Iterative Design Process of Things
Cultured Code's mockups and history on how they designed the user interface for the iPhone version of their app, Things.
Cultured Code's mockups and history on how they designed the user interface for the iPhone version of their app, Things.
CogTool is a prototyping tool with a difference. Quickly mock-up designs in a storyboard, then demonstrate how to do tasks and CogTool runs an underlying cognitive engine to make predictions of task performance time for a skilled user. Use CogTool to benchmark competitors' products, or your own earlier versions, to be sure that your design will be more efficient for skilled users (one measure of value to your users). Use CogTool to explore a large design space and only invest in testing a few of the more promising ideas with users. Use CogTool to analyse a current product to find efficiency bottle necks and focus your redesign efforts. CogTool does not replace user testing, but it brings a complementary analytic technique to the UI design toolbox.
Downloaded. Looking forward to give it some tasks and see how it performs (pun partly intended). Only I am worried that this might put too much focus on only one quantitative (here time) aspect of user interaction. Other factors are error rates, success rates (objective and subjective), data collection and so on.
Donald Norman reposts an article for ACM on why simple interaction with things around us are not the best way to go about.
I conclude that the entire argument between features and simplicity is misguided. People might very well desire more capability and ease of use, but do not equate this to more features or to simplicity. What people want is usable devices, which translates into understandable ones.
The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn’t mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable.
Like all good type nerds I have a dislike for Comic Sans, Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman and a handful other typefaces which dererve to be retired for better alternatives. However, lately I thought to myself: Why not try to do something nice with what Times New Roman has to offer? And suddenly I had myself a good set of boundaries and something to challenge – The essence of graphic design.
Marian Bantjes found the perfect tooth brush while questing for knowledge on why so much energy is put into these tiny things and comes to realize that:
If everything in our lives were afforded the design attention that my toothbrush has, we would sit in chairs that floated while tickling our troubled backs, have tables that yielded at our aching elbows while remaining firm on top, walk on floors that tingled like active sand, and sleep on pillows that would never allow our ears to flatten against our heads.
True.
...And we thought it was important to begin with.
Lisa Herrod, writing for A List Apart about how deaf experience captioning and subtitles. Even captioning, it turns out, is often not enough for a good experience. Best piece on disabled and interaction I have read this year I think.
Jack Shedd on Big Contrarian wrote a very thoughtful piece on multiple groups working together on a product:
The idea of design divorced from engineering is laudable, but the way it so often plays out makes it implausible. Yes, in theory, the design team should come up with a perfect solution and the engineering team should be smart enough to figure out how to pull it off and neither should ever have to talk to each other.
While I am not in agreement with his statement about:
Engineers reminding designers that the supply of time and money being finite, choices have to be made. The two together defining more perfect solutions that ship, and work not just correctly but elegantly.
Using design could just as well be the measure of saving money since that is the essence of making sure beforehand that you are making the correct product which should work as expected. Via Cameron Moll.
A fun YouTube video of a lecture by Neil deGrasse Tyson detailing some problems with the intelligent design argument. Funny because it is true.
The ever-going cycle of explaining exactly what you do. Via Jakob Persson.
A good interview with the man behind many excellent user interfaces such as those found in Poser 3 and 4 and Kai's Power Tools which are famous for their different and good user interface models.
Tom Insam explores the different looks and behaviors of the volume widgets found on the iPhone.
The good thing about research is that you only have to do it once and many projects can benefit from it. Not unlike open source software. But it turns out few developers make use of even the good research that is available to them.
Steven Frank, offers suggestions for future versions of trees in his thorough review of these carbon based thingamajigs:
If I could make one suggestion for future versions, it would probably be for trees to become "untethered". That is, preserve the top portion without the intervening trunk. I have on a couple of occasions been walking down the street and gotten a branch in the face. This is a painful and, let's be honest, humiliating situation.
Based on Gapminder, of Hans Rosling fame, Google just announced their new Visualisation API one year after acquiring Gapminder. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this.
Via: Information Aesthetics.
Repeating the results from the World Color Study, Dolores Labs asked people to name random colors:
We showed thousands of random colors like this to people on Mechanical Turk and asked what they would call them. Hereâs what they said:
