims that there is money in tools. Damn straight there is. Let's see, Adobe makes money off of Acrobat. About a billion a year (Acrobat is funding an entire additional Silicon Valley skyscraper, Adobe's CEO said in a recent magazine article I read). Macromedia makes money off of Flash. Borland makes money off of tools. One of Microsoft's biggest buildings (#42) is full of guys writing tools.
Then Marc talks about the gender of Longhorn. Awesome stuff. Yeah, my wife is different than me. Thankfully!
What does Longhorn need more than anything else? Tools!
Why? Well, as an evangelist, I want tons of great apps for my wife to use on Longhorn (Longhorn is the code name for the next version of Windows). How is she gonna get those great apps? Developers are gonna have to create them. How are devs and artists gonna create apps for the operating system most of us will use in 2005 and beyond? Tools!
Translation: Marc, we gotta get you to sing at the PDC.
Deep translation: Marc, if you can't get funding with such an opportunity ahead of you, the valley must really be messed up. Here's your chance to kick our behinds again!"
Tools? He wants people to write unique tools for Longhorn. I say give people like me more power to change the OS. From what I have seen of Longhorn, it doesn't go deep nor wide enough. Today, Open/Save File Dialog, dialogs everyone must use, are like a couple of neanderthals wearing lipsticks and I doubt Longhorn improved on them significantly.
Meanwhile, Marc gives Scoble a chase and a tackle with his own:
"We'd love to work with Microsoft to get our tools running with Longhorn - just as long as they understand that they have to work with OPEN standards, on all browsers, across all platforms and connect everyone together. Not just Microsoft/Longhorn communities."
and performs a dance for the crowd:
"In fact here's a funny story. Back in '86 - I ran into Bill Gates at some conference where he told me that he'd wanted a chance to publish VideoWorks - but got 'left' out of the bidding. I told him we offered the original VideoWorks/MusicWorks to them (via our Wm. Morris agent) - back in '84 - but we never made it past the front-guy. He was pissed."
Hey, I love stories like that. I remember being at a Dvorak/Hearst Comdex party ages ago where I saw Bill Gates dancing with a Marilyn Monroe-impersonator oozing sexily nearby. Since then, I have a strong mental association between Bill Gates and Marilyn Monroe. Too bad Comdex parties went down hill from there. Oops. Where is the ball now?
[ed: I am not sure if most of embedding contents of referenced posts is my style, but it does save you the trouble of jumping back and forth to get the whole picture. I would appreciate it if you could give me feedback. Frankly, I like to write just my thoughts without much references.]
Mark has a stalker bot that monitors "Dave"'s blog for changes every five minutes and list detected changes using color-coded difference report. Called Winer Watcher, it is an interesting experiment from an engineer's point of view, but I think it is stalking and suspect the motivations behind it.
I frequently edit my recent posts for various reasons and would feel offended if someone did a Don Park Watcher. Regardless of copyright issues, I think it is stalking, stalking to catch embarrasing mistakes and show them to the world.
While I enjoy reading Mark's blog post most of the time, I have noticed that he has a mean childish streak that calmly surfaces occasionally. Usually, they are harmless and even understandable. Winer Watcher, on the other hand, is truely awful, a demonstration of how technology can be used to abuse bloggers.
Mark, STOP IT! If this is an earnest experiment, use your blog or at least ask for permissions before putting a microscope on other people's blog. Having a blog is not an invitation for abuse.
New issues are starting to surface with newspaper UI. Most immediate one has to do with link-happy nature of blog posts. Newspaper user experience is modal and sequential in nature. While you may jump from one article to next, you are within the newspaper and reading them in sequence. Mapping blogs to that model requires a lot of design work.
Recent posts referenced by an article is easiest to handle since they are likely to be in the same edition as the referencing article by embedding or by forward pointers. References to articles in past editions is manageable if the referenced edition is in is saved somewhere -- remote repository design discourages personal editions. If it is not, then it can be treated like new posts.
Beside using a few key smilies to express likes and dislikes, a newshound icon could be used to allow readers to ask for more information on a particular story in future editions. I thought about new pages being added to the back of an edition while it is being read, but I concluded that readers will get confused or tired -- not being able to turn the last page sucks like watching inbox grow as you work through it. One issue here is that some bloggers write about multiple unrelated stories in a single post.
These are just some of the issues I am dealing with these days. What I strive to do in these sort of design situations is to find issues that cancel each other out. For example, people want more control over how much time they spend reading blogs, so not being able to read referenced articles immediately helps in that regard.
In a way, I am weaving a bamboo basket, working the strands against each other in a pattern that creates a stable shape.
