Design Fun

One of the great things about the web is the relative ease with which one can set up a new service. In social bookmarking alone with have Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Fark, Mister-Wong, Newsvine, Reddit, Technorati, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon, to name a few. That’s great for competition, and that’s great for users, but it’s not so good for bloggers and content creators.

What are you to do if you want readers to promote your content? Kevin Rose, of Digg, put it succinctly: “Encourage your visitors to submit their favorite stories directly to Digg [with a Digg badge].” Not everyone uses Digg. You have to decide on which bookmarking site, if any, to dedicate your precious screen real-estate. It’s a hard choice. If you choose poorly your reader won’t vote—it’s not a single click coupled and out-of-sight means out-of-mind—and your content losses its chance to make it big. You have to choose your horse wisely.

Read the rest of the post for a way to figure out which social bookmarking sites visitors use, on a per-visitor basis. JS library included.

Fun Life Hack Our Products

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of Bloxes.

Bloxes are essentially 3D cardboard Legos that ship flat, and fold up in modular building blocks that are strong enough to stand on. While they aren’t tech per se, we use them for building tables, walls, cubicles, and desks at the Humanized office. Google and Mint.com have already ordered some, and Mozilla has expressed interest in using them in their offices too. This may well be the new thing in terms of agile office-space deployment. Don’t like where a wall is? Just move it! Don’t like the way it looks? Just rebuild it! They are cheaper than cubicles, and much more fun.

They are also eco-buzzword-friendly (meaning that they are made from recycled cardboard and are recyclable).

So head over to Bloxes and order yourself some re-factorable furniture and walls. Then come back here and tell us all about it.

We are now a Python and cardboard shop.

Fun Our Products

I am proud to announce the release of Songza, a music search engine and Internet jukebox. Songza solves the related problems of “I want to hear a song” and “I want to share a song with a friend.” Released on November 8, its popularity is growing rapidly: We’re poised to reach one million songs played within just a week of launching Songza.

Songza is also an interface showcase. I’ve used the interface principles discussed here on the Humanized blog to design Songza to be humane, slick, and viral. Play with the interface for a bit, and you’ll find habituatable pie-menus instead of slow linear menus; an inviting design that uses only two icons, both of which act as illustrations for words; an incredibly high density of content and a correspondingly low amount of interaction; undo instead of warnings; and transparent messages that don’t break your train of thought.

Ironically, there’s a lot that went into making Songza so simply. Achieving such a high level of simplification required a lot of code, in part because we couldn’t just use standard widgets. It was worth it, though.

You can’t be better without being different — I think Songza is both.

Fun Our Products

Imagine this. You are writing an email to a friend and you mention that you want to meet at your favorite breakfast place in Chicago: Tre Kronor. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to send them Tre Kronor’s address along with a map? Currently, the only way to do this is to open your browser, load up a site that provides maps, do a search for the restaurant, wait for the map to appear, copy the URL of the map to your email, copy the address to your email (and reformat it), and finally close your browser. Gross—and you’re not even sending a map, just a link to one!

Enter Enso Map Anywhere.

Enso Map Anywhere lets you select an address or a business name and add a map in place. For instance, if you don’t know where a business is, you can just highlight its name and you’ll get a beautiful map from Google with the location marked, along with the business’s full address and phone number. Alternatively, you can use the map command on a partial address like “4611 N Ravenswood” to get a map and the full address. It’s a great way to look up a forgotten ZIP code.

So download it now, it’s free forever and works with (but doesn’t require) other Enso products. Go map happy. It maps in lots of places, from Word to Gmail. You can even use it while blogging in Word Press. Check it out:

Bongo Room, Chicago

Bongo Room: 1470 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL - (773) 489-0690
Did you mean the Bongo Room at 1152 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL - (312) 291-0100?
Mapped by Enso Map Anywhere

Fun Our Products

In honor of International Talk Like a Pirate Day we’ve added the pirate-talk ability to Enso Translate Anywhere! To chat like a sea dog, all you’ve got to do is to select your text and use the “translate to pirate” command. To make your Photoshop captions more swashbuckling, just select them and use the “translate to pirate” command. Even your file names can be made less land lubbin’. Seriously, what could be better?

Want the penultimate laugh? Select an email to your boss, translate, and shiver his timbers.

Arrrr you wanting to know more about this horn swogglin’ Enso and its commands? Sail o’er to this link. And, a round of rum to Jeffrey Souza for being the source of all our buccaneer-talk knowledge!

So take out your hornpipe and grog, and download Enso Translate Anywhere, the pirate edition. Where does it run? I’ll give ye a hint: XP marks the spot (Vista and 2K too, arr).

Now, t’ return t’ findin’ me some golden interface booty.

Commentary Fun

I’d like to propose a new portmanteau for inclusion in the English language: “Wikspert“.

A wikspert is someone who is an expert on a topic purely on the basis of having read the Wikipedia article on that topic. In short, “Wikipedia” + “Expert” = “Wikspert”.

Once confined to an exclusive class of in-the-know computeristas, the last couple of years have seen proliferation of “wiksperts” in every level of our society. They’re everywhere. From business-school professors to burger-flippers, everyone now has a quasi-authoritative opinion on, for instance, how much corn is produced in Iowa. These trivia, once the sole purview of academic cocktail parties, have now been liberated for the masses. In fact, every one of us either knows a wikspert or is one ourselves. Personally, some of my best friends are wiksperts, and I know a suspicious amount about liopleurodons, pumas, and the ethnic make-up of Romania in the early 1800’s.

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Fun UI Design Fundamentals

Welcome to the first installment of the Humanized Interface Puzzler. For your fun, bafflement, and desire for free stuff, we’ll pose an interface design puzzler on a semi-regular basis. To enter, simply send your answer to puzzler@humanized.com by the deadline. We’ll select the best answer and post it on our blog. Then, we’ll send the winner a limited-edition* Humanized shirt and entrance to our beta program.

The first puzzler is about modes and cars.

An interface has modes if one gesture can mean different things, depending system state. Modes are at fault when you miss a call because your phones in silent mode. And there’s little worse than having the final bars of Appalachian Spring – with harmonies as delicate as frozen cobwebs – thrashed by a cellphone who’s owner has forgot to put it into silent mode. Perhaps there is something worse: having it be your cellphone. You can read all about modes, modes errors, catastrophic mistakes, and some solutions in our article Visual Feedback: Why Modes Kill.

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Fun

Aza pointed out a couple posts ago that the interfaces for most ovens and microwaves can be improved. Turning on the wrong burner of the stove is a minor inconvenience, but what about error-prone interfaces to larger, deadlier machines?

See the May 2, 2006 Achewood comic by Chris Onstad. Never mind why two cats are flying around in Airwolf looking for an otter headed out to sea in a beer cooler; just scroll down to the last row of panels and see if that isn’t a familiar problem. Aza says this comic makes his point better than he could make it himself.

Just remember, bad interfaces can kill.