Ciara Taylor was also at Interaction 12 in Dublin and reports on the keynote talk by Anthony Dunne for Core77. “Interaction design and designing interactions… are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in London, gave a keynote at Interaction12 that began this discussion [...]

Posted on 6 February 2012 | 12:08 pm

There was magic in the air on the final day of the Interactions 12 conference in Dublin, as a number of speakers drew the connections between magic and design, whether it be electric faeries, having childhood dreams of being a magician, or actually being one in a past professional life. Louise Taylor, Boon Chew and [...]

Posted on 6 February 2012 | 12:01 pm

It is a constant complaint: We’re choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair in an NPR radio program — this is not a new condition. It’s been part of the human experience for [...]

Posted on 5 February 2012 | 10:51 am

McKinsey’s John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea write that businesses ought to focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale. “Some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, [...]

Posted on 5 February 2012 | 10:47 am

Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor continue their coverage of the Interactions conference in Dublin. In this long article, they report on the presentations by Jonas Löwgren (School of Arts & Communication at Malmö University), Scott Nazarian (frog), Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Dustin DiTomasso (Mad*Pow), Julie Baher (Citrix), Jonathan Rez (Seren Partners), Sami Niemalä (Nordkapp), Rachel Bolton-Nasir [...]

Posted on 5 February 2012 | 10:42 am

Dublin — and even its Lord Mayor — welcomed a record 750 attendees to the opening of Interaction 12. The day would unfold with Hitchcock, healthcare, and hearing the question ‘what if?’. Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor report on the presentations by Luke Williams (frog design), August de los Reyes (Samsung UX Centre), Mike Lemmon [...]

Posted on 3 February 2012 | 3:18 pm

Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011. Abstract While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of devices and systems, telephone calls on cellphones remain the most [...]

Posted on 3 February 2012 | 2:31 pm

The Norwegian Design Council has published a new resource site about inclusive design, to inform and communicate how this approach can be used as a strategy for innovation and development of more user-friendly products and services for the mainstream market. Note also that the Council will be organising the European Business Workshops on Inclusive Design [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 2:30 pm

Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 2:18 pm

In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia: “Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 2:16 pm

In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 is bringing us a preview of this year’s event, including this guest post by David Malouf, professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College of Art and Design. “In the last year IxD, as [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 11:14 am

As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. The people at ReadWriteWeb announce that over the coming months they will be exploring the world of User Experience design, by interviewing UX experts and reviewing products that get it right – and some that get [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 11:03 am

On 23 January 2012, Martijn de Waal defended his Ph.D. thesis ‘The city as interface’ at the Philosophy Department of the University of Groningen. Abstract: The main concern of the study ‘The City as Interface’ is the future of the urban public sphere. It investigates various scenarios that describe how the rise of digital and [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 10:48 am

All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we should buy, believe in or vote for. In our personal [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 10:38 am

Two interesting posts by Danish photographer and visual ethnographer Jacob Langvad Nilsson: Business ethnography as a key strategy for international brands When penetrating new markets, two critical mistakes seem to repeat themselves. The first mistake involves thinking that because it is already a big and recognizable brand, its potential consumers will be overwhelmingly impressed when [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 10:04 am

Applying Anthropology in the Global Village Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp. Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5) Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2) The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how do applied social scientists use complicated, fluid new ideas such [...]

Posted on 25 January 2012 | 9:19 am

Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating work-oriented applications towards dealing with leisure-oriented applications, such as games, [...]

Posted on 13 January 2012 | 10:30 am

During the Pop!Tech conference, well known design researcher Jan Chipchase gave a talk about his research work. In the panel session an audience member asked two questions relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to extract knowledge from a community for corporate gain: - What [...]

Posted on 13 January 2012 | 9:45 am

Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, was the speaker at the October 2011 Creative Mornings event in San Francisco. In her talk she discussed how we hide, reveal and misinterpret emotion online and off. Watch video (30 min)

Posted on 12 January 2012 | 4:03 pm

Jan Chipchase thinks that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house through a clever use of social networks. “For researchers this means learning new skills: maintaining an online identity that is [...]

