My campus is the proud home of the McCormick Tribune Campus Center which, despite being incredibly beautiful, has some of the most frustrating bathrooms known to mankind. This is due to the faucets having a totally different interface from every other faucet ever. To turn on the water, one must wave their hand in front of an infrared sensor. To turn it off, one must do the same thing again. The amount of water this building wastes because visitors expect the faucets to turn off automatically is not known to me, but I assume it to be quite large.

Why am I talking about faucets? The faucets in the MTCC break a common user interface that is familiar to people, who respond by being confused. Learning a new way to do a familiar task will never be intuative. This is a basic human limitation based on functional fixedness. I believe that this is why risks are so seldom taken in interface design. Burnout from the pre-standards days of websites, where mystery meat navigation was common practice, may also be a strong contributor.

As rational as the current approaches are, they are also self limiting. Fortunately, I think interface is going in a new place entirely.

Welcome to the new interface

The search bar is quickly becoming the primary interface tool for everything. I launch every application on my computer with quicksilver, which is infinitely faster than anything else. I don’t type URLs anymore, I search google for the name of the site. I’ve stopped meticulously organizing files on my desktop; every month I just throw the entire contents in a zip and move it to an archive folder.

The search bar has moved organizational emphasis away from the filing cabinet/folder system that we are so used to. The emphasis is on having a good idea of what you are looking for, not on knowing where to find it. Good search features have also cut down on our need to meticulously organize everything so that we may later retrieve it.

There is still a lot of work left and creating better and better search algorithms is an extremely difficult task. Nevertheless, organization and interface is moving in the search bar direction.

After giving up on the last layout I made, I promptly made and gave up on another one:

This is probably better than the last one, but still not near what I want.

By the looks of things, it’s going to take me another 2-3 designs to get a design that I’m pleased with enough to actually template the thing into wordpress. I think that this has become the measure of whether I’m satisfied with a layout I’ve made: if I’ll take the time to cut it apart into 15 php files and plug it into software.

In my mind, the things I’ve been doing with this are probably closest to doodling. At this point it’s become fairly obvious that I need to do this a lot more. Expect more screenshots of failed works.

Recently, it came to my attention that my URL may not be the most professional thing the business world has ever seen. So, a few days ago, I registered the domain hgltp.com. Hopefully this will allow me to keep this site’s excellent theme and style, but will prevent snide remarks about how I don’t know what is resume-appropriate (I don’t).

In any case, I’m working on a new design for the whole thing, so I’m going to post a preliminary mockup. Probably going to go about converting this to xhtml this weekend. Templating should be much esier the second time around.

1. Life
2. Liberty
3. Pursuit of happiness
4. Internet
5. Health care

There is a lot of talk going around about nation-wide free broadband wi-fi. This sounds great. I love the internet, and I think that being able to connect everywhere would really make a lot of things easier/better. Furthermore, this action would finally make information totally free.

What I am upset about is that free internet for everyone is such a no-brainer but healthcare isn’t. I realize that the healthcare debate is far more convoluted and problematic, but this rediculous. Good health is becoming a luxury item in the United States. The less money you have, the harder it is to get proper healthcare and food that is good for you.

In the land of high-saturated fat food and sedentary lifestyles, the man who shops at whole foods and has a gym membership is king. As the average daily human routine becomes less and less physically active, people are going to have to pay to be skinny.