The original author is Michael Arrington published in TechCrunch.com
Nika Smith wrote a post on the Google blog today showing the evolution of Google chat before it launched in early 2006. Google does extensive testing of new products using employees as guinea pigs (see our post on the pre-launch evolution of Gmail) as well as outsiders brought in to test software and interfaces in their usability lab.
I had a chance to see the lab a few weeks ago. It’s a small room with a large flat screen monitor, along with a desk and computer. It also has a number of discrete cameras (and a microphone) that keep an eye on the user herself as well as the screen.
Around the corner is a second room where Google employees can watch people interact with the software real time. The room has a couch and a chair along with two screens and speakers to monitor the lab. See the image to the right.
The Gmail Labs team took us through some of the pre-launch iterations of Gmail chat that were tested in the lab. Most of these weren’t included in the Google post, so I’ve added them below. All of these were eventually abandoned as the team moved towards the much more low profile chat window at the bottom right of the Gmail screen we see today.
BY NICHOLAS CARR
llustration by Guy Billout
“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »
brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
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My point is that UI do not mean interaction design, definitely.
Due to the definition of UI in WIKI, it is explained as User interface, right, interface for using.
So, how about the INTERACTION, the same as UI? Not at all.
In my private opinion, the INTERACTION is the progress which happens between the user and the object including people or machine, most times computer.
According to the definition, INTERACTION is much more expandable and border than UI. As result, while doing UI design, it is necessary to take how to improve interaction level into consideration, or the design is just nothing but graphic only. I was asked several times to tell the differences from UI and INTERACTION, at that time i always explained the graphic design and UI design was even not the same thing, on the aspect of interaction definition.
That is my standpoint, UI is just one part of interaction design which contains the whole progress of people to communicate with environment. Do remember, while picking UI out of INTERACTION, it is still a part of INTERACTION.
I rebuilt my site yesterday, because yesterday i just finished my Master’s study and i graduated. So i believe that this will be totally new stage of my life unfolding to me.
Due to this, i completely changed my private site’ s out-look. But do not worry, i will recover the previous data as soon as possible, or how about forget the past and start over again? Hoho, Just Joking~
So i hope every of my classmates good luck in their life and career, wherever you are, whenever you are, we always classmates, the best friends in the memory. Best wished to you, my friends.
Hello, my friend.
Today i have a best news that is i graduated from Zhejiang University, the top 3 university in China, I am master now, yeah~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
