tknight.org

160?

Did you ever wonder why text messages are limited to exactly 160 characters? Who came up with the limit and is there a logical explanation behind it?

photo by Leo Reynolds

It turns out that it is a technical limitation imposed by the GSM standard. As always Wikipedia has a nice article on the topic.

Transmission of short messages between the SMSC and the handset is done using the Mobile Application Part (MAP) of the SS7 protocol. Messages are sent with the MAP mo- and mt-ForwardSM operations, whose payload length is limited by the constraints of the signalling protocol to precisely 140 octets (140 octets = 140 * 8 bits = 1120 bits). Short messages can be encoded using a variety of alphabets: the default GSM 7-bit alphabet (shown above), the 8-bit data alphabet, and the 16-bit UTF-16/UCS-2 alphabet.[18] Depending on which alphabet the subscriber has configured in the handset, this leads to the maximum individual Short Message sizes of 160 7-bit characters, 140 8-bit characters, or 70 16-bit characters (including spaces).

Read the whole article here.

Delicious Happiness

At the airport in Seoul I saw the following slogan which made me smile.

It certainly sounds a lot nicer than "Live everyday of your life as if it would be your last".

Youtube + Music Videos + Playlists = Music Player

Last month I saw someone using YouTube as a music player and thought "what a neat idea!". I mean it is quite obvious once you see it. YouTube has all the ingredients to make it work: lots of music videos and a playlist feature called quicklist which allows you to play a list of videos in a defined order.

You can even take it one step higher. There are lots of air apps (e.g. FLVPlay) which remove the need to use the limiting web interface and replace it with a much richer user experience by using flash.

So the next time you are at a party and you need a music player just use YouTube's quicklist feature.

A small redesign...

This week I finally introduced some small design changes to this website which had been floating around in my head for a while.

The first thing you might notice is that I changed the menu items. I replaced "news" with "blog" because I did not feel like my posts are reflecting something new. There are just thoughts about the topics I am interested in. Moreover I decided to merge the about and contact page into a new section called "info". The contact page just never had same importance as the other menu items.

Secondly, I introduced a new section called "shared". In this section you will find interesting or inspirational articles from other websites. The way it works behind the scenes is simple I use Google Reader to follow my favourite websites. When I like a specific article Google Reader allows me to mark this article as shared. In the end my website pulls all the shared articles from Google Reader and displays them here.

The main reason I introduced the shared section is that now my friends can easily see what I found interesting. This removes the need to send emails to them when I think something is worth looking at (push versus pull). Hope you like it.

Roadsworth

I like things which challenge me to see the world from a different perspective, for example photography. Lately I found something else which provided that challenge: Street Art.

Pic courtesy of Alaine Edouard

Have a look at this trailer for the documentary "Roadsworth: Crossing the line" to see what I mean and if you like it make sure to have a look at Banksy's book "Wall and Piece".
(via boing boing)

Tokyo Metro Posters

By accident I stumbled upon these rather hilarious posters which can be found in the Tokyo metro.

Apparently each month they come up with a new one. Click here to see all of them.

Quote

"Goals are dreams with deadlines.”

Diana Scharf Hunt

Make Ads not Slides

I am really passionate about presentations and presentation design. Why? Simple, I hate wasting people's time! Imagine you are doing a one hour presentation in front of 24. If your presentation is boring then you just wasted one day of a persons lifetime!

So how can you make sure that you do not bore people to death with your presentations? Well, there are a couple of ways. First of all make sure to check out presentation zen. Garr Reynolds is the brain behind the site and it has lots of great tips on how to become better at presenting something. Perhaps the best advise I got from Garr was to look at public advertisements as an inspiration for crafting a message.

Everybody knows that people do not look at boring things. However what could be more boring then your standard slide featuring a list of bullet points on a white background. Even the interestingness of your flashy company logo will not save you if you serve one boring slide after another.

So everyday while waiting for your bus or train, look out for advertisements which make you look. Then think about why you like them and how they caught your attention. Was it the typeface, an interesting image or the composition?

