sangsara.net

  • ➟ The UX of Angry Birds (plus: buy Super Quickhook, Hook Worlds!)

    Pulse UX Blog:

    Why Angry Birds is so successful and popular: a cognitive teardown of the user experience

    Why is an interface so engaging that users cannot stop interacting with it? This is a difficult question because it requires cognitive reverse engineering to determine what interaction attributes a successful interface embodies that result in a psychologically engaging user experience. This question pops up when products become massively successful based on their user experience design – think iPhone, iPad, Google Instant Search, Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Kinect.

    A detailed examination of the game mechanics and psychological elements that contribute to Angry Birds’ incredible stickiness, fun, and success. I play it now and then, a couple of levels at a time, and have many levels to go. I’m personally more susceptible to reflex-based game addictions, stuff like Canabalt, Skipping Stone (an ancient mobile game which is now being remade for iOS), and Super Quickhook/Hook Worlds. The latter two are amazing games on the iPhone by a small indie studio called Rocketcat Games. If you like infinite running games like Canabalt or retro 8/16-bit graphics, you’re going to love these. They’re hardcore one-more-try games that have you racing against your own ghost and/or the clock, but their finely-balanced fun/reward ratio keeps you going instead of tearing your hair out. 

     

    Link

  • ➟ The iPad, Year One — A beautiful video recap of Apple’s 2010 breakthrough

    This was shown during the iPad 2 announcement, and it is one of the best corporate videos I've ever seen. An amazing product story told with emotion and subtle, quality editing. You can really believe this is the most important development in the last 20 years of personal computing.

  • ➟ Thom Yorke Smashes Dead Fish on Washer-Dryer

    If you don't laugh at this Lotus Flower video remix, you're completely dead.

  • ➟ The Weight of a Good Notebook

    Whitney Carpenter, The Bygone Bureau:

  • Wishlisted book: Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

    Amazon.com recommended this book to me, and they were right, it's exactly the book I'd like to be reading now. Completionist instincts are especially activated in Japanese consumer culture, the one place I can think of where releasing a $300+ electronic device in multiple colors prompts repeat purchases from a significant number — with limited edition rereleases prompting early-morning lineups. Serendipitously, this lines up with a lot of articles and posts I'm reading lately (therein lies the problem, "high rate, low downtime" information consumption) about hyperconnectedness and how it's ruining our ability to analyze. The last line of the book description below summarizes this idea, and explains the book's title, so I've set it in bold for your convenience.

    Book description from Amazon:

    In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on within mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States.

    Hiroki Azuma’s Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into the characteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture. For Azuma, one of Japan’s leading public intellectuals, otaku culture mirrors the transformations of postwar Japanese society and the nature of human behavior in the postmodern era. He traces otaku’s ascendancy to the distorted conditions created in Japan by the country’s phenomenal postwar modernization, its inability to come to terms with its defeat in the Second World War, and America’s subsequent cultural invasion. More broadly, Azuma argues that the consumption behavior of otaku is representative of the postmodern consumption of culture in general, which sacrifices the search for greater significance to almost animalistic instant gratification. In this context, culture becomes simply a database of plots and characters and its consumers mere “database animals.” 

    A vital non-Western intervention in postmodern culture and theory, Otaku is also an appealing and perceptive account of Japanese popular culture.

    Otaku: Japan's Database Animals (USD$16.17) [BookDepository.co.uk, free shipping worldwide]

  • Reading: Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown

    Bad Connection: Inside the iPhone Network Meltdown | Magazine
    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_att_fail/all/1

    They’d always end up saying, ‘We’re going to have to escalate this to senior AT&T executives,’ and we always said, ‘Fine, we’ll escalate it to Steve and see who wins.’

    (via Instapaper)

    Digging through my Instapaper queue to read this article from eight months ago. Not sure “We’ll escalate this to Tim and see who wins” has quite the same ring to it.

  • ➟ The Modern Concert

    I've had a few conversations over the last few weeks about our modern state of connectedness, and right now my Facebook feed is filling up with photos from several vacations happening in near-real-time. This Gizmodo article looks at the impact of Instagram sharing on the concert experience, which both takes away and adds to what we traditionally define as being present at a concert, and absorbing – really feeling – what it's like. There are drawbacks to every instance of this now, as long as our interactions are still device-oriented. Every photo you post or update you send on holiday takes precious seconds away from the view, or breaks conversation once sacred and uninterrupted with one's travel companions. Looking at a screen breaks gaze, and advances in technology to change that are far off.

    Most people reject this behavior, and I can understand why, but it's of interest to me that we push this envelope against the grain of comfort, make the sacrifices inherent with any pioneering generation, and see what this connectedness can serendipitously bring us. The immediate countable benefits are obvious: live restaurant recommendations from friends who've been in the same part of Tokyo before, location-aware mapping and transport data, photos and video from a concert you couldn't attend, a greater sense of involvement with a friend's life, and so on. It's what else might come silently with these that I care about. More highly developed neural pathways for social interaction, greater pattern recognition in relationships, augmented emotion, the end of the long-distance relationship. There's so much to be excited about.

    http://gizmodo.com/#!5764994/the-modern-concert

  • Getting goosebumps to music = creativity, openness to experiences

    Science Daily:

    Most people feel chills and shivers in response to music that thrills them, but some people feel these chills often and others feel them hardly at all. People who are particularly open to new experiences are most likely to have chills in response to music, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science.

    I never knew that some people don’t get goosebumps or chills listening to music they like, whether from some sublime melodic passage or brilliant lyric. Talking about it last night reminded me of this article, which I wanted to find and share.

    Link