The loading feature was cooler than the end result

19 Aug 2009 / 4 Comments

personas_01

loading_01

Kind of curious to see how my online persona was looking like to others, I quickly typed in my name to http://personas.media.mit.edu/. The system searches through a myriad of categories like online, books, fame, sports, management, genealogy, fashion, aggression, family, committees, medicine, media, education, movies, news, illegal, music, social, religious, medical, politics, music, legal, professional, musical, art and design. Above is the final product, while kind of cool looking I didn’t think it really help me understand anything better about myself online and I questioned how sports could have more than design… Oh well, the bigger take away for me at least was the loading screen. Watching all the data filter through the screen was actually pretty cool. By placing some of the calculations out front and visualizing it, I was willing to wait a couple minutes. If the load had been the standard loading bar I doubt I would have stayed and closed the site up.

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Posted in: Design, Information Design, Interaction Design, UX
  • http://www.nofi.org/ Jeffrey Melton

    Agreed. Also, it doesn't differentiate between multiple people with the same name. So, the more unique your name, the more accurate the final reflection is.

  • http://www.portigal.com/ Steve Portigal

    You hit it right with the headline; my exact reaction. Plus, what the heck is that stuff about “Illegal” and “Aggression” (labels for segments in the map that came up for me)?

  • http://www.nooka.com nookaNOW

    the loading is so cool they should have an options to save the search as a video. i too got a big sports sections, but there is another matthew waldman who does professional mountain biking, so they should add some filter options. was fun to use though.

  • http://www.nooka.com nookaNOW

    from the designer of the tool after i posted a comment about filtering:
    “If you read the text on the main page, you'll see this is an art piece critiquing data mining. Part of data mining is imperfection, such as the inability to separate out people. Feeling that frustration is part of the piece.”

    very funny as i obviously did not read the text on the opening page!