Anticipatory design
September 6th, 2006Pete Forde reinvents search with his Live Filter demo.
Take particular note of Pete’s never-ending auto-loading page that gets more elements from the result pool as you reach the bottom of the page. Try it yourself – click the View Results button right at the start to see all 64 items, then scroll to the bottom and watch it get the next set of items on demand before you even knew you were demanding them.
Pete and the Unspace folks have been taking serious aim at improving the state of UI interaction for the good of us all. Not content with simply implementing something like OpenRico’s LiveGrid, they apply even more anticipatory design to fixing the scroll-within-a-scroll UI anomaly that LiveGrid introduces to a page that uses it.
The result is that by anticipating a need I didn’t even know I had, they have provided an interface that is natural to use yet very powerful.
Live Filter is cool eh!
Pete gave me a demo in real life before he released the article… I trust we’ll see this design technique picked up all over the web. Kudos on being one of the first to blog about it Brent!