I’ve been keeping this personal blog for a couple of years, writing about a variety of topics. Now that I’m leaving education and becoming a freelance I.T. professional and serial entrepreneur, it seems like a good point to separate out the personal from the professional. Not because I’m trying to keep any secrets from you - it’s just that I realise that no matter how amazing it is, not everyone is interested in my recipe for chickpea curry.
So that it’s not so empty, I duplicated some of the relevant posts from orangejon.com but from now on, I’ll post work-related things only to my professional blog, so you might like to follow both if you wish to stalk me effectively.
Here’s something I just improvised that is inspired by Polish cuisine. Finely chop and fry an onion, garlic, plenty of mushrooms and perhaps a spring onion or two. Mix wholemeal flour and water into a paste and add to pan when onion is see-through. Add salt, pepper, maybe soy sauce and half a vegetable stock cube. Thicken the sauce then spoon onto hot oat pancakes, roll and serve with kasza gryczana (roasted buckwheat).
So we identified that online social networks don’t make it easy to find the news that interests you, and we discussed different ways that we can figure out which social context each of your friends fits into. How can we now design a better user interface for browsing news on social networks?
In my dissertation, I suggested interfaces that group the stories according to the person they relate to, then arrange these people in two dimensions according to:
their social context (by looking at shared friendships and co-appearance in photos)
how much interest the user shows in stories about this person (by observing the user’s behaviour)
Here’s a short video I made to show one of these designs:
For more interface designs and details about how they could be implemented, please refer to my dissertation (PDF, 3.5Mb).