Link Emphasis (Tag Cloud Lite)

I read somewhere that it's best to limit the number a list of links to no greater than five. The reason being is that people can instantaneously recognize things in groups of give but have to count if it is more. An example is people count six items as two groups of threes. I guess what they are trying to say is that if it increases the cognitive load, it has a higher probability of being perceived as cluttered or overwhelming.

With that being said, it's sometimes very difficult to do so because well... everything is important. The categories of an eBay or an Amazon or in this example, the properties of Yahoo! You just can't leave one out, they are all too important for a couple of reasons: One, a lot of times these companies are trying to communicate the breadth that they have and Two, if you hides them behind something, you can't expect people to ever know about them (A bunch of Google's features I still don't know about because they hide it behind their "more" and "even more" buttons.

Anyways, I thought Yahoo! managed this issue quite elagantly... well, as elegant as it was going to get by combining a little tag cloud action with their traditional list of properties. What they do is they highlight the three properties that you use the most by increases the font sizes of those links so what you have is two layers of links. The top most being the links that you are looking for so it increases the affordance while making sure that the other parts of the site are still exposed.

Yahoo! IM / Chat Status Messages.

I have to say, Yahoo! new mail is waaay better than gmail and the outgoing edition of Y!Mail. One of the neat features that has been built in is the ability to chat in the mail experience (Ya, ya, I know Gmail does the same thing). So the chat experience is nothing special but I did notice a small detail that actually amuses me and keeps me in the experience.

Notice at the bottom of the window, the status of your friend is displayed. Normally, the just have " is typing..." but everyonce in a while, they have a random status message that just brightens your day. Here are the one's I've seen so far:

"1000 Monkeys just landed on <-Your Friend->'s keyboard..."
"STAND BY FOR MESSAGE FROM <-YOUR FRIEND->..."
"Don't leave! <-Your Friend-> is typing a message..."

It's a super small thing but man, it adds such a wonderful human touch to the experience. I love it.

Rocking Chairs... Brilliant

On my way to Detroit, I had to make a layover in Midway, Chicago and it's hands down one of the nicer airports I've been in. What did it for me was when I got to the gate, I noticed something that wasn't there in my previous trips to Detroit. Laptop bars w/ electrical outlets and rocking chairs. They were everywhere! Finding seats is usually hard enough but full on areas dedicated to laptop users (everyone) was just brilliant. There is nothing to make a layover more bearable by increasing the affordance for people to use something to keep their minds off the wait. In this case, their productivity boxes (laptops).

As for the rocking chairs, it provided a lot of warmth and frankly, just brought a smile to my face. The first thing I thought was, "That's such a Southwest thing to do."

Link: MacBook Air

This is a great article about how everyone is saying the MacBook Air is useless but also how they are idiots. I think it's a great writing on how perception is not really reality and it takes so real insight into how we use our things to see that the MacBook Air is a truly well thought out design.

My favorite part is the title: MacBook Air Haters, Suck My Dick.

http://wilshipley.com/blog/2008/01/macbook-air-haters-suck-my-dick.html