Media

Are You Designing For A Maximum Audience?

by

I used to have a tradition in my programming days, of going to the Interface Hall of Shame (now quite out of date http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/) to find out the latest things not to do.  And yes, as you guessed, my programming days were quite awhile ago.

Anyway, to get away from my age to the subject, one of the things I learned as a programmer was that designing a good interface was not obvious.  Most people designed interfaces with . .  . well I'm not sure what they had in *mind* since thinking was not often part of the process.  Let's just say I saw some bad stuff.

Read more

Rage Against the Dying Of The Site

by

I was doing another round of link research for the blog (you'll see some new resources soon), and once again Bonnie and I ran into another round of dead sites.  You've heard me rant about this before – there's so many blogs and sites out there they would be awesome, interesting, and progeeky if they were actually updated.

In ranting to a friend, he simply said, "Oh, like Geocities?"  That stopped me in my mental tracks.

Read more

Go Farther: Procedural Media

by

(Last week I suggested spontaneity and surprise were elements that people making media could use to add value and increase interest.  I wanted to explore that more.)

As I've suggested before, spontaneity and unpredictability is an element of a media product (a story, a game, etc.) that can get, maintain, and expand people's interest in the product.  Spontaneity, combined with relatively fast access to the spontaneous content, is a unique way to add value to a media product as its un duplicateable and plays on our love of the unknown and novel.  Getting that spontaneity is thus important – but varies from media to media.

Every kind of media has its different advantages and disadvantages in adding spontaneity to it.  Changing technology has also altered how this can be done, and changing expectations have altered what people expect.  I'm going to take a look at the different kinds of media and how spontaneity can be added to them.

Read more