Category: Links

“Jake Zeller […] handily beat the other students on the pop quiz and was rewarded by watching his spaceship […] land on Mars while those of his classmates vaporized.” I cringe at the use of completely unrelated visualizations.

“Playyoo’s game creator allows users to create their own games too, and by uploading images and modifying game elements users now have more flexibility than with any other service.”

“…it’s not the diagram or the artifact that matters. It’s the process of making the diagram that produces innovation.”

Blog for an MMO I’ll be keeping my eyes on. One interesting aspect of Lila Dreams, for instance, is that it’s 2D side-scrolling. Oh and its front-end is Flash. And it’ll be hosted on Kongregate. Huh…

“[…] the movement is propelled by a new generation of kids who have easier technological access than ever before […] Today’s indie gamemakers possess the desire to tweak the old genres, and an intuitive sense of the language and mechanics of play.”

Of particular interest are the bits on using kaizen in service design and how brand and UX relate.

Karsten forwarded me this nice example of IKEA moving into Generation C territory: a furniture swap event supported with an online tool that allows you to map your room and have it subsequently be shuffled for inspiration.

“Personas are to Persona Descriptions as Vacations are to Souvenir Picture Albums. […] If the vacation pictures aren’t compelling, did the vacation itself suck?” Thank you Jared. Can we wrap up this silly persona discussion now?

“Good design… is designing enablers or tools that include the use cases given, but have breathing room, rather than designing strictly to the use cases. It could be said that this reduces usability, and it often does, but with the flipside of user value

Portfolio of illustrator Mar Hernandéz. Found her through Weplaythis. Lovely work.

Interview with Quicksilver developer Nicholas Jitkoff who now works at Google. Also includes an interesting video of him talking at Google about how QS came to be and where it’s headed.

“…the potential for the game creator Web app is promising for folks like me with little to no coding skills.”

The notion of non-touch gestural interfaces is interesting in and of itself, but I personally enjoy looking at these diagrams even more. Documenting and designing gestures, the visual vocabulary needed for this, is what really interests me.

How I learned to stop worrying and opened my wi-fi.

“Steve [Portigal] is talking not about personas, but poorly conceived personas. Like any tool, personas can be wielded effectively or not.”

Site with lots of wonderful illustrations by Kevin Cornell, who also seems to be a pretty funny writer. Makes me think I’m too serious.

Danish serious game production seeking to educate people’s attitude towards the conflict in Palestine.

Why oh why hasn’t Apple addressed this. My iPod Touch is nearly useless at the moment because of no 802.1X support…

Smith’s book is here: “There isn’t a large body of research around tagging and there is no widely accepted “tagging theory,” … Much of the conventional wisdom … around tagging is being challenged by new … applications of the basic tagging techniques

Useful summary of the web of data argument put forward by Coates, Biddulph and others. Down to earth. Explains the value of this approach well.

“WriteMaps is a free web-based tool that allows you to create, edit, and share sitemaps online.” Perhaps useful sometime?

Easy to understand explanation of Bayesian rating.

How to create a webclip icon for use with iPhone and iPod Touch. Why not do this for leapfrog.nl, I think.

“Another theory is, picross is just too unique. Especially for the mobile users. If you look at other games, the ones making noise are the very very simple and familiar ones.” Nonograms might take too long to solve for them to be suited to snack gaming.

Long, good overview of Dan Hill’s thoughts on adaptive design, interaction design, hackability and architecture. I agree with one of the commenters that he should write a book about this. Required reading for IxDs I’d say.

“FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S.”

Context aware stuff keeps fascinating me: “Shelf is an app for MacOS that looks at the current foreground application, and tries to figure out if what you’re looking at corresponds to a person in your Address Book. Then it’ll tell you things about the

“…it clearly demostrates the power of access and general enablement that Playyoo is creating for the everyday gamer with an idea…”