Sketch Journal

[vibblr-blog]

A/B Testing is a widely used testing method on the web.

A/B Testing lets you compare several alternate versions of the same web page simultaneously and see which produces the best outcome, e.g., increased click-through, engagement, or any other metric of your choice. 

A/B usability testing is primarily great for testing alternatives, for example navigation structure, button designs, button locations – basically anything where even a small variation could make a difference to the end user and the usability of your site, service or product.

Here are some great resources on A/B testing:

20 Bits.com: http://20bits.com/articles/an-introduction-to-ab-testing/

Nielson's Alertbox: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050815.html

Optimizely:http://www.optimizely.com/

Standard Elements tested could be:

Even though every A/B test is unique, certain elements are usually tested:

The call to action’s (i.e. the button’s) wording, size, color and placement,

Headline or product description,

Form’s length and types of fields,

Layout and style of website,

Product pricing and promotional offers,

Images on landing and product pages,

Amount of text on the page (short vs. long).

There's also a great list of Do's and Don'ts here:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/06/24/the-ultimate-guide-to-a-b-testing/

[vibblr-blog]

I think it would be easier to remember Cognitive psychology laws such as 'Hicks Law' & 'Fittz Law' with the help of simple visual stories.

Fitts's law (often cited as Fitts' law) is a model of human movement in human–computer interaction and ergonomics that predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device. It was proposed by Paul Fitts in 1954.

Hick's Law, named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick, or the Hick–Hyman Law (for Ray Hyman), describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has. The Hick-Hyman Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick-Hyman Law is known as the rate of gain of information. Given n equally probable choices, the average reaction time T required to choose among them is approximately

[vibblr-blog]

This is the first of the 'What designers do' sketch series. The terms describing our work i.e. 'Interaction design' 'Information Architecture' are loaded and we need to break these down for the communities we work with. We love problem solving. The problem solving process involves observation, deconstruction, re-imagination and sharing.

[vibblr-blog]

'One to few' communication

Is there a way to speak to a very specific portion of my social graph? I wrote up a quick sketch using python where I could broadcast my location to only a few. As our social graphs explode, 'one to few' communication will become increasingly interesting.

The patch below is a simple test that allows one to message to multiple friends and tell them 'where u are tonight'. =] The idea is to create simple tools that enable efficient and quick 'one to few communication' import appuifw import messaging data = appuifw.query(u"hey, Im partying tonite at:", "text") cellno1 = "7166301656" # neighbors mobile no txt=u "Girl4 is partying tonite at" +data if appuifw.query(u"send your location now?","query") == True: messaging.sms_send(cellno1, data) appuifw.note(u"Sent your party location to", "info") else: appuifw.note(u"Nobody cares where you are tonight", "info")

[vibblr-blog]

Lately ive been interested in how one users tweets affect a city or a country's trend.I started out by creating a simple sketch to sense conflicting emotion a community.

For instance on Valentines day I wanted to sense emotional tilt. I used the terms 'Love' & 'Hate'. I scraped tweets for about a minute and discovered that the ratio was 98:28. Interesting.

Next I want to create some interesting ways to tell stories with this data.

[vibblr-blog]

Wordbuddy: An easy handheld dictionary for the Iphone.

Often while reading books we need a quick way to see definitions. Sure there's tonnes of dictionary apps on the Iphone, but they involve input. Too much work and too out of moment. Here's a simple app that acts as a super fast handheld dictionary.

How it works:

1. Invoke the App

2. Get your word into the big text box, don't worry about focus.

3. The dictionary definition appears.

4. Done. Back to reading.

  WordBuddy by Vibha Bamba is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

[vibblr-blog]

This is a distortion algorithm which i created in OpenGL. Could be very interesting for interactive applications. Well, we will have to use it for something interesting soon!

[vibblr-blog]

"I'm searching...but i dont know what I feel like"

Mood based Interfaces for Netflix:

Netflix has some neat & well curated genres. But sometimes, just sometimes its not about that movie your friend recommended or netflix top 50 or even your queue. You feel like discovering something for how u feel right now. The conversation you have in your head, not quite literally is: "What do I feel like right now?" "What's the story for me right now?"

Well, why not let you explore films for your mood? even if you don't have a term to describe your mood. This can be playful, fun and vastly different from looking at genres.

We aren't talking filters and input fields. We are talking about a live mood canvas that a viewer can play with. As you interact with this mood canvas, you can discover your own mood through colors, film covers and film lovers! But most of all, this is a great way to discover new films.

[vibblr-blog]

Visualizing Caltrain Delays

Caltrain Tweets: is a commuter community that tweets about delays and bike cars on a train. While this great content is out there, it is hard to visualize and leverage when making a decision about a train at a station.

CalTweet is a web app that saves your sticky settings and rolls in the tweets to show you an updated forecast. Its minimal and meant to require no user input unless you want to dive into the tweets, at which point you can see the time-stamp and location of the tweets.

[vibblr-blog]

Showings at twilight

Films are cultural artifacts. So are some of the compelling environments that are created around film. The "Showings that began at twilight" or the "Drive in movie theatre" is one such nostalgic renaissance period for films. It created an intriguing interaction artifact in film history.

I am interested in exploring some playful ways of re-purposing this theme in an online space.

A huge community of academia, artists, film buffs and film geeks are interested in independent film makers and their stories. They follow festivals and communities to connect and participate with the world of independent film making. There is an opportunity here, to connect a community to hot-off-the-press independent content. This could be a "monthly movie night" on Netflix. This content is the "hard to get, once in a month" boutique experience that one cant find on the regular DVD/streaming channels or anywhere else. Once a month, an online space could be a porch for film geek-dom where film buffs, film geeks, critics gather virtually for ‘Showings at Twilight’ or a first look at independent films.

This creates a unique space for consumption and conversation.

[vibblr-blog]

Tab Joey is a modified tab-it. It makes it easier to remember why you bookmarked a page.

The intent to bookmark a page is usually to come back to a specific piece of content on that page.’Tab-it/Post-it’ bookmarks are not very contextual in this respect.

While one can bookmark a page, you have to scribble in your books to mark that one picture or that one sentence that you want to come back to.

Tab Joey is a reaction to the tab-it bookmark. By introducing a little joey within the main tab-it, bookmarking can be made a bit more contextual.

[vibblr-blog]

Sketches from E.Tufte's Information Design Discourse.

0. Know your story.

Graphical excellence in information design come from knowing your data but more importantly knowing what story you want to tell from the data.

1. Create layers of Information.

Each layer of information brings a new variable into the story. Its a new factor adding perspective and light to the story. The goal for all information design is to enable a multi variate analysis. A good reference for this is Minards Graphic, considered an epic information graphic gem, it shows terrible fate of Napolean's army in Russia with a beautiful spatial time distance relationship. 

2. Zero out the interface.

The information is the interface. Interfaces are impediments to information design, zero out the interface.

3. Increase information throughput.

Create data graphics that give viewers the greatest no of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Do not design for the lowest common denominator or dumb down your audience. Provide intellectual leadership and enable people to learn through your data graphics.

4. Create Data Maps.

Data maps are like cartographic maps. They are high resolution textures of content which can be interacted with. A viewer can draw conclusions from an eagle eye view. But they can also zoom in to gain details of a time space relationship.