A friend of mine just built this little app for McCann Erickson: Social Peek. For those of you that remember We Feel Fine, it’s based around a similar theme - organising and surfacing lifestream content around emotional content. But where WFF was quite an experiment in data visualisation, SocialPeek is a simpler representation, focusing on single frequent updates of ‘emotional’ cues that are appearing in the social cloud. It’s also got an API. Give it a go.
Google’s acquisition of Gapminder has led to the release of a visualization API. Here’s a selection of the gadgets in the expanding directory. The API hooks into Google Spreadsheets so that you can use your online account as a dynamic store for your visualizations’ data. 
There’s a debate going on over at Flowing Data about whether Google’s API is going to limit the imagination of visual data artists, but my feeling is that true artists won’t touch it. This seems to me bread-n-butter graphing and plotting for developers who aren’t artists at heart, and don’t have the time to invest in original representations. It’s why Google Maps is everywhere now - who’s going to bother creating a new and more artistic map interface and API? (Well, Stamen actually) It’s easier to just piggyback off Google’s code to add a quick map to your site.
Hopefully the new visualization API will add a lot of charticles to the web though, as developers integrate it into their CMS componentry. This can only be a good thing - I don’t want to have to go reading dense text docs… tell it with a picture instead.
If you get a moment read 37 Signals’ reponse to Don Norman’s accusation that their arrogance to ‘design for themselves’ is the wrong path. It’s a) a very good riposte to Norman’s cogent but dated arguments, and b) a fantastic jumping off point to other articles, in particular this interview of Steve Jobs (where he makes many of the same arguments for ’selfish’ design).
The quote from Norman’s original article that riled me was this:
“Moreover, we purchase on features, not on their absence, and so the successful business must always face this tradeoff: the very things that customers complain about afterwards are what caused them to [purchase the item in the first place].”
One word, Don: iPod. The original iPod’s almost childish lack of features was one of its most redeeming, er, features. People - not technophiles with CS doctorates but everyday people - learned to love the iPod overnight. And that’s exactly the spirit that 37Signals engages in, and why I’m a fan of Basecamp. Yeah - it’s simple. But that’s the point. Someone used to Confluence or Sharepoint might look at Basecamp and think ‘Gee, this doesn’t have such and such a feature that I use about once a year’. Well, so what? For the 80% of tasks that you might use a project planner for each day, Basecamp will be more intuitive, faster to interact with, less expensive and easier to convince your colleagues to use. I know, because I’ve used both
And there’s the other great reason to not do everything for all people: you actually get stuff out the door. These days, if you keep trying to choke your product with new features, you’ll be left scrambling to pick up the odd straggler who didn’t already sign up for your competitor who put out their product that does a few things really well.
Norman did post an addendum to his article that sounded terrifically similar, actually, to Jason Fried’s rebuttal of his arguments:
As expected, the publication of this note has released a flood of responses, so let me use them as an excuse to clarify my writing.
One correspondent wrote: ” I think you’re somewhat mistaken in your evaluation of 37signals. To them, feature-bloat in web applications is akin to food service and seat reservations for Southwest Airlines. Application simplicity and usability are what the customers need most.”
I do not disagree with the comment: I simply do not believe that arrogance is the solution. Feature-bloat is horrible. 37signals is correct to be annoyed. But the disdain they show for their customers is not just arrogance: it is selfishness. The solution is not ignorance of the needs of your customers. Their approach is both arrogant and selfish.
The solution is to decide which customers represent your core audience, and then to observe them at work, the better to understand their true needs. (Not by asking them, not by questionnaires, not by focus groups). Rapid iterations of prototype and evaluation is the key. The iterative design method of rapid prototyping, test, and iteration (all done within the span of a day or so) is well defined in the Human-Computer Interaction community. It starts with observation and understanding. It then proceeds through rapid prototyping and test, continually refining the project scope and definitions.
