September 2010
1 post
UX/Web Designer openings at eBay Motors
I’m looking for a contract and full-time web designer with solid UX experience to help out with eBay Motors. As a designer for eBay Motors, your creations will be used by over 8 million enthusiastic users per month - users who are into cars and all things automotive.
The Basics
You have incredible design talent, with an ability above average, as demonstrated by a continuous history of...
August 2010
1 post
3 tags
Subtlety, Deconstructed →
Seth Godin:
Subtle design and messaging challenge the user to make her own connections instead of spelling out every detail. Connections we make are more powerful than connections made for us. If Amazon and Zappos had been called ‘reallybigbookstore.com’ and ‘tonsofshoes.com’ it might have made some early investors happy, but they would have built little of value….
It’s tempting to turn the dial...
July 2010
2 posts
How the Old Spice Videos Were Made →
Agency Wieden + Kennedy took the Old Spice Man (played by actor Isaiah Mustafa) to the social web and took it by storm in a day, and in real time:
A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They...
Storyboarding: The Simpsons Way →
A great look at the behind-the-scenes - I especially like how they illustrate the different camera moves. The lessons in composition are also very cool.
(via 37signals)
June 2010
4 posts
Design Decisions: Calling out to existing... →
Great article from the 37signals crew, where the user interface design process is broken down, revealing the thinking behind each iteration. You can see the different solutions and the insight behind each decision as the design progresses from the first version to the final product. The reactions in the comment thread - as well as the responses from the 37signals team - are also a good read.
Touch Content Creation →
Great article by Duncan Wilcox:
To a novice user, aiming at something on screen with a mouse is like trying to ring a doorbell using a broomstick. The tool that’s between you and the target object is the cause for the lack of directness. You will get used to it out of necessity, but that doesn’t make it better than direct interaction.
To sum it up, a first level of indirection is removed by...
“I want you to point your finger and thumb like it’s a gun. This will be...”
– Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Motivational Speaker Explains Why Excellence Matters.
Excellent.
“We take things for granted, visually speaking. It’s hard to learn how to look....”
– Frank Chimero: Tin-Eyed
May 2010
5 posts
Redesigning the Boarding Pass →
Cameron Moll:
A nice set of proposed redesigns from Tyler Thompson and a few of his readers. I’ve used this very exercise with design teams to stress the importance (and execution) of good visual hierarchy.
Flickr and personal data ownership →
Flickr has set the standard here. Think about other sites where you have provided your information: how easy was it to get back, to what degree of fidelity were you able to retrieve it, and how fast did it take? (via Daring Fireball)
A Musical Revolution, With a Cost in Fidelity →
The portability of music led to a couple of things: The fidelity or sound quality of songs were compromised for smaller file sizes so that more songs could fit in an iPod/MP3 Player (this also makes it easier to buy and download songs), and the way people consume music changed. The act of listening to music used to be a very focused activity, similar to reading a book. Now, music is more often...
8 tags
The "Mad-Libs" web form →
Luke Wroblewski on the unique narrative format of the registration form on Huffduffer, in which input fields are presented as blank areas within sentences:
You can tab between the “blanks” just the way you tab between standard Web form input fields. You can click on any “blank” to start entering text. The password “blank” masks any characters you enter just like...
On the Art of Visual Hierarchy →
Cameron Moll:
Visual hierarchy, the classification of elements according to importance and relationship to other elements, tends to be one of the most ignored and underutilized principles of design. Perhaps this is because it’s difficult to talk about hierarchy exclusively without mentioning other design principles—proportion, proximity, position, alignment, contrast, relativity, dominance, and...
April 2010
4 posts
“One design lesson here is that most interface design work should be done at...”
– Edward Tufte’s inital impression of the Windows 7 Phone screens is that it looks “as if they were designed for a slide presentation or for a video demo (to be read from a distance) and not for a handheld interface.”
The Mental Model →
In the process of designing for your “customers”, figure out who they really are and what they need to achieve:
Mental model diagrams are your models of “others.” Not only that, these mental models are not necessarily just your model, but your whole design and development team’s model. I would like to define that term “others” more specifically, too....
