Small Surfaces

Designing an emotional journey

Gabriel White — Wed, 22 May 2013 00:48:55 +0000

“Thatgamecompany co-founder Jenova Chen set out to create not only a new video game experience but a new emotional experience, with the multiple award-winning PlayStation hit Journey…this free 60-minute lecture explored Chen’s desire to make an online multiplayer different from his experiences with World of Warcraft. He wanted Journey to be genderless and ageless, with gameplay that was neither about achievements nor empowerment. Prototyping for the emotional Journey actually began around its music. Chen said that he always does so because ‘music is the most effective and powerful medium that can create emotion.’”

Link: Designing a new emotional experience in Journey (gamasutra.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Film UI: Star Trek Into Darkness

Gabriel White — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:29:48 +0000

An interview with the UI designer who created the displays for Star Trek Into Darkness.

“In practical UI, you are trying to give the user an elegant way to make choices. With film UI, I am trying to give the viewer the illusion of choice. I am trying to deliberately direct the viewers eye to whatever story point the director wants revealed at the time he wants it revealed. The job becomes more about illustration, especially in post where we can see how the interface is framed within the shot. We paint a small part of a much bigger picture, and our work needs to visually support what’s on screen so that we don’t disrupt the rhythm of the viewing experience.”

Link: Interview: Jorge Almeida (inventinginteractive.com)

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Multi-purpose or single-purpose devices?

Gabriel White — Tue, 14 May 2013 06:26:26 +0000

Arguing for multi-purpose devices, Berkowitz writes: “It’s true that my GPS-enabled camera takes better pictures than my smartphone, and can tell me they were taken in California. But learning to share the pictures with friends takes more effort than it is worth. In the new marketplace, devices people can’t master in five minutes will result in a lot of returned items, which very quickly makes a product unprofitable.”

On the opposite side, Saffer writes: “It’s not just professionals who care about quality, either. Yes, the speaker on a phone is good enough to listen to a song in a pinch. But to really enjoy the music, even your multipurpose device must be supplemented with a product like the brilliant Jambox, designed to play music loudly and well.”

Link: Are Multipurpose Devices Better Than Products That Perform One Function? (wsj.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

How knobs feel

Gabriel White — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:17:14 +0000

Attention to detail. In this case: knobs.

“Ferguson Stereophonic – Antique Knob…The Knobs are what I’d expect from a lovingly built Hi-Fi. Axial Skew doesn’t exist. The weight behind the rotation is deliberate and weighty. The on-click feels like I’m providing the power myself! Why can’t people make them like this now? What is stopping manufacturers from this attention to detail?”

“Marantz NR1504. The input selector here has notches that for me aren’t notched enough, we know Marantz can do it because of the Pearl-Lite already reviewed. The volume Knob doesn’t have enough weight behind it. And the icing on the cake of disappointment is the plastic… It feels terrible.”

Link: Knobfeel (knobfeel.co.uk, via)

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Firefox OS simulator is out: take it for a spin

Gabriel White — Fri, 03 May 2013 02:26:24 +0000

“Firefox OS Simulator is a test environment for Firefox OS. Use it to test your apps in a Firefox OS-like environment that looks and feels like a mobile phone. After installing it, go to Web Developer > Firefox OS Simulator to access its features.”

Link: Firefox OS Simulator (mozilla.org)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Smartphone innovation: what’s around the corner

Gabriel White — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:26:54 +0000

CNET identifies some of the upcoming changes we might expect in our pocket computers.

“Sensitive sensors track the world in real time: …the gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, and so forth – are starting to get more friends in the neighborhood. Samsung, for instance, slipped pressure, temperature, and humidity sniffers into the Galaxy S4.“
“‘Appcessories’: …highly specialized peripheral software that fulfills very targeted needs, stuff that most people wouldn’t want their everyday phone.”
“Rise of gestures and touch-free input: …Gestures and voice may be starting the trend, but other, more sophisticated transitions and input methods will soon move from wacky option to normal ways of interacting with devices.”
“The larger ecosystem: …smartphones will come with more components and communications tools to interact more than ever before with people and other devices.”
“Wearable tech and you: …Your smartphone is still there, still essential for communicating with your environment, but it becomes only one device in a collection of other, even more personal or convenient gadgets, that solve some of the same sorts of problems in different or complimentary ways.”

Link: Smartphone innovation: Where we’re going next (cnet.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

How to design for Google Glass

Gabriel White — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:42:26 +0000

“Glass is essentially several layers of timeline. You have your main timeline. Kinda like your twitter feed of things you’ve done and received. You have a timeline with information (or cards) hiding in bundles. You have a timeline of options (share, reply, etc.) hiding in cards. Yes, it’s still a little bit complicated to understand, because surprisingly there’s still no one video presented by Google that drives the idea forward. But most work flows will involve tapping something you’re interested in, then sliding through cards, then tapping a card, then sliding through options.”

