From bouquets to search engines, there’s nothing the talented folks at Jackson Fish Market can’t do, except maybe sell fish. Last week, in cooperation with their former employer Microsoft, they launched “Tafiti“, a Silverlight-powered Windows Live Search interface with a twist.
Given it’s Jackson Fish with Jenny Lam we’re talking about here, there’s no question it’s an elegant experience inside out. But it’s not all looks and no substance. Tafiti also incorporates a set of unique ideas including result clippings and “passive search” – a.k.a. tree view – the ability to explore search results without user interaction.
I had the wonderful opportunity to ask the Jackson Fish gang (Hillel, Walter and Jenny) a few questions. Of course they were busy as always, so we kept it reasonably short.
For how long have you worked on Tafiti? How long did you spending planning, designing and implementing?
Did Jackson Fish approach Microsoft or vice versa? What was the initial project concept?
What sort of tools did you use to design and develop Tafiti?
Does Tafiti use only public Windows Live Search APIs?
What were the best features of Silverlight to work with?
Did you encounter any major problem(s) with Silverlight and/or Microsoft’s Live APIs? How did you work around those problems?
What was the decision behind the wood and paper styled design?
The user experience has some key elements from there including the index card from the library card catalog (notice the telltale hole where the spindle holds the cards in place in the drawer) as well as the motif of the card catalog drawer at the top of the results view. We weren’t trying to be completely literal but we thought these elements added a library/research atmosphere to the experience.
We also felt the “tree of knowledge” was a powerful motif as ultimately the search engine contained pointers to huge amounts of useful information. That element felt coherent with the general library/research concept.
How did SectionSeven play a part in the development process?
Will Tafiti be maintained by Jackson Fish or Microsoft?
Finally, should we expect more Microsoft branded solutions and/or Silverlight-powered solutions in the future from Jackson Fish?
I am not sure I like the imagery. I am not a big fan of real-world metaphors when it comes to computer UI. There are nice touches usage-wise, though.
Why doesn’t it support DBCS fonts such as Japanese, Chinese, Korean? it just turns them into squares. Russian and European extended chars seem to work fine, so I suspect it’s a font issue more than an encoding issue. Is this a weakness of Silverlight or something the designers forgot about?
Paul, that’s a very good question. I would assume that Silerlight only supports fonts installed on the users computer. Flash Player works in the same way. However, Flash allows you to package the required front with the content.
Would be interesting to find out how Silverlight handles fonts.
I was a little skeptic about Jackson Fish Market (the way you praised them for theyrebeatiful.com), but I must say that this is great stuff they are bringing to the table. I don’t usually comment much, but the site seems well done and thought out. Good work guys!
P.S: I have a secret crush on Jenny, don’t tell her about it 😉
I do have DBCS fonts on my system, so I lean towards believing that Silverlight requires fonts to be embedded in it for use. But then it’s surprising that cyrillic fonts would be supported. It’s a bit of a mystery!
Usefull information, but as for me nothing more