The mark of the great designer is the ability to provide what people need without excessive complexity, without feature bloat. Simplicity should never be the goal. Follow the famous Einstein quote: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.†Complex things will require complexity. It is the job of the designer to manage that complexity with skill and grace.
I don’t think fundamentally there’s much difference in their approaches: it seems that Norman’s just not a fan of upstarts such as Hansson and Fried - possibly because they are too boldly confident in their own talents and intuitions, and assumptions that by designing a tool that they would get enjoyment and use out of, they would end up with a successful product. But what’s fundamentally wrong with this kind of approach? It’s certainly served Apple well over the years, if the Jobs interview is anything to go by.
The old Henry Ford quotation came up at least once in the conversation, and it’s one that’s more and more relevant in a world where people don’t necessarily understand how the applications of the future are going to affect them, and whether they think they would actually use or come to need an application in their lives: Ford said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.”‘ For me it also comes down to this: if you give something that’s completely new to a ‘user’, they will immediately buck, complaining that it’s not what they’re used to and that they don’t like it. That’s a recipe for staid design in my book. If we only adopted features that 100% of our users knew how to employ 100% of the time, we would never create new metaphors of interaction and interface, and more importantly, the medium and the mechanism would never become art. So sometimes, we have to be brave enough to strike out on our own.
Regardless, it’s a good thread to become absorbed in - two great thinkers exposing their thoughts for the world.
A couple months ago Platform4 launched a creative code contest for developers keen to mash up Channel4’s Film4 content with other content from around the web.
We had some great entries but it was Thomas Butterworth with his enhanced cinema search who was crowned the overall winner and awarded £1500 for his mash-up of Google Maps, YouTube movie trailers and Film4 reviews.
The judges were impressed with Thomas’ app’s ease of use, clear utility and how it added clear value to the Film4 reviews that underpinned it. In the words of one judge, it’s a simple idea, well delivered.
Our two runners-up excelled in creating quirky apps that played with ideas of traditional navigation and social interactions.
Daniel Hilton’s group-decision engine for choosing a film to watch and what takeaway to eat on the night impressed us with its kooky nature and attempt to marry usefulness with the social aspects of ‘movie nights’. It also employed a postcode lookup tool, but instead of searching for cinemas near you, found food delivery places nearby.
Andrew Chalkey’s feedreading service with built-in previews and blog reactions took joint second prize. It combined trailers from Apple’s trailer service and the latest blog reviews of the films from Technorati. Both Daniel and Andrew won £250 for their trouble.
We’ve been really impressed by all the submissions received – it’s been a great competition. Hopefully we’ll be able to run similar contests with more Channel4 feeds later in the year. (Maybe even using some RESTful C4 services 
I spotted this the other day and immediately thought: yes - a perfect use of a web app. Mint.com is part account activity aggregator, part implicit spending behaviour monitor, part deal-finder. In other words, it’s a low-maintenance budgeting software package that works on your behalf to sort out your finances. Pretty cool. Now that I’ve got a wife and kids to look after, I worry more about the old pennies, and I’ve fired up Excel a couple times and tried to work out the sums a bit. But I think I’m not alone in the habit of forgetting about the spreadsheet about a week later not bothering to update any information in it, plummeting into a guilt spiral. Well, it’s never that bad, but you know what I mean.
So when I took the tour of this US-only web app and saw the feature list it appealed instantly: once it knows your account details (yes the security question looms, but heck, if I bank online anyway, what difference is it?) it can categorise your spending by checking what the debit went on, then suggest ways of cutting back on those outlays. 
In fact, it even emails you if you’re about to go overbudget on a particular category, say ‘Beer and Pizza’. It can also offer you discounts on products that it think could save you money. Having just switched current accounts myself, I wish I’d had this facility ages ago. Anyway, the downside is that it’s US-only for the time being, though a UK launch is planned in ‘early 2009′ according to the corp blog.