You might say "Wait a second but I am not selling any goods with my presentations so why should I dress them up like an advertisement", well, in a way you are always selling something. It might be an idea, inspiration or you want to make people think about a certain topic.

So have a look around and see if you can find some inspirations. They might help you to make your slides a little bit better.

Links or the importance of consistency

One of the biggest usability problems on the internet is still the inconsistency in which links are displayed. Back in the good old days my Netscape browser displayed every link on nearly every website in the same way because not many people knew how to change their looks. Nowadays this is not the case anymore. Probably one of the first things a web designer does when building a new site is overwriting the default link design. However this leads to a lot of pain especially for people who did not grow up with the internet and do not have that sixth sense when it comes to knowing what word, box or picture is a link and which is not. Lets have a look at Twitter as a concrete example.

As you can see Twitters main site uses a wide range of designs for their links: underlined text, text in a different color, boxes, pictures,... I doubt that you can tell me the number of links on the page after one quick look. Now lets compare this with the most visited site on the internet the Google Search homepage.

As you can see the site uses only one design for every link: blue underlined text. Obviously this makes it very easy to spot links.

It will be interesting to see how this topic will evolve further. I strongly believe that it is important for every website to have a consistent way to design links.

By the way this post was inspired by my own attempt to improve the links on this site. As you can see every link, except to top menu, is underlined, now. Hopefully this will have a positive effect on the usability of the site.

Show do not tell

One of the things I liked about my favourite Italian restaurant in Sydney is the fact that they put there pizza plates on the wall. So if you ask the waiters how large the small pizza is they just turn around and point to the plates hanging on the wall.

Situations like the one I just described always remind me that in a lot of cases information can be represented much more effectively by using images instead of text. Since strong images convey information in a universal language which everybody understands immediately.

Meet your users

The following video was shot by Google in New York. They asked random people on the street the question: What is a Browser?

People who work in the IT industry will probably cringe or even laugh when the hear the answers. But it is important to accept that these persons are your average users! When you design your next user interface keep in mind that not everybody studied IT. Build software which everybody can use which is probably still one of the hardest problems the IT industry has to tackle.

See also my post about guerrilla testing.

Eyewriter

By accident I stumbled upon this inspiring story. Tony Quan is a famous graffiti artist in LA however tragedy struck hard when he discovered that he got ALS. Since his body is failing on him he could not follow his passion anymore. A group of talented hackers did something truly amazing. First they build a low-cost eyetracker which allows Tony to draw by only using his eyes. After he used the device for the first time he said:

"That was the first time i’ve drawn anything since 2003! It feels like taking a breath after being held underwater for 5 minutes.”

After they built the eyetracker they took the whole idea to an even higher level. Since Tony can not leave his bedroom, the group used a high performance beamer to project his art live onto walls in the city.

For me the story shows two things. First it is amazing what kind of possibilities technology offers for people with disabilities. Secondly it is interesting to see how the falling prizes for complex hardware are leading to a true democratization of high-end technologies. Nowadays in order to accomplish something all you need is a dedicated group of hackers since the hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper every day.

Learn more about the project here.

Content and Process

Another fantastic TEDTalk. Lead like a conductor.

Which conducting style has your boss?

PotsBlitz now available on Github

While most of the times I work on commercial projects I also think it is vital to give something back to the community whenever you can. Today I am finally releasing a little side project of mine called PotsBlitz.

PotsBlitz is an educational program which is used for training dyslexic children. It is based on the theory of FlashWords. The idea behind FlashWords is simple. You show a kid a word for a short period of time and it then has to tell the teacher the word it saw. It can be used for a wide range of exercises one could be to train a certain reading strategy e.g. based on syllables. If you wanna learn more about PotsBlitz head over to the project page. Furthermore PotsBlitz also comes bundled with the reading training program "PotsBlitz - Das Potsdamer Lesetraining" which you can find here. While the training costs money the software part will always be for free.