Innovative interfaces for site/content navigation
(Originally for Satama Research Blog)
During Web 1.0. era we though that the neatest idea an content/transaction site could have, it leverating Amazon.com -like recommendations engines and the wisdom of crowds in showing the related items. Yep, that was cool, but still, the UI for this kind of sematics is/was nearly always purely text-based, top-to-bottom, read and find out – UI’s.
At the dawning Web 2.0 era, we are seeing this to change. Not only the cool new internet-based computing via site APIs, but also rich data visualisation is breaking through. News Corporation operates one of the largest IT-business news sites in the world. It has pioneereed in nearly all the possible neat tech-solutions in online publishing. Its latest innovation is showing where, in my opinion, we at Satama should be guiding our media customers towards into – media experiences. If you click on any article from News.com, you will see 1) the actual article, 2) what related, 3) what new BUT also 4) the big picture and 5) what’s hot – views to the site/article.
The Big picture is based on LivePlasma-technology, originally designed for music recommendations. Through it, you can see and browse through similar articles, topics and companies. Actually fly into content items and relations, which you did not know that existed in the site. Not yet Matrix- kind of data 3D worlds, but an additional step towards them. I wrote here few months ago on search engine results visualisation. Now this visualisation and the visible and value-adding ontologies, semantics, content linkages etc. are breaking into mainstream – to media companies. Yet, I think there is still few companies that beat in 3D-navigation usage the 1999 pioneer, TheBrain. Compare, try, explore – please 🙂
The other media innovation, “What’s hot” builds upon the NewsMap innovation. It shows the hottest (most read) news on the top left and shows with colours what is new and what is old. Very daring, very cool.
Comments, ideas, thoughts?