Link: First Look: How The Google Glass UI Really Works (fastcodesign.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Visceral UX creates emotional connections

Gabriel White — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 19:47:31 +0000

“So here’s my theory: I believe that introducing visceral elements into an app will take it past the point of just being awesome. It will make your app speak to the subconscious, built-in affinity that humans have for the physical properties I mentioned before. I believe that even if you designed the most perfect and useful app possible, that the act of adding in these visceral elements will make people love your app on an even deeper level.”

Link: Visceral Apps and You (mysterioustrousers.com, via)

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Using typography to improve ease of use

Gabriel White — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:08:39 +0000

“…It’s helpful to understand one of the basic mechanicals of reading: saccades. Instead of moving smoothly across the page when we read, our eyes actually make discrete jumps between words, fixating on one word for a short period of time before making a ballistic movement to another one. We call these movements saccades.”

“But despite their “ballistic” nature, these rapid eye movements actually improve our reading capabilities. While we process the words immediately within our focus, we use the additional information just outside of it to further guide our reading. As readers, our time to comprehension is aided by the context of adjacent words-to the extent that we are often able to automatically process (and thus skip over) shorter functional words like and, the, of, and but.”

Link: Setting Type for User Interfaces (typekit.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Gamifying UX to ease learning

Gabriel White — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 21:26:05 +0000

Philip Battin writes about using game design techniques to carry out progressive disclosure in complex UIs.

“Televisions have evolved from being signal receivers into universal multimedia hubs offering features such as Skype, Internet browsing, hard-drive recording, streaming online content, and apps, making operating a television much more complicated than it ever has been before. The complexity itself is not a bad thing. We do not buy televisions for their simplicity but for their features. However, complexity can be managed and presented in a manner that reduces clutter, confusion, and cognitive workload. In order to design a prolonged user experience, complexity has to be sequenced into challenges that match the skills of the users, giving them the chance to learn progressively and feel satisfied while doing so.”

Link: The Next Big UI Idea: Gadgets That Adapt To Your Skill (fastcodesign.com, via)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Replacing the Android action bar: designing a scalable solution

Gabriel White — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:59:34 +0000

“…Scaling the current Android 4.x action bar scheme may not be realistic or ergonomically desirable for all applications or device types. I’m proposing C-Swipe as an alternative navigation pattern, based on the natural ergonomics of the human hand. C-Swipe can be used to bring up a contextual menu anywhere on the touchscreen by swiping the thumb in a natural semicircular arc along the surface. This gesture is roughly in a shape of the letter C when executed with the right hand – hence, the name of the pattern (the gesture is called a “reverse C” when executed with the left hand).”

Link: C-Swipe: An Ergonomic Solution To Navigation Fragmentation On Android (smashingmagazine.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

A new kind of television

Gabriel White — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:55:23 +0000

Punchcut has put together some nice thoughts about the future of television.

“…As TV evolves, it’s abandoning many of the characteristics that made us fall in love with it in the first place. Aspects of that original attraction are being lost as TV becomes distributed across space and time. But these modern failings can also be opportunities to reclaim and reimagine certain popular behaviors of the past and create a better TV for today.”

Access – Free viewers to explore and share content
Immediacy – Rediscover the satisfaction of instant on
Continuity – Create seamless viewing experiences
Purity – Distribute the experience to save the big screen for content
Restraint – Simplify and streamline TV interactions
Chunking – Parcel content to aid discovery
Chronology – Put TV back on schedule

Link: Lost Signal: 7 Lessons from TV History (punchcut.com)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

Palm: A History

Gabriel White — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:02:11 +0000

A fantastic (and 22,000 words long) article about the history of Palm products.

“Palm realised that in order to make a handheld device that people wanted to use, it needed to break with the convention of the time that more equals better. So, Palm made two very bold decisions. First, it would only implement a very small set of features that it believed customers needed. Second, and related to this, Palm actively deemphasised the importance of specifications like processor speed and amount of RAM…“

“…Palm understood that instead of “how to get natural handwriting recognition to work”, the real problem was “how to input text on a handheld”. To solve this problem, you really didn’t need natural handwriting recognition at all – a simple, single-stroke alphabet that was easy to learn was a far better solution, since it required far less processing power and RAM, which in turn meant better battery life and smaller devices. Since the recognition system only had to work with a small set of possible variations, it was also a lot faster and more accurate.”

Link: Palm: I’m ready to wallow now (osnews.com, via)

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The emotional principles of Android UX

Gabriel White — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:13:31 +0000

Summary of a recent SXSW presentation by some Google folks about Android design principles.

“Roeber and Garb used the visual metaphor of two jars filled with “positive emotion” and “negative emotion” marbles. Certain design approaches cause those hypothetical jars to fill with more “negative” than “positive” ones. For example, placing a graphical indicator to show that a user has reached a “last screen” when swiping back and forth through Android icon menus sparked positive emotions; without that graphical indicator, users felt they were doing something wrong-i.e., leading to a jar full of negative marbles.”

Link: How Emotions Determine Google Android’s Design (slashdot.org)

Small Surfaces designs amazing mobile and device UI. Learn more

It’s the details that matter

Gabriel White — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:21:40 +0000

My favourite design read at the moment is Little Big Details.

Link: Little Big Details (littlebigdetails.com)

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