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Reading about 'Intelligent' design personalization at bbc.co.uk i wonder a bit about this tool. Firstly, I'm a baseball follower, but have no interest in any other sport. So basically i may click the sports area quite a bit for a few months, then not at all for eseveral more. does the box stay dark blue? Is it smart enough to fade, then go dark agian during spring training? Or what if I'm following one news story, but generally I'm apathetic about the news? This sort of customization might seem to make sense at first blush, but humans are not fixed in time -- different things are important at different moments. Once the design can understand humans as changable creatures, I think they'll have it.
What if next spring you were no longer interested in sport? Going darker then would be wrong. When would it be correct in going darker again ... after you show interest in that area again, no?
Reading the patina.js file reveals a couple of things: the patina is stored in a cookie that will expire in 60 days after your last visit, and yes, it looks like the patina will fade although not by time but by clicking elsewhere, and finally the fading is distributed randomly across all areas - that is, if you click 5 times onto radio then 5 other areas will fade by 1 point each. This makes the fading more subtle than the darkening.
It's kind of nice that there's a javascript file somewhere called "patina.js."
AFAIK, this is one of the first instances I can remember of an interface that specifically considers time in its behavior. I was just at a conference and heard the weird and fascinating Dutch architects Berkel and Bos speak about their (loosely) persona-driven design methodology. One of the most crucial factors in creating narrative descriptions of people in their spaces was *time.* It occurred to me that I don't think I've ever read an user-centered-digital-design persona that considered *time* at all; whether that's how a user's abilities change, or her interests, or her preferences.
Ok, thought of an exception: Word's default menu behavior is to shuffle and hide menu items depending on how you use them over time. Everyone I know pretty much hates that, although it sure sounds good on paper. I think the BBC thing is actually a really nice, simple implementation of records of physical traces over time.