Check out this infographic; what surprises me is that Australia and New Zealand do not fair well in the competition for wealthy Chinese students.
Countries where wealthy Chinese students go to study
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Power Law at Play in Interface Design
Rukuku design work is progressing full steam. In the process, we have discovered that interface design can be driven by the Power Law.
In early 20th century Vilfredo Pareto noticed a particular quality about incomes—in different towns around Europe, across many centuries, regardless of political systems, geographical location or anything else, incomes were distributed on a curve:
The graph illustrates that roughly 80% of wealth belongs to about 20% of people. And the remaining 80% of people collectively own the remaining 20% of societal wealth. This 80/20 rule magically works in many areas of life.
We discovered that when people post pictures and attach tags to them, 80% of pictures have fewer than 10 tags. Furthermore, any type of tagging activity on the web seems to follow the Pareto Law and 10 tags is the tagging capacity that should satisfy most of the users.
We concluded that if there is a need to limit the number of tags that a user can make in a software interface, most of the people will be satisfied with about a dozen.
Hey, course authors!
In late December 2012 and early January, 2013, we invited a select group of first users to give Rukuku a try! If you signed up for our launch before, and did not get an invite this time, please do not worry – we remember everyone and will send more invites in the upcoming weeks and months.
The wonderful individuals who are now helping us with debugging and generally tolerating the “work-in-progress” look and feel of the site are authoring courses, creating and collecting content, and uploading material for the first courses available on Rukuku.
If you have a particular course in mind that you would like to move to Rukuku, contact us at listentome@rukuku.com
While we will welcome most course ideas, we are especially interested in course authors whose content could appeal to junior high and high school students.
Why move offline models online?
I am amazed that so many education-oriented startups work so hard to move traditional educational models online. To me, the whole point of doing anything education-related on the web is in the ultimate disruptive power of the Internet.
Why bother with emulating offline models when something previously impossible can be created to compete with tradition?
User Interface colors
Color is a powerful tool in interface design.
Jef Raskin’s book I mentioned in my previous post devotes a long chapter to “Modes“. These are “a significant source of errors, confusion, unnecessary restrictions, and complexity in interfaces”. A simple example of mode would be how the “shift” key on your keyboard works: pressing “Shift” with a letter key results in a capital letter, but “Shift” and a number key produces a completely different symbol. The author talks about different modal interface features and suggests a number of ways to avoid modality in interfaces.
However there is very little about modality of color. There is cultural modality, i.e. colors have polar meanings in different cultures. For example, Chinese stock market data displays use green for falling prices, and red for raising prices as seen on the official Shenzhen Stock Exchange website:
Western tradition has it completely the opposite way, i.e. red means loss of value and green means growth in value as seen on Bloomberg.com:
If it weren’t for the triangles and the bars showing direction of the stock price movement, the colored numbers of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange alone would be confusing to most of the Western world, and the colored numbers on the Bloomberg website would confuse a lot of mainland Chinese.
Choosing colors for the interface should not be taken lightly as it can be a source of modality and sheer confusion.
At Rukuku, Inc, we are acutely aware of the ability of color to add modality to the interface, and we work hard to avoid such confusion. Our goal is to create the ultimate education marketplace that is a pleasure to use for anyone.
Read up on good interface design
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, web-based education services seem to have been infected by a virus of ugly design work.
Blackboard LMS (Learning Management Software) has such a complicated and confusing interface that people see business opportunity in designing a better, simpler LMS. There is a startup in New York that is doing exactly that. For some reason, however, when the open source community decided to design Moodle LMS, they effectively created Blackboard’s ugly stepsister. These “designers” should first read up on interface design and put the potential user at the core of their design thinking!
Jef Raskin’s classic book “The Humane Interface” is a good start for any start up. In addition, a nice foundation covering a broader topic of media design is Bill Moggridge’s “Designing Media” volume.