4 tags
ESPN.com: Choice is good
If your site provides two different - yet comparable - experiences that are optimized for certain devices, which one do you give visitors with a device that works well on both?
On ESPN.com, visitors on an iPad will land on a menu screen where they are presented with two viewing options:
Unlike some sites that have decided what kind of device (mobile or not mobile?) the iPad is, this is a nice...
4 tags
Auto Sites on the iPad
With my new Apple Tablet in hand, I visited a number of auto sites to see which - if any - delivered content that looked and functioned well on iPad.
Did any of these sites support the latest web standards, including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript? Did any provide an experience optimized for the iPad? Here’s what they did.
Give users the Standard Experience
Most of the sites provided the...
March 2010
11 posts
Fitts' Law and the Ejector Seat Button →
If we should make UI elements we want users to click on large, and ideally place them at corners or edges for maximum clickability — what should we do with UI elements we don’t want users to click on? Like, say, the “delete all my work” button?
Jeff Atwood calls this “the opposite of Fitts’ Law”. I think Fitts’ Law still applies here, the only...
A compendium of financial data visualized by... →
Some interesting displays of quantitative information.
52 Weeks of UX: Why UX is really Marketing →
If you ask any User Experience Professional what the principles of their profession are, one of the first principles you’ll hear is “Know Your Users”. This makes sense: if we are to create great experiences for users then we must know something about them.
Etymology: The Shake and Freestyle Rap
The origins of the Shamrock Shake (via Bobulate):
The Shamrock Shake, which has developed a sort of cult-like following in the United States since its start in 1970, began with a story that most don’t know:
“Freestyle” is not the same as “Off the dome” (via Nil Doctrine):
Rap legend Big Daddy Kane explains that a real freestyle is a rhyme that is written down but is free...
CapSee: Caps Lock Notification for Mac OS →
Cool:
CapSee is a small utility that lets you see when you bump the caps lock key. Identical to the built-in Mac OS notification bezels, like volume and screen brightness, CapSee presents a bezel whenever you enable caps lock… preventing the accidental caps lock forever!
Designing Bing with Heart & Science →
Luke Wroblewski’s great synopsis of Paul Ray’s MIX10 presentation about the design process behind Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Or if you want, watch the video.
3 tags
1Password Design Concepts for the iPad →
Gorgeous mockups of 1Password for the iPad. If anything, it’s a good indication of how the interaction of Touch apps would differ from traditional (mouse-cursor) applications (compare these mockups to the desktop version of 1Password).
It’s going to be very interesting to see how the UI of other apps will be ported for use on the iPad.
5 tags
Points in the real world →
Great find from bobulate:
Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon assistant professor, in a presentation from DICE 2010 on the future of gaming and the crossover of gaming and life:
The idea of games being part of the real world is what’s taking hold: games that have you jumping around in the real world, games that have you connecting with people in the real world.
Schell:
People are demanding reality,...
4 tags
Tufte on Windows Phone 7 →
Edward Tufte’s initial impressions of the big-button, panoramic approach toward the interface of the Windows Phone 7 Series:
The panorama sequence appears to be an interface for an interface, a distancing from the core activities of users, who just want to get on with what they want to do. My view is to let the user’s eyes do more on a screen-image rich with opportunities rather than...
February 2010
5 posts
WatchJason Fried on Why You Can’t Work at Work
How deep is the Mariana Trench? →
Yeah, it`s super deep.
Neven Morgan: iPad & the 16:9 aspect ratio →
There’s nothing magical about the 16:9 aspect ratio. It is suitable for one thing and one thing only: video. And even there, it’s not the Holy Grail. Some of the greatest movies of all time were shot in 4:3. Your theater most likely shows movies in 2.39:1.
“You can’t get to wonderful without passing through alright. You can’t skip from...”
– Bill Withers, one of 51 luminaries in Andrew Zuckerman’s book/project, who weigh in on the topic of wisdom.
Information Resolution on Windows Phone 7 Series →
The information resolution of an interface - the amount of information elements that is displayed versus the UI widgets of an operating system - is especially important on a mobile device, as Luke Wroblewski illustrates in his comparison of the iPhone Photos and App Store apps to the Windows Phone 7 Series equivalents.
January 2010
1 post
