M.Okubo's Super Pillow Bunny Land Circus

Â¡Snippity!

2006-06-08T02:59:00.000-07:00

Today's presentation was a great example of why I hate doing presentations. When I have to talk in front of a group of people I almost always forget what I'm going to say and start rambling. I do that during interviews too, which normally leads to me saying something less-than-complimentary about myself. I need more practice with this sort of thing.

We're still working on the project. We need to integrate a few more things in order to have something ready to turn in by Friday. This was a very ambitious project, and I don't think we fully realized what kind of monster we had on our hands. As a result, some of the planned functionality has to be scaled back. Regardless, I'm quite pleased with our progress. And I'm happy that Jonathan likes the look of our app :) Yay!

There's one thing I forgot to mention: I noticed that many of the groups didn't take screen resolution into consideration, as there was some dreaded horizontal scrolling involved. Since the resolution is 800x600 for the projectors, I designed the site to fit that window. I also coded the workspace page such that the control panel and tag area have a fixed width, and the box that contains the snipps has a fluid width. The page will still look decent when it's in a pretty small browser window. This is more of a usability issue than anything, but I just wanted to throw that out there.

Layouts

2006-06-06T06:21:00.000-07:00

These are the products of two waves of inspiration. They share basically the same layout, but each has a different feel.

modern version

textured version - not entirely done

Sleep is for the Weak

2006-06-05T08:57:00.001-07:00

HTML/CSS in progress...preview:

Homepage
Registration Page
Very Unfinished Workspace Layout

I had some very last minute inspiration that isn't reflected in these pages as of yet. Maybe after a nap or something.

Uh...Blogger is having major issues...not sure if this is actually posting :(

Purgatory

2006-06-04T23:31:00.000-07:00

Brian and I, though on a hiatus from our blogs, have been talking about our project in real life! Since the purpose of our app is for the short-term storage of items, we have a concept of 'purgatory,' where all the items that are past a certain date old go. We mentioned color coding in our presentation. We'll have different hues to denote different people, and different saturation levels to denote age. Items with really low saturation go to purgatory. More to come...soon.

Shiny

2006-05-25T01:45:00.000-07:00

Playing around with fonts and such:

shiny gray

green and red solid

green shiny

Project Meeting Part Deux

2006-05-23T02:15:00.000-07:00

We planned what kinds of data we want to put in the database, as well as the general layout. It basically goes like:

ROUGH wireframe

but I think there might've been plans for a separate box under the control panel to help with the organization of the current workspace. Using the control panel, one can navigate through workspaces (designated private and public). Some keywords for the UI: sans-serif, rounded corners, shiny, grey with colour-coding! And because I feel like it:

12 frames of Ayumi Hamasaki dripping

Project Meeting & Google Notebook

2006-05-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday most of my group had a little meeting to discuss our project. We played around with Google Notebook a little.

Google Notebook Screenshot

We also have a more focused idea of how we want to set up the general workspaces and control panel. We're going to have another meeting tonight, so I'll post the layout wireframe later.

Things:

Decide on how to organize each of the entries (by date, metadata, etc...?)

What to do with metadata

How to work with different sized entries

Backend stuff...uh :\

Fun With Tablet

2006-05-16T02:24:00.000-07:00

To put my tablet to good use, I decided to draw some rough rough rough possible parts of the UI for my project. They're utter crap, but it's a starting point at least.

version 1

version 2

Ayumi Hamasaki is a freakin' space creature. This is what I should be using my tablet for...ICAM...

DOM Issues

2006-05-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

For HW3 I was planning on writing a JavaScript thingy that would display a calendar on a page. The calendar would be generated from reading the date from the computer and spitting out the appropriate numbers in their right place (i.e. if the first day of the month is a Tuesday, the calendar table would have "1" printed in the first row, third column). The table would be created using JavaScript and HTML DOM. I got it down to the point where I only needed to print the numbers in the table cells, which I planned on doing using 2 for loops. Unfortunately, I discovered that you can't write variables as output to the cells. K.O. desu~ :(

So I'm wondering if there actually is a way to do what I wanted to do, or should I have just taken another route entirely...

Purojekuto!!!

2006-04-28T00:48:00.000-07:00

Group Proposal:

We are developing a system for quick, short-term storage of web elements. The velocity of modern living often precludes extended sessions online, and necessitates efficient, ad-hoc systems for storing and sharing simple data, e.g. websites to be read; links/images/notes for short-term projects; quotes or links to share with unavailable friends. Some systems exist that accommodate these goals, but only incidentally to their intended tasks: del.icio.us is intended for longer-term recording of links, and uses folksonomic organization to find related and popular sites; Backpack is a multi-modal system for recording data elements, with an emphasis towards time management and collaborative organization. Our system will use Javascript bookmarklets to trivialize recording in situ, and define records as draggable AJAX elements to make loose, hiearchical (or associative), on-site organization natural and adaptable.

