I *knew* it was just a matter of time before I was able to use Kenny Rogers on my blog.

And it’s all thanks to Joshua Porter who has written a great post comparing design with playing cards.

Each design is a new hand of cards. Not only are the cards we’re holding different every time, but so are the hands of the other players. Our hand is our own knowledge of the design project, and the hands of the others are the constraints that we must deal with.

Josh uses the card game metaphor to demonstrate how every design situation must be considered afresh and all the constraints, requirements and opportunities be evaluated anew each time. That old ‘tricks’ don’t necessarily apply in a new situtation. Or, to borrow his great closing line ‘three fives beat two aces every time.’

I’ll definitely be borrowing this analogy in the future. Go read it now, you’ll love it.

Technorati Tags: design, kenny+rogers

argh. I can’t believe its 19 March already! Hope you all had a great weekend :)

Just one little link for you today, continuing some earlier thoughts on tag clouds and their potential for non-evilness.

• Tag Cloud Usability Guidelines
  a few guidelines for tag cloud usability, arrived at by playing with a number of tag cloud implementations. These are all fairly straightforward derivations of common usability heuristics.
  (tags: tagcloud usability tags)

I think I mentioned that I’ve been doing some user testing lately for a project I’m working on at the moment.

As part of that research, I included some questions to see whether services like Flickr and Del.icio.us were making any impact on the ‘general public’.

Working in web, and reading/writing blogs, it sometimes seems like *everyone* knows about Del.icio.us and Flickr and I find that perspective can influence the strategies that I am inclined to take with functionality and design for projects. It’s easy to start to think of Flickr, for example, as setting a number of 2.0 type conventions.

Except, it’s not really a convention if only a small group of people are aware of its existence.

And that, based on our research, is the case.

Not one person we interviewed (and, to put this in perspective, we interviewed about 18 people) volunteered either Flickr or Del.icio.us as services that they used online. Once prompted, they confirmed that they had never heard of either of them.

I guess its not really all that surprising. More like a reality check.

I’d be interested to hear of any other research that’s been done re: awareness of ’2.0′ services in the world outside of the blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Delicious, User+Research, Web+2.0

• Sparkline PHP Graphing Library
  Sparklines are “intense, simple, wordlike graphics” so named by Edward Tufte. Great visual device
  (tags: design informationdesign tufte visualisation sparklines)
• Particletree · Lightbox Gone Wild!
  lightbox can be used to provide additional info, show an image or present a form for user input, makes it easy to extend a web application’s interface without having to add clutter.
  (tags: interfacedesign Javascript demo)
• the unseen video – milosh – you make me feel
  The Unseen Video is much more than a normal, static music video. It is a video that is affected by the weather and local time from the position of the viewer. V nice. V cool.
  (tags: dynamicVideo ambient flash music visualization inspiration)
• Graphical visualization of text similarities in essays in a book | munterbund.de
  A collection of essays is collated for readers with visualizing graphics. The graphics should both serve as a thematic and structural overview of each text, and pose the essay in question in relation to the other essays in the book.
  (tags: visualisation design informationdesign)
• The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press
  why have I not looked for this earlier?! (actually, its a little underwhelming, but,.. its still Tufte and we love him)
  (tags: Tufte visualisation informationdesign)