There’s an interesting presentation from Mule Design on how a designer’s approach and strategy for copy can make or break a digital interface.

For a lot of projects, copy and wording are considered “icing” or an element of the design process that gets fitted in later—often with little or no involvement from designers. While many user interface experts believe that digital interfaces cannot support copious amounts of copy (the concept that users scan rather than read), the trend in UI design is more copy, not less. Wikipedia and Facebook are both great examples of how text can be used as the core of the user experience.

The presentation also discusses new communication and expression trends that are evolving as aspects of Web 2.0 – the concept that “We aren’t writing, we are speaking in text.”

The presentation, Copy as Interface, is embedded below.

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Nexus is neat Facebook application that lets you visualize connections between all of your friends. It’s a fascinating way to examine how your friends fall into clusters and interrelate. My clusters clearly correlate with phases of my life stretching all the way back to elementary school. Cool stuff.

It’s also interesting to see which friends are the “focal” contacts who link across different groups and people. It’s too bad this tool isn’t available for LinkedIn or a different business site. It would be incredibly useful to see how business contacts and groups connect with each other.

Nexus is a product of Ludios Networks.

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• Interesting Visualization Charts Changes in S&P Market Index
• Four-Dimensional Universe Browsing
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Cool visualization — shows how all the interstate highways are connected.

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A couple of weeks ago I posted about CNN’s use of the Perceptive Pixel’s magic wall. The Wall has created quite a buzz among interaction design geeks and there’s been quite a bit of coverage since.

Tuesday’s edition of the Washington Post has a nice article about the wall, calling it the “gee-whizziest TV-news gizmo since the animated weather map”.

Some more good links:

• All things CNN
• Gawker Readers Don’t Get It
• NY Times Calls Super Tuesday Night of the Touchscreens

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• Interfaces using gestural recognition are no longer science fiction

CNN’s election coverage is boasting some cool new technologies—specifically the new “Magic Wall”, an interactive Touch-screen provided on Jeff Han’s Perceptive Pixel multi-touch technology. According to this article from Broadcast Engineering, Perceptive Pixel developers created customized software for use during the election coverage.

CNN reporters have been using the Magic Wall to toggle between screen views and zoom-in on data sets. During the Iowa coverage, they also had a slick “delegate-sorting” interface. Last night, one reporter used the multi-touch resizing to show some campaign picture. Overall…very cool stuff and, like any design geek, I can’t wait to get my hands on one those (although I hear they go for a cool $100,000.00).

As they cool as the screens are, watching a reporter interact with them feels broken – there’s an unevenness watching them work with the device that doesn’t translate well to TV coverage. The screens also create some challenging body positioning issues. Reporters have to face away from the camera to interact with screens, creating some choppy communications. This is similar to some of the problems people have when presenting projected PowerPoint presentations.

All in all, it’s great to see nifty new technologies like multi-touch interfaces being put to practical use, but there are some clear kinks that need to be worked out…

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