Share your interests Wordle style

I have to say, this Wordle cloud of my interests (fed in from my del.icio.us tag usage) is pretty neat!

Make your own.

Thanks for the pointer, Greg!

My gmail usage trends

I found a nifty little tool a while ago, offered through Google, that will analyze your mail usage and make pretty graphs and "top 10" lists about your mail usage. There's a snippet of my results on the left, the top recipients of the mail I sent, shown with relative frequency to one another. It's interesting to see the top to be teammates from a class project, (with one of the repeated below at a different e-mail address), the bottom one being my webteam committment to the Inter Cooperative Council, and other than my mom, the rest are coworkers. You can see when Bhavesh joined the team because he becomes visible in the visualization.

If you want to try it out for yourself or learn more, check out the Google Code mail trends page. (You'll need a gmail account with IMAP enabled, Python 2.5, and Cheetah which was a quick install.)

A plug for OmniGraffle

I am learning a lot about designing interfaces this summer through working on DrProject. I've dabbled with interface design before by creating a few paper prototypes, wireframes in Visio, and free form design of a game and some website screenshots from within OmniGraffle, a great multi-purpose diagramming tool for OS X. Although I am relatively new to both Macs and interface design, I've really picked up OmniGraffle over the past year. I've found it to be easy to use and enjoyable. I guess that like most interface designers, I've found my favorite prototyping software and I'm sticking to it, for now.

OmniGraffle comes with "stencils" which are shapes and symbols that you can drag and drop onto the canvas. (Graffletopia is a great resource for stencils.) In addition, you can create multiple canvases within one document, and have one or more "Master" canvases that can be used to include elements from one canvas as the beginning for multiple canvases. You can also link from any OmniGraffle object to a website or a different canvas. This lets you export the entire document as a clickable prototype. (Be sure to select Entire Document in the export options if you try this.)

Here are a few resources if you're interested in prototyping interfaces with OmniGraffle:

Graffletopia User Interface stencils

How to create clickable HTML image map or PDF prototypes using OmniGraffle

Yahoo design patterns provides an easy package of 16 stencil sets, but it is also a great resource for thinking about and learning about conventions for design patterns, like breadcrumbs.

My design process has pretty much been like this:

• Talking with developers about requirements and design decisions


• Brainstorming more concretely by mocking up ideas in OmniGraffle


• Questioning my assumptions and thinking about the interface from a new user's point of view.

I think I've also been using the design principles and other less tangible knowledge I've learned from classes and readings. So far this summer, I've read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think and I'm working on Morville and Rosenfeld's Information Architecture. Once I'm past my big deadline for my job at Clearsighted, I hope to spend even more time reading.

(You can also find this post on my DrProject blog.)