Ambient information in interfaces ideas
Above are some small ideas I penned down in one of my sketch books. Maybe you can make them useful in some of your future interface designs. They are all about including extra information in common interface elements.
1. Range slider with distribution curve
Price ranges or other type of ranges like for example the diameter of a screen, processor speed, analogue zoom range etc are perfect examples of information that is to be manipulated by range sliders. You select the range of the attribute you are searching in the product and the search application returns the results.
But what if you select a range that is very rare and combined with other search parameters return no results. The inclusion of the distribution curve tells the user which ranges are most common and are more likely to return results.
2. Distance selection with travel time
If you want to search for a new home or for example a restaurant in your vicinity most often you can select a range in distance to narrow down the search.
Why not include some small icons that show the travel time by some icons which represent the means of transportation and a time icon that shows the travel time? Green is minutes and red is the hours spend.
3. Scroll bar showing sections
Scrolling is a handy method of navigating through pages but it is for example not easy to go to the comments right away in a blog site. Most often a separate link is included.
Why not show the different sections of the page besides the scroll bar? When you hover over the colors you see what they represent and if you click on for example the purple bar you will go directly to the comments section. This can also be handy in large articles like wikipedia pages.
4. Loading bar with subprogress
Sometimes you have a separate loading bar to show the progress of a subprocess. Why not add some colors above the load bar to visualize the subprocesses. You can also mouseover them like on the scrollbar to see what they are.
Ideas inspired by my regular dose of infosthetics. I highly recommend this blog to any kind of designer.
gravano Said,
April 9, 2007 @ 20:03
excellent idea’s! great inspiration
Jurriaan Mous Said,
April 9, 2007 @ 20:57
Thanks! The distribution curve idea was inspired by you statistical question earlier
I hope I can post some more soon 
Ralph Das Said,
April 11, 2007 @ 11:45
Well it’s certainly a interesting idea and looks nice. The only feeling I have is that it won’t change the way I operate and use systems a lot. I guess a lot of the metioned features present me with double information as there are components used parallel to the ones mentioned. But the features mentioned are very interesting for a have to know audience rather then the general public I guess. Anyway thanks for the inspiration!
Jeroen Said,
April 19, 2007 @ 9:00
Good ideas.
A working sample can be found at: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/102
Rollover the videos’ timeline when playing a video to get some extra information about the movie.
estetika » Blog Archive » links for 2007-09-27 Said,
September 27, 2007 @ 20:30
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