About the "Interactive Web Design" category
Interactive Web Design
Multiple Database Interaction Environments October 1, 2007
As well as the native database schema, the the ability for multiple environment masks… eg client view, administrator view, email view etc… which not only determines which fields are viewable, editable, and such, but what the default titles are for the fields, what the default descriptions are, what format the data will be displayed in by default eg ‘2007-12-13 13:59:59′ or ‘December 13th 2007′, and the input constraints for each interaction environment. Interaction environments, are of course extendable with a stack and mask approach.
MicroInteractive Conversion (Mintercon)
Q:What does a salesmen, a dog and a fortune teller have in common?
Find out how this powerful method that can help drive conversions online.
Have you ever filled out a government application form, and found that by the way your answers fit in that you are being labeled as belonging to a certain ‘category’ of person, and you know that you don’t really fit into it, but there’s no way to have a human conversation to explain how you are a different case because all you have to explain yourself with is the form? It’s a shame but the department is lacking is the ability to deal with you according to your individual disposition. This ability which I refer to, I call microinteractivity.
A salesman, a dog, and a fortune teller all have the ability to sum up a persons disposition from micro actions that the person exhibits. An example of microinteractivity is that a salesman will change the whole content of his pitch in real-time depending on small hidden signs of excitement that he senses to make his conversion. A dog can ’smell’ the fear (or i’d be more inclined to call it tension) on you, and will either bark and bite one person, or wag his tail at another. A fortune teller can do both: sum up your excitement, and fear; by small signs you exhibit, just to reach his conversion. A fortune teller will take you down the relevant path of fortune, and is even so good at it as to repeat back details of events given to them through signs you unwittingly yield. Why not use microinteractive conversion on the web?
Since Javascript, there has been a great oppertunity for microinteractive conversion but instead there has become a plethora of websites using interactivity for a visual only tool(ie. mouseOver etc.) rather than to subtly find out more about the individuals disposition, and seal a conversion. Most interactive sites resemble a government agency than a salesman, trusting that the user has enough ability and motivation to define their own need and seek their own conversion, which is so untrue: users usually give up, and it reflects as abandonment in analytic filters. Of course there must be a direct route to a goal for power consumers, but the other 98% need their interest aroused, to be afforded the ability of taking baby steps, and someone to hold their hand every step of the way.
Baby steps is what mintercon is all about… no loud noises, no overt marketing prose, incredibly short wait times, fluid page changes, progressive data-collection rather than block forms.
Dynamic real-time fluid geared information ingestion September 27, 2007
Changing the dynamics of reading.
Imagine a tapestry of images on a web page, imagine, you can let the computer know which part of the page you are focussed on (eg with a mouse), and zoom into the relevant focussed image(eg with a zoom wheel) to see more detail; now imagine that the tapestry is not a tapestry, but now a paragraph of text, and that each picture is not a picture, but a word. Imagine reading the paragraph at your own pace, the computers keeping up focus with where you are up to, at your pre-expressed speed like a human uses a karaoke screen to keep up to the songs focus, now as your level of comprehension changes, you change your zoom control in and out, and the actual wording of the paragraph changes as you read in real time according to the gearing on your “comprehensiometer”- you keep reading… If you find the text is too explanatory and simple for your level of understanding you change your ingestive gearing, and the words become less numerous, more succinct and powerful. However if you don’t understand much of the text, you change your ingestive gearing the other way, and the text becomes verbose, yet easily understandable. With this approach, doctors can read the same text as children, without need for multiple documents on the same subject. The most effective way to develop this is through 5th generation language analytic software, providing the full fluid geared range but before this is invented, there will be manual implementations, with step-ranged translations.
I believe this technology will change the literature in the future to become more semantically loaded, and more uniform… we’ll see.
Interactive Web Design, (So much different than print design (and web design))
Before the muse let us realise that there are 3 Different terms not to be confused: Print design, web design(WD), and interactive web design(IWD).
E=MC2=IWD
I often find that successful Interactive Web Design (now look I’ve captitalised it) is so complex that it causes deeper, broader, and more complicated thoughts to integrate it than to comprehend the workings of the theory of relativity. It is often confused with print design and web design but in truth, IWD is a lot different; you are creating a universe, you are defining its containment, the laws of its nature, you are implementing it, and where ever you don’t limit your users with natural constraints, you will be called to be judge the intent of their actions. It’s like playing God in a demi-scale, but not sac religiously - It gives you a great respect for him - and you realise why he gave man free choice.
Web design Compared to Print Design
Perhaps the only similarity between print design and WD that your output canvas is rectangular (if you ignore web accessibility mandates) but that’s where the similarities end because in print you know exactly what your end product is going to look like, and you know exactly what medium you are going to impress it on, your paper and your image never changes however the canvas in WD is never the same, it is stretched with the size of the users screen, shrunk with output resolution, and even warped with user preferences, you can’t ever rely on the typeface to be the same across browsers, let alone the colour matching. If one must compare it to print design, imagine designing a print job(one, not many) that must work equally well no matter what you throw into the printer tray: rubber party balloons, socks, paper, glass, and no matter what the colour of media you are printing on; it’s just not do-able, in WD one must design markup, to handle any media type put in the chute, and degrade gracefull. In summary the difference between print design and web design is that in WD you don’t have control of the output, therefore you must code for everything.
Interactive Web Design (IWD) compared to Web Design(WD)
We summarized WD vs print design by saying the difference is that WD must comply to and embrace multiple output methodoligies, however with IWD vs WD, you come into a dilemma upon the realisation that not only you do not know the exact output method, you are now not sure of the content you are outputting, with absolutely every element in your design that is to hold unknown content you will be forced to deal with the question of overflow: weather you are going to shrink it, tabulate it, paginate it, summarize it, hide it, overlap with it, alpha blend it, or a mixture of any of the above, you must have the resources to carry it out.
Aside from content rendering you also have to deal with content input, databases, use extensive algorithms etc…
The five dimensions of web design:
- Real world effect scope
How plugged in the site is to the world, how it effects it, whether the site effects only the light in someones bedroom, weather they can buy a product and have it delivered, or more… - Information Volume
Volume of information, including, but not limited to how many pages, how many words on each page, external resources, etc… - Accessibility
Handicap equality, SEO, sitemaps, xml, web services, spiders, syndicability the comprehension scope and gearing(see next post), and internal seekability. - intrinsic operability.