Introducing MOBhat

Kiam - 16/04/09
Nice work! I'll give it a try!

Jed Alexander - 14/07/09
Does this work with Facebook? I'm finding I'm using Facebook a lot, but the interface is pretty busy. I really like the Mobhat idea of different hats, but again, the interface seems kind of busy and overly complicated. I get the essential idea, but I think the interface needs to be distilled more.

The other issue is the feed. I like my newsfeed on Facebook, but often good stuff passes me by because there's so MUCH stuff. The hat thing could really break that down, but is there a newsfeed on friendfeed?

What I like about Facebook is that you don't have to go to each individual person's feed to check out what their doing. It might be nice also to prioritize a friend's feed You might have your closest friends, and then a bunch of peripheral friends, and some friend's feeds will come up more prominently than others.

At the moment I have nearly 250 Facebook friends, which is a cumbersome number of friends. Most of them are cartoonist acquaintances. These make up the bulk of that number. So putting on my cartoonist hat, I would still have a crazy number of feeds.

Also, I'm all for expanding on the visual metaphors with visual interfaces. With these friend sites we're still very traditionally text based, while on my "desktop" I have "folders" and "folders" within "folders" and so forth. But then we revert to lists of text with the occasional icon on systems like these. I think you're thinking too much like a programmer in this instance. Programmers relate more to the raw data, while for users I think visual metaphors, like the paintbox in painter, are critical. The hat is a great introduction to this kind of thinking, but I don't think it's enough.

So here you have a social construction that doesn't really exist literally in practical every day life. How do you organize this information in a way that has a simple but practical real world analog? Right now it's sort of like those old fashioned stock ticker tape machines:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape

The information scrolls out linearly in one direction. You can scroll backward, but we're always scrolling, and the only order is based on the time when the piece of information was published. Blogs break the scroll down by date, but it's still pretty awkward. One effective model is the "tab" model. Tabs represent a great visual metaphor for organizing pages. Tabs come from a book rather than a scroll metaphor, but would still be a cumbersome interface for blogs and news feeds.

Just off the top of my head, as an example, I'm thinking of "feed" as a literal metaphor. What we have at the moment is a kind of trough of information, and somehow we need to break it down into individual courses, and meals. Then expanding that further to food pyramids that describe the basic components of our diet, what kind of visual metaphor would that be? How about instead of a pyramid, which seems too ruthlessly hierarchical (best friends at the top, least important friends at the bottom) what about a wheel or pie?

Anyway, that's just one random example, but this is the kind of thinking I'm talking about. The pie thing might not work at all, but it's image based, visually spare, and the metaphor has the potential to be more accessible, or at least on the right track towards being more accessible and user friendly. You've already got this great hat metaphor. You just need to find a way to present the rest of the information with a visual metaphor that's equally as intuitive and inventive.

Though folders and desktops seem pretty basic to us now, think of how it must have seemed when they were first conceptualized as an interface. the idea must have been incredibly radical. The whole way of thinking in a virtual interactive conceptual space was so new, they were inventing not just the language we use to talk about this stuff--ok, this is a "folder" and this is a "desktop"--but they took it further, making visual icons that corresponded to the metaphors. We need to keep thinking in this direction on a fundamental formal level, but at the moment, we're not conceptualizing past these basic metaphors of pages and folders, books and scrolls. Think about it: even though you've come up with this great metaphor of a "hat", it's just another icon on a page in the same old formal context, the same presentation. But what's a hat? And how is it less a symbol, and more a formal construct, a metaphor for a different way of interacting with something. You put a folder on a desktop. You put a hat on your head. I don't know what the interface should be, I just think you need to fundamentally change the way you're thinking about this stuff to reflect a visual vocabulary that corresponds logically with the metaphor, rather than using it as an iconic component of traditional written language an it's basic forms.

Also I made a new giant picture:

http://jedalexander.blogspot.com/2009/07/elephant-factory.html

Check it out!

Good to see you messing with this kind of stuff, Austin! Looking forward to future developments.