What I remembered most from the movie, “Minority Report” was not Tom Cruise but the touch screen interface. The movie was made in 2002 and I remembered thinking, we were probably 8 – 10 years away from achieving that. Only a few years later, I saw touch screen interface being demo’d online via a video from a university think-tank and now in Microsoft Surface, and I thought, wow the future is here.
Last night, as I watched election coverage on CNN, I was amazed when Jessica Yellin, a CNN correspondent, “beamed in” to speak to Wolf Blitzer. At first, I thought the halo around Ms. Yellin was some technical glitch; perhaps there was something wrong with the broadcast. But, no, she was a real hologram.
It was just like princess Lea saying, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.” Star Wars technology is here. I was also impressed with what CNN called, “The Why Wall,” where the pundits analyzed the demographics of each state wide result. Having just completed a grueling week of user testing, I fully appreciated the visual breakdown.
Obviously, when I think back on this election, it will not be just CNN’s special effects wizardry that I remember, but that’s a topic for another blog. Now if only I can have a C3PO to around the house to take out the garbage for me.
I’ve done my part (dropped off my absentee ballot at the poll, bypassing the hordes that like standing in line), so now all I can do is wait for the vote. FiveThirtyEight.com feeds that fix — it’s a stat geek’s guide to the election
The site everything from the number of interviews that John McCain and Barack Obama have done (
2,077,765) to projections after projections after projections. It ain’t fancy, but it’s very usable.
Do your part.
Vote. Then visit this site.
So i was suprised to see a Yes On 8 advertisement on my blog today. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s pure branding, and I’m not making any money off off it.
And I would never want this ad on my site — I’m voting no on proposition 8 tomorrow — but I feel like my site’s been hijacked for political purposes. I run a usability blog, and while I might mention my political leanings (Libertarian, with a slight hint of Democrat in there), to have this on it just ruffles my feathers.
This is the danger of allowing political ads, especially one’s that are so controversial: someone’s going to get upset.
Anyone else have this happen today?
I might have written another post about this — it might have been Baseball Prospectus — where I described the issue where search was confusing because there were too many different ways. In their case it’s probably a technical issue because they’re on some custom hacked together content management system.
Six Revisions is different: they’re on WordPress, which has search right out of the box (notice the search box I have on this site, nice and big). Yet, there’s no way to search the site except through using google. It’s really disappointing, because the content is off the charts, and I was going to find a Photoshop article along the lines of their Illustrator article to send to a friend, but I can’t. I have to browse through their archives; this increases page views, but I don’t want to take the time.
It’s simple: blog readers sometimes want to see what’s on the inside, and the easiest way to do it is either through free form search, or through tag clouds.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact