Dec
21
Adaptation & Usability

I spent some time checking out the sleek redesign of the BBCi site today and it has one very interesting feature I don't think I've seen anywhere else.

All of the story links are grouped into boxes on the homepage: "News", "Sport", "TV", "Radio", &c. If you pay careful attention you'll notice that each time you click on a link, the background color of the box the link sat in becomes just slightly darker. Over time this has the effect of visually pushing your most-used sections into the foreground, while sections you rarely click in begin to fade into the background.

Fabio Sergio of freegorifero makes an interesting analogy to the physical world:

Another relationship between BBCi and RealSpace: physical things that get forgotten and not cared for slowly start to show this by getting covered with dust, dirt, rust. They age and decay. Over time, they fade. Digital objects completely lack these LO-FI qualities and keep their first-day sheen forever. This also brings back to memory a satirical piece written about all the sites that end up never getting updated and how that should be reflected by some sort of digital rot.

How might interactive products show the qualities of a wooden artifact? How could they age gracefully?