Gee, I must be on a roll or something. I just uploaded another entry for the ol’ portfolio.
This one’s a work piece - more specifically, it’s an intranet site for a working group that my boss and some co-workers run. It’s got two main features: a blog-like interface for announcements and a document repository. Admins can go in and modify everything on the fly, yadda yadda… It’s a neat little system.
What I’m most excited about, however, is the chance to finally implement something I’ve been hearing about for ages - eliminating confirmations for delete actions. I was able to do away with ‘em by making all such actions reversible (within an adjustable timeframe - currently two weeks). I’m really looking forward to hearing the feedback from users to see if the knowledge that they can’t permanently screw things up by exploring and playing around makes the system easier to learn and use.
but I finally got around to updating the Version 2 section of my portfolio with the March entry. The sad thing is I’ve had the post and the thumbnail ready for a few weeks; I just forgot to publish them to the site.
[previous installments of WDLfC: Introduction, Part 1, Part 2]
OK, so we’ve seen a bit of how abstraction works in comics and how it can be applied to the big picture of web design. Now, let’s turn our attention to another piece of the picture.
In Understanding Comics, McCloud describes two interesting consequences of abstraction. The first is forcing audience focus onto those features of the object the artist wishes to be attended to. The second consequence, however, works somewhat differently; instead of imposing a limit upon the audience, abstraction also opens the work up to a wider audience by making objects more universal.
If I draw a photorealistic face, it’s going to look like someone - it’ll be male or female, Caucasian or African, fat or thin, and these definite features make the audience members less likely to identify with the individual depicted when they differ from the audience member’s own traits. By eliminating away from such characters, abstractions become more universal than their less abstract counterparts.
At this point, you’ve got to be asking yourself what in the blue blazes this has to do with web design. I mean, certainly, you could draw a parallel with efforts to internationalize sites, but that’s not what I’m aiming for here. After all, the title of this section is Abstraction and Widget Design, isn’t it? Well, I’m arguing here that the universalization effect you get with abstraction (so easily noticed with faces) may also be worth exploring with user interface widgets.
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Just got back from playing squash with Craig…. For those of you out there who aren’t familiar with the sport, think of racquetball with a dead ball (so there’s more running) and more limits on where you can hit it (so there’s more skill required). I won 4 of the 7 games that we played over the course of an hour or so.
And if you were thinking it’s a low impact sport - I subluxated (partially dislocated) my left shoulder in the second game, tweaked my lower back, and did a little somethin’ somethin’ to my right knee. Waking up tomorrow will be oh so much fun.
But at least I have the monkey (the trophy Craig and I play for each time out).