Posted on 12 January 2012 | 3:07 pm

Genevieve Bell, interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs, has published a guest post on the BBC website on how artificial intelligence will change our relationship with tech. “I think in 2012 we will start to see signs of change in our relationships with devices. Here I do not just mean more forms of [...]

Posted on 2 January 2012 | 6:28 pm

It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural shift driven by the more civic minded millennial generation. The [...]

Posted on 2 January 2012 | 6:22 pm

Steven Portigal interviews Julian Bleecker about the near future, design fiction and storytelling. Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher in the Advanced Projects studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles and the Near Future Laboratory where he investigates emerging social practices around new networked interaction rituals. His focus is on hands-on design and [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 2:33 pm

In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research: “To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It recruited top product designers and sales strategists from within the [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 2:13 pm

The idea of sharing things instead of owning them goes against everything we’ve been taught as a consumeristic society. Those who have spent their lives “keeping up with the Jones’” may find it hard to suddenly relinquish their death-grip on idea that owning things is the path toward happiness. But younger generations, poised to inherit [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 2:05 pm

Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China — the rural poor, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers — to research the impacts of three decades of disruptive change, and to design new services to improve their livelihoods. Their task was [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 2:01 pm

Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes: “A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In short, a great brand experience is a story, in which [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:51 pm

Jared Spool explores the key differences between “Normals” (normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters. Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into a new technology or solution at various points in the [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:42 pm

Frog’s Robert Fabricant breaks down the themes from the 2011 Interaction Design Awards. “Technologies like cheap sensors and cloud computing are increasingly being used to augment our daily lives in both magical and mundane ways. Everything we do is an app in the making (a million and counting). But in this environment we are also [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:36 pm

Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat to do things together that would otherwise require a plane ticket. “Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become a regular fixture in a growing number of American homes, [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:31 pm

NY Times technology reporter Steve Lohr writes on how consumer-based Internet technologies are morphing into new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care, traffic management and food distribution. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:26 pm

With a harvest of data from a wired planet, computing has evolved from sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, explores what this means. “As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have [...]

Posted on 22 December 2011 | 1:21 pm

As design becomes more sophisticated in influencing user behavior, it’s important that we start to think critically about the ethical boundary between persuasion and outright manipulation, argues Stephen P. Anderson. “You can’t discuss a topic like seduction or what motivates people without some awareness that, no matter how playful or well-meaning your intentions are, these [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 10:17 pm

Incorporating wireless technology into its newest cars, Ford prepared to roll out vehicles capable of monitoring everything from pollen counts to glucose levels. “[Ford] started concentrating on the aging population in 1999, and a focus on health and wellness within the car is at the center of their new approach. Unobtrusive ergonomic changes like lowered [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 9:59 pm

Sondre Ager-Wick, Nokia’s Head of Design Strategy and Foresight, discusses the evolution and future of mobile design. His new trends: - DIY design - Electronically enhanced senses - The smartification of everything - Less digital bling. More content first. - Getting serious about play Read article

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 9:51 pm

In an article for DMLCentral Nishant Shah, founder and director of research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, wants to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. “Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 9:44 pm

In September 2011, researcher Anna Snel defended her Ph.D thesis, entitled “For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse“, at the University of Amsterdam. It is now available for download. The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last decade. However, the lack of a clear definition of experience [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 9:25 pm

Experience designers investigate the motivations behind users’ behaviors to develop skill in predicting and guiding those behaviors. A short article by designer Sorin Pintilie. “So, yes, experience can be designed— not all experiences, but certainly some experiences. And with time, experience designers will continue to investigate the inherent motivations behind users’ behaviors. They will continue [...]

Posted on 15 December 2011 | 9:17 pm

Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology. This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell, Intel fellow and director of interaction and experience research, who [...]

Posted on 14 December 2011 | 4:03 am

Chapter eleven of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It was written by Dag Svanaes, Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (and former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and deals with the philosophy of interaction and the interactive user experience. “I [...]

Posted on 14 December 2011 | 2:56 am

Homesense was a research project that looked at how we might design smart homes from the bottom up, in an environment of open innovation. Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. “The Homesense project was an open research project around the topic of [...]