This project can be divided into three relatively parallel tasks:

1) Contextual bookmarklets to parse plain text, hyperlinks, and/or image links from the wild to our system.
2) AJAX-driven interface for presentation of user-stored data. Simple, high-level model-world systems for sorting and modification of data elements.
3) Database for userdata storage.

And meta-bullets:

1) Defining public/private, individual/collaborative spaces user spaces, and systems for transitioning resources between spaces.
2) A strong, cohesive visual and philosophical identity.
3) Uniformity and generalizability of backend coding; development of a public API and simple extensions for outward presentation models (badges, RSS feed).
4) Metadata synthesis.

My Take:

One issue we have to deal with is how to make this system manageable, such that one can find a specific item in a field of other links. This is why I argue against a hierarchical organization; it would be cumbersome to go through multiple 'levels' just to find or classify a bookmarklet. An associative approach is much more suited to our project's goal, although it is harder to visualize this information.

I'm excited to work on this project. I've always felt insecure because I don't have any back-end web experience, and I'm reluctant to learn it because I don't know where to start. Since Pam, my wonderful group-mate, has the know-how to get this project off the ground, I'm hoping to learn from her. My other group-mate, Brian, is a design-y person like myself, but he's more of a nerd than I am so he's played around with many many web apps and such, so he has a lot of practical experience with the kinds of things we're building our project upon, and he doesn't use run-on sentences like this one. I suppose my main part will be in designing the user interface. Fun!

Social Psychology

2006-04-23T02:00:00.000-07:00

Just some thoughts...

I proctored a math competition today, and to pass the time I read my social psychology textbook. I made note of a few things that always seem to happen in test-taking situations. (1) After the first person finishes their test and turns it in, several others immediately follow suit. (2) People like to finish at the same time their friends finish the test.

These behaviors can be thought about in terms of one's need for validation. A person would probably like to know how their performance rates in comparison to their peers. It's hard to be that first pioneer to turn in the test; they might think that perhaps they've missed something vitally important on the test that's taking everyone else so long to finish. But once someone finally turns in their test, others who are finished can feel more confident about their performance. As for finishing the test with one's friends, people like to discuss their personal performance with their peers to gauge how well (or poorly) they did relative to everyone else. This serves to comfort them if their performance is perceived to be within a 'normal' range, thus validating their intellect.

Though not inherently so, taking an exam is a social experience. Such can be said about the web. Without the knowledge or existence of certain conventions of web-behavior, one is unsure how to act. Taking cues from peers is a way of validating one's own 'web performance' by acting in accord with 'normal' behavior. For instance, danah boyd and Jeffrey Heer's "Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster" explains how people modeled their own Friendster profiles upon those of their associates.

Information on the web has a funny way of interacting with the real world. After the competition was over, I chatted with the other proctor as we exited the building. I mentioned that I'm a Cog Sci and Psychology double major, and to my surprise he replied that he knew this [since I'm the secretary of the Math Club this information is on our website]. I'm not sure how I feel about people knowing more about me than I do them.

Aesthetics

2006-04-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

When designing a user interface, usability comes first. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems as if aesthetics have been completely ignored. Personally, I like pretty things. My style is usually simple and elegant--I find it is the surest way to avoid something ugly. My sister once said to me, "A lot of people think they know good design. Most of them don't. You can't teach someone pretty." Here are a few links:

[ws] Color Scheme Generator 2
If you're having trouble finding colors that go well together, this is a nifty tool that, as the name suggests, generates color schemes for you.

CoolHomepages
When I'm coming up with a design for a website I often browse through CoolHomepages' galleries for inspiration.

Style Gala
Style Gala lists some very pretty sites with very pretty CSS. Beauty on the inside and outside.

CSS Vault
Another nice site.

bad design: Great Web Design Company
I hope this is a joke. I'm laughing.

Experimetrix Suckage

2006-04-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

Experimetrix is a website used by UCSD's Psychology Department to schedule subjects for experiments. It provides a great service; however, it is very poorly designed from both the subjects' and experimenters' end.

I doubt the designers of Experimetrix performed much (or any) user testing because parts of the design actually encourage people to make mistakes. For instance, I 199 in Psychology Professor Hal Pashler's lab running experiments. When creating new experiment appointments on Experimetrix, they provide a system of drop-down menus to specify the time of the appointment. The experimenter must select the hour, minute and either 'a.m.' or 'p.m.' in separate menus. The problem is that people tend to forget to set the 'a.m./p.m.' correctly. It is also hard to conceptualize the time when the appointments you made are at because they display this data in plain text rather than using a visual system. Experimetrix would benefit from using a calendar metaphor.

This is just one example of the system's ill-conceived UI. Even if I don't end up using this idea for the project I'd like to redesign the Experimetrix UI. I've been itching to do this for some time now because it's a pain to use.

"The dangers of a new Web" Article

2006-04-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

I came across an article that might be semi-relevant to this class here. Rather than relating to an actual project idea it discusses how people use the web; the design for my project will take these kinds of factors into consideration.

"Certain things get lost in this transition to the new Web, and the context of content is one of them."
-Faruk Ateş on RSS feeds

Haha, read the whole article for the context.