another interesting visualization tool

As I mentioned the other day, del.icio.us has become even more of an outboard brain for me lately, especially with our website redesign in full swing. Anytime I’m confronted with even the most minuscule UI issue (what to put on the form submission button? “submit”, “go”, “search”?), I turn to a handful of UX/design favourites and usually follow that up with a little googling. And of course all the interesting results end up in my del.icio.us account. The habit is useful to a point: if I want to recall something today that I bookmarked last week, I’ll probably find it pretty quickly and easily. But if I want to go back to something today that I vaguely recall bookmarking 2 months ago, I’m doomed to a whole lot of paging, scrolling, and clicking before I find it.

So it was with some delight that I stumbled upon Favthumbs. Do the internets really need another del.icio.us visualization tool? Maybe not, but it turns out that this one works for me. Since most of the stuff I’m doing these days is design-based, and being a generally visual person, images tend to imprint themselves on my brain better than words. If I bookmarked your website last week because you’ve done some interesting stuff with search boxes, I can guarantee you that I won’t remember the name of your site or anything I read on your page (rendering a search of my bookmarks fruitless), but I’ll probably remember the colours and layout. So a carousel (à la iTunes) or grid display of my del.icio.us bookmarks, complete with thumbnails, is genius. It’s pretty much exactly what the visually-biased like me need.