a running jump...

"When a design finally hits the real world, stereotypes go out the window. Real people don’t fit into..."

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:12:45 +0100

“When a design finally hits the real world, stereotypes go out the window. Real people don’t fit into the neat little boxes that we try to put them in. They’re complex, unpredictable and each one different than the next”

- The Difference Between Good Design and Great Design

“Can experience be designed?” Yes. No. Wait, yes. But.

Sat, 09 Oct 2010 18:46:06 +0100

“When a person engages with your products, services, and environments, a set of distinctly human qualities comes into play. A person’s experience emerges from these qualities: Motivations: why they are engaged with your offering, and what they hope to get out of it Expectations: the preconceptions they bring to how something works Perceptions: the ways in which your offering affects their senses (see, hear, touch, smell, taste) Abilities: how they are able to cognitively and physically interact with your offering Flow: how they engage with your offering over time Culture: the framework of codes (manners, language, rituals), behavioral norms, and systems of belief within which the person operates. When someone says they’ve had a good or a bad experience, what they’re talking about is how a product, service, or environment did or didn’t satisfactorily address these qualities.”

“Can experience be designed?” Yes. No. Wait, yes. But.

Via boagworld

Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 18:09:00 +0100

A chronological list of essential Interaction Design reading.

Take a look

Review Design Comps on iPhone

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:34:59 +0100

Review is a simple app to review your visual design comps on the iPhone. You install an app on your mac and an app on your iPhone and pair the two. On the Mac, drop images into Review, and they’re synced with the iPhone for previewing at full screen.

Via Konigi

Can Experience be Designed?

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 17:25:38 +0100

Did someone design what you experience right now? Can experience be designed? Do experience designers shape how users feel or do they shape with respect to how users feel? A small but important nuance. Did you catch it? No? Then let me ask you this way: Do architects design houses or do they design “inhabitant experiences?”

So is everybody that uses the term “user experience design” a charlatan? see what Oliver Reichenstein at iA has to say. Read more

10 Omnigraffle Tips You Might Not Know

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:09:00 +0100

Great run down of some Omnigraffle tips and tricks, you might not have stumbled across from Todd Moy at Viget Labs.

Check them out here

Informing Smartphone App Design

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:46:37 +0100

Shadowing, Field Interviews and Diary Studies; three complimentary research techniques well suited to smart phone app design. Discussed in detail over at UX Magazine by Suzanne Ginsburg.

Read all about it.

Ocado: Delivering on User Experience

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 22:53:00 +0100

“Good user experience design is about ensuring that at each point of engagement with your product, company, or service, you are crafting positive interactions. It is goal-oriented and outcome-focused because at each stage you are ensuring that users can easily achieve their objectives.”

Ocado is the biggest online grocery retailer in the world Felicity Evans over at UX Booth Explores the Ocado Experience.

Google and Arcade Fire Team Up for HTML5 ‘Experience’

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:40:45 +0100

(Via cameronmoll)

Google and Arcade Fire Team Up for HTML5 ‘Experience’
This multi-window browser experience is probably unlike anything you’ve seen before, though eerily reminiscent of the Javascript-controlled browser window resizing and spawning we saw a decade ago (most notably with Flash sites). The big headline here is that it’s built with HTML5. I’ve not dived into this enough to understand precisely what components of HTML5 are being used, and Google’s official post doesn’t offer details either. Given every link and article I’ve seen pointing to this today mentions HTML5, somebody oughta give us the deets. _Note: I’ve linked to the Wired article, as the actual site is getting hammered with traffic. It’s also very processor intensive, so close just about everything else running on your machine._ **Update:** The Chrome Experiments page includes a few snippets about the HTML5 components being used.

Free Wireframing Kits and Resources

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:05:00 +0100

Comprehensive and slightly epic roundup from Aquil Akhter at Smashing Magazine

“To mock-up the user interface of a website, software or any other product, you’ll need some basic UI elements. And this is where wireframing kits and UI design kits come in handy. When you want to create a low-fidelity prototype for your projects, you can use these kits to give your idea a certain shape, keeping it abstract and not losing yourself in details.”

