As for peterpixel.nl, I am not entirely sure how to proceed with the blog. My interests have sort of moved on from general usability into more design (research) methods. Perhaps I can find a place for the here. Either way, the coming 5 weeks will be spent preparing for my Masters Thesis, getting ready for my epic trip to Asia and moving to a new flat. Hopefully, I’ll get back to some more regular writing as the new semester starts.

The students at my former University of Applied Sciences in Rotterdam, currently graduating at various companies in their 4th year, forms a perfect group of people to talk to, which is why I hope they are reading this.

Since I, like most of you, am currently working during the day, I would love if we can schedule a skype meeting one evening. I estimate that 30 minutes should be enough.

If you are reading this and am interested, please get in touch with me via email (communication@peterpixel.nl) or twitter (@peterpixel). Alternatively, simply leave a comment here.

Thanks in advance!

Since coming back home on the 3rd of March I have been working at the Deutsche Telekom Design Research Laboratories here in Berlin, leaving little time left for blogging.

However, the Design Research Lab is a very interesting and environment for an internship and I am very lucky to be working with a bunch of really bright people.

Project I am working on at the moment is coined Next Neighbourhood, and if you are interested you can have a look on our team blog to find out more about what we are up to. Topics covered range from Design Methodology, Community Informatics to Participatory Design. All in all, very exciting times!

The idea behind it is that our Social Networks online are not representative of our actual social network. As it turns out, this is in fact the truth: the average person only communicates with 5 – 7 people in their intimate circle, using technology. Facebook is also quite interesting: the average user has about 120 friends but two way communication only takes place between 4 -6 people, depending on your gender.

It does make me realize that Social Networks don’t adequately deal with the fact that our actual relationships are vastly different from those depicted on our online profile.

(Sources are at 1:30)

If you have ever used an iPhone you’ll notice that there are some really cool gestures that you can do.  Amongst them is this cool little On/Off gesture. It works really well on the iPhone, the gesture is natural and very clear when you have tried it once or twice. Great.

Lately I have started to encounter this little interaction in different places that are certainly not gesture based. Prime example of this was Spotify. The latest Spotify builds allow you to sync some playlists to you hard drive giving you access to it offline (which is great). Instead of using a good old checkbox to do the trick, they have resorted to copying the iPhone’s way of of doing it, with a slider. The massive difference is though that sliding with your mouse is a lot harder to do than swiping with your finger on a screen.

The kicker however is the fact that this little slider is not even a slider, although you’ll forgive anyone for thinking it is one. It actually behaves rather differently from the iPhone slider, namely that you have to click it to change its state.

My guess is that when they developed the iPhone client of Spotify they thought that simply using the controls that are being used in on the iPhone would also work on the desktop. Well, guess again.