Design Exploration: Phylotaxis and 10x10

"the study and understanding of humans through the artifacts we leave behind on the Web"

I've chosen two sites designed by Jonathon Harris . Both deal with the problem of presenting a group of related items of information in a way that gives you an instant "feel" for the whole. A snapshot, if you will.

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Phylotaxis - a look at science

Phylotaxis was built for Seed magazine. It "scours a slew of online news sources and blogs that focus on science", and collects them into this...

• Phylotaxis

The interface is based on the logo for the Seed Media Group, which was designed by Stefan Sagmeister. The "Science---*---Culture" slider controls how the blobs move about. My favorite setting is to set the slider slightly right of center, then rest the pointer in the middle and let the stories pass under it.

Every item is clickable, and within moments a user can figure out the site. There are no hidden features, and nothing behaves in strange or multiple ways. Click a blob, get a story run-down. Click a picture, get the story itself. Couldn't be easier.

The site uses the metaphor of "Science = Reason : Culture = Chaos", with the quivering blobs standing in for atoms bouncing seeds around under a microscope. But if you've never heard of Brownian motion or don't make the connection, it probably doesn't make much sense. I think in this case the metaphor overpowers the usefulness of the site. Maybe it's because Harris based the interface on the logo, but the main focus of attention is the blobs bouncing around rather than the stories they represent.

10 x 10 - a look at the news

10 x 10 was built by Harris in conjunction with Fabrica , Benetton's communication research group. It scans RSS feeds from Reuters World News, BBC World Edition, and New York Times International News, and uses Perl, MySQL, PHP, and Macromedia Flash to create this...

• 10 x 10

Like Phylotaxis, 10x10 is a one page site, with all elements available to the user and an intuitive interface that can be understood almost immediately. 10x10 is better in that the information it contains isn't hidden behind a metaphor, and so can be seen straight away. Again, everything is clickable, and in moments users can understand both how the site works and what it's for. Clean and elegant design.

Harris kindly provides a page explaining how the site works. Once an hour a program scans the news feeds, a word list is created, and two images (a picture and a thumbnail) are stored for each word. The Flash front-end then takes this data and feeds it into an interface that provides interactivity.

This site works much better than Phylotaxis in terms of info comprehension. Users intuitively wave the pointer over the Flash and click to get to the stories contained therein. The interface is practically invisible in fact, and by updating every hour the site is always fresh. The "History" feature gives the site more value by encouraging users to explore. And running stories that don't score highly each hour through the day are gathered up in the "Summation"pages that you can access through the "History", which provides a good filter of story value.

There are two problems I have with the site.

Problem 1: The site only uses single words. Baseball fans won't find "World Series" as one of the links. Likewise, "regime change" and "freedom of information" don't get a look-in. This introduces a type of bias into the results, as most interesting and important topics have multi-word identifiers. This problem wouldn't exist if we all spoke German, which brings me to the second problem.

Problem 2: The site is in English. This brings a massive bias to the type of stories which are likely to show up on 10x10. Popular revolutions in South America; India's fight against GM; the growing problem of water rights in the Middle East; these are three examples of stories that affect huge numbers of people but can fall outside the radar of the site. The three news feeds 10x10 uses are among the most authoritative and outward-looking sources in the English speaking world, but by their nature the stories affecting English-speakers will rise to the top.

As it stands, the site works very well and achieves its aim - presenting a snapshot of This Is Now. The problems could be dealt with in a Version 2. More news sources from many languages could be used for the initial scan, and the word lists could be compiled in a way that gives equal value to each language (water = agua = mayia). This would allow the site to work in different languages too, which would make it much more useful.