Check it out over at Smashing Magazine

How Choice Impairs Your Visitors

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 10:25:00 +0100

“Many sites provide an array of methods to interact with their offerings, but excesses in decision-making pressure can render less empowered visitors into a cyclone of stress from the barrage of questions being asked. As an industry, we place a great deal of emphasis on getting visitors to make decisions, but are we turning a straightforward path into a labyrinth with our need to know?”

Alexander Dawson discusses how providing users with too much choice can result in confusion and negative feeling towards a product.

Placing too many demands on the user to make many decisions on the spot rather than as the need arises, causes them to provide ill considered responses. Better to wait until they can make a more enlightened choice later.

Head over to UX Booth to read Alexander Dawson’s article

A Model for UX Career Growth

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:12:31 +0100

From the guys at Adaptive path

HTC is live

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 18:10:00 +0100

Our latest work at Head

(Via mrbnut (Andy Bennett))

Me and the team at Head have been busily working away on lots of exciting projects over the last year, and they’re all starting to make their way onto the world wide web. Here’s one of our latest projects for HTC. We’ve just re-designed the products section of their Global site. You can read all about the project here

Using Omnigraffle with Subversion

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:18:00 +0100

By default Omnigraffle and Subversion do not play nicely together, and will result in Subversion collisions and hair pulling.

This happens because by default Omnigraffle saves as a File Package, this is a folder that allows the user to modify a group of files as if they were one, and helps to keep Omnigraffle files smaller by only having to keep a single instance of elements such as images. For various reasons Subversion cannot handle File Packages.

So we need to save a Document as a Flat File, this generally makes for a slightly larger document size.

To save as a flat file, open the Omnigraffle Inspector, and go to the ‘Document’ panel (Shortcut for this is ⌘+4), then go to the ‘Document’ tab. The default selection of ‘Automatic package or flat file’ will be visible in the drop down here. Click on the drop down and change the selection to ‘Save as flat file’

and your all set.

Good Help is Hard to Find

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:05:00 +0100

“Frustrated users can become a company’s biggest fans. People who have no trouble using a system may not give the experience a great deal of thought. But someone who has difficulty and then finds that the system anticipated their need for help (and met it effectively) is much more likely to appreciate the thoughtfulness of the system’s developers—and of the business itself. Effective help content is a powerful and underused tool to make that experience possible.”

Read the article on A List Apart

Scamping Tools

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:53:35 +0100

My scamping/sketching tools for rapid wireframing; Sharpies of various colours, Uniball fine-line pen, Uniball Kuru Toga Mechanical Pencil, Goldline layout pad, Pritt non-permanent glue, scissors, Post Its, Blue Tac (and not in the photo, Tipex & a photocopier)

What Motivates Us

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:38:00 +0100

Complete Beginners Guide to Design Research

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:22:00 +0100

“Research actually begins the moment we learn about a project, whether we acknowledge it or not. As user experience designers we aren’t content simply designing to specification. Instead, we ask questions. We take notes. We learn everything we can about our client and their audience—and that’s before we even begin! In this article, we explore the (purported) method to this (seeming) madness, appropriately known as design research.”

Read on..

A Visual Vocabulary for Describing Information Architecture and Interaction Design

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:23:00 +0100

“Diagrams are an essential tool for communicating information architecture and interaction design in Web development teams. This document discusses the considerations in development of such diagrams, outlines a basic symbology for diagramming information architecture and interaction design concepts, and provides guidelines for the use of these elements.”

Creating a Table of Contents in OmniGraffle with AppleScript

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:20:53 +0100

A quick and easy to use script for creating a Table of Contents in your Omnigraffle documents. Wish i had discovered this a long time ago!

Get the Script & instructions here