Nice little plugin for Google Chrome.  Mind you, the promo video music sounds like the backing track from a porno.

Spotify is awesome.  Music on demand with a few adverts here and there - radio for the web in some ways.  

While it is nice to have a legal way to listen to music, tips hat to Napster, some of the aforementioned adverts might needs a little more thought.  Like this one.

A white background with white link text kinda undermines the purpose of contrast.  At least the album covers are nice and big and clickable.  Time for some Ella...

 

A wee while ago I banged on about my British Gas online experience.  Well, here are a few more bits of goodness that have made me stop and think while on my journey through the interwebs. Home Office This is a nice little gem.  Not often you get asked to enter a date in DD-MMM-YYYY format - in a text field even. MM would have surely sufficed, and been one less character to enter.   Bureaucracy in all its glory. National Express This is up there as  one of the most useless error message ever. Trying to book a bus to Glastonbury.  I got this message a few times as I was selecting the times I wanted.  Would have been nice to indicate whether it was the outbound bus, returning bus, or both that was full at the times I requested.  Ended up calling as it was quicker than working out all the possible outbound / return combinations. Fogbugz Quite like how Fogbugz displays the set-up process as 'your end' and 'our end'.

Only minor beef is that 'email address confirmed' is red, to me, indicative of an error, even though the messaging and big tick say that all is good.

When I first saw Minority Report, I was wowed by the space-aged interface that a certain glove wearing Tom Cruise was interacting with. Yesterday, TED published a talk by John Underkoffler which was filmed earlier this year.  John was a consultant on the film, and has now actually built the interface.

On a recent trip to Helsinki I needed to stop at the cash machine to aquire the local currency. I wandered about the terminal and found the ATM.  Now to me, ATMs are one of those universal devices which follow a standard operating process.  Insert card into card slot, mash your PIN into the keypad, and bank gods permitting, cash will magically appear from cash slot.  Simple. Well, they do it a little different way up north. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480" caption="eeny meeny miny mo"] [/caption] As you can see from the above, I was offered two choices.  Straight away I went for the yellow, familiar looking card slot - the one with the arrows showing you the way.  Seconds later, my card was returned to me with an error message advising cards with a chip should be inserted into the blue slot.  WTF?!  Don't make me think.  OK, forgetting the technical reasons, why doesn't this machine (and the others scattered throughout Helsinki) simply have the one slot, and let the machine determine the type of card, and respond accordingly? Donald Norman coined the term affordance in his book The Design of Everyday Things, where he states:

... the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. [...] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing. Knobs are for turning. Slots are for inserting things into. Balls are for throwing or bouncing. When affordances are taken advantage of, the user knows what to do just by looking: no picture, label, or instruction needed." (Norman 1988, p.9)

I like the last sentence.

Gotta pay those bills. No one likes paying them, some try to avoid them, but at the end of the day paying your bills is one of those 'responsible grown-up things' that your mum always talked about. Fine. The electric bill arrived. At least it's an online statement - a tree was saved. While environmentalists celebrated, I quietly wept at what was owed. Damn you cold winters! At least British Gas provide an online payment service, so I have been speared the pain, and more tears, of calling them. Now, I'm a big believer of business that have embraced the web, especially those that at the end of the day make it easier for me to fulfil my obligations. So I rocked along to the British Gas site, logged on in, selected 'make a payment'. All was going well. I'll be in and out in no time, safe in the knowledge the PS3 will be powered for another month. However, this is where I started to notice a few scratch marks, on an otherwise polished payment service. Firstly, I could only pay one account at a time. WTF? I owed both gas and electricity. I received the bill for both at the same time. Why can I pay for both at the same time? Sure I think that the fact you can pay online is great, but not to the point where I want to have to go through the process twice. What about time saving? [caption id="attachment_222" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Radio select - but I wanted to pay for both in one transaction"] [/caption] Perhaps the help question, aptly entitled 'Can I make more than one payment?' will be of assistance. Nope. [caption id="attachment_213" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Let's check out the help"] [/caption] [caption id="attachment_214" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Help says no"] [/caption] Fine, so I selected the account to pay. Roll on step two. What's this? [caption id="attachment_215" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Don't make me think please"] [/caption] It may seem like a small thing, but the fact I needed to stop and think about matching the numeric date on my card to the corresponding month in the drop down, is a rookie mistake. Matching systems with the real world is super important, especially when people are entering personal information. This issue could be simply resolved by adding (XX) in front of the month, where XX is the month number, so January would be displayed (01) January in the list. Right, step two rant over. Time to review my details then pay the man. But wait a minute. What's this? [caption id="attachment_217" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Come on. At least be consistent"] [/caption] The date is now numeric! Consistency please BG. Gripes aside, there are some good things about this process. For a start, the process is short. You also know where you are at each step, and help is provided along with the option to go back and correct any information. Finally, and most importantly, it works. Now where did I put that controller?

N Building from Alexander Reeder on Vimeo.

"This building in Tachiwaka, Japan, is a standalone user experience. Snap a photo of the exterior on your cellphone and be directed to its website; stream live tweets from inside; point a camera towards it and bring up an augmented reality layer displaying information on the stores inside and the sales they're having." - from Idealog

As good as the iPhone is, there are still a few features missing.  One being the ability to multi-task between the plethora of apps you have installed. This video by Ocean Observation shows how they would tackle the multitasking problem, and while their solution occupies too much home screen real estate for my liking (it could hide away and only appear when user taps the home key twice),  it is definitely a feature I would use. Wonder if the folk at Apple are pondering such things?

Nearness from timo on Vimeo.

Vid came in through the twitter-sphere courtesy of @odannyboy Entitled ‘Nearness’ the guys at touch hooked up with BERG made a short film that explores nearness in interactive technologies