[Sigia-l] Jared Spool's article on galleries

[Marc Rettig]

Hi all,
The VW reference reminded me of some student work that might be relevant
here. I understand from the original question-poser that "categorizing
phones is right out." How about categorizing facets? 

One of my students at ID, Ross Carl, was working on an assignment to create
an interface for people looking for a car. The assignment was to be done in
stages: watch and interview people doing the activity, create an information
model, design the interface, test and refine the interface. The first two
stages resulted in a description of a situation that sounds similar to
phones:
- a large flat information model: tons of attributes
- a wild variety of personal knowledge and priorities among car-shoppers
- the resulting challenge: what criteria to surface in the interface?

Ross' solution was interesting. He segmented his audience based on
generalizations of their goals in buying a car, then associated a set of
facets with each of those segments. In effect he created a family of four
different interfaces, with a front page on which people self-selected into
one of the segments. So for example, people who were looking for performance
-- a hot car -- are people who are likely to both understand and care about
things like horsepower, turbo features, transmission details, and so on.
People who are looking for a beater to get them around town are more likely
to care most about cost of ownership, reliability, mileage,.... 

Because of the speed at which the class was moving, Ross was unable to
produce a refined version of this design. But you can see a taste of how he
planned to vary the facets, imagery, control style, and so on -- it's near
the end of this article: 
Interface Design in Seven Weeks,
http://loop1.aiga.org/content.cfm?Alias=iitinterfacedesign


Cheers,
Marc Rettig

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Marc Rettig
Fit Associates
www.fitassociates.com