Posted on 7 December 2011 | 11:07 am

Since September 2011, Niti Bhan, an emerging markets design strategist, has been wholly immersed in the cyber cafe industry in Sub Saharan Africa, specifically peri urban and rural Kenya in East Africa. She and her colleagues were tasked to assess the market and value the opportunity space for Village Telco, a social enterprise start up [...]

Posted on 7 December 2011 | 11:05 am

Information Marketplaces: The new economics of cities Author: Arup, The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham Publication date: 28 November 2011 The technology-enabled city is an untapped source of sustainable growth. “Written in partnership with The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham, this report investigates how technology can be used in [...]

Posted on 7 December 2011 | 10:55 am

Rohan Gunatillake, the lead producer of festivalslab (the Edinburgh Festival Innovations Lab) gives four reasons why new thinking and tools can produce better experiences. “Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the experience of the twelve major Edinburgh festivals even better – [...]

Posted on 7 December 2011 | 10:27 am

Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian that the “smart money is moving from online towards ‘live experience’.” “The new magnetism of congregation seems universal. Every online service or forum promotes an event, an invitation, a club night, something for which subscribers will pay, much as online dating points towards a meeting. Demonstrators are never content [...]

Posted on 2 December 2011 | 5:19 pm

“Homage to Catalonia II” is a documentary, a research project, a story of stories about the construction of a sustainable, solidary and decentralized economy. The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN 3, the High School Institute of Research of the University Open to Catalonia, investigates new [...]

Posted on 1 December 2011 | 12:29 pm

Chris Risdon expands on what constitutes a good experience map in a long and highly commendable article on the Adaptive Path blog. “The experience map highlighted [on the left - click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US distributor that offers North American travelers a single place to [...]

Posted on 1 December 2011 | 12:08 pm

Chapter ten of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview and deals with end-user development. Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity. They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters, salesmen, and administrative assistants. Many of these people work on tasks that rapidly vary on [...]

Posted on 1 December 2011 | 11:58 am

Aileen Lee, partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, believes that the best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users is harnessing a concept called social proof. “What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It’s also known as informational social influence. [...]

Posted on 29 November 2011 | 1:27 pm

The concept of of social labelling could lead to a subconscious change in behaviour, Guy Champniss writes in The Guardian. “By social labelling, we’re referring to the tag society gives a particular behaviour in order to make sense of it. In other words, society interprets the action and tags it with a motivation – for [...]

Posted on 24 November 2011 | 6:10 pm

Definitions

Storyboarding is the technique interaction designers and information architects have adopted from film and animation to specify interaction in user interfaces. Storyboards in interaction design typically show a sequence of key frames that depict when a change in state occurs in the interface. They are often illustrated with a linear, multi-cell diagram, often accompanied by annotations to describe the actions taken by the user, and the responses or behavior of the system.

In Interaction Design

Storyboards were originally conceived at Disney Studios about seventy years ago. They are a sequential series of illustrations or rough sketches, sometimes including captions of events. Storyboards provide a synopsis for a proposed story (or a complex scene) involving its action and characters.

Storyboards transfer well into the world of the user interface. With a storyboard we can present as frames each step in a sequence of user interactions. Viewing the interaction in a story format helps to refine the interaction and provide feedback for user testing.

Source: "Storyboarding Rich Internet Applications with Visio," by Bill Scott. Boxes and Arrows.

In Film

"a sequential series of illustrations, stills, rough sketches and/or captions (sometimes resembling a comic or cartoon strip) of events, as seen through the camera lens, that outline the various shots or provide a synopsis for a proposed film story (or for a complex scene) with its action and characters; the storyboards are displayed in sequence for the purpose of visually mapping out and crafting the various shot divisions and camera movements in an animated or live-action film; a blank storyboard is a piece of paper with rectangles drawn on it to represent the camera frame (for each successive shot); a sophisticated type of preview-storyboard (often shot and edited on video, with a soundtrack) is termed an animatic"

Source: AMC Film Site

See also definitions from Wikipedia.

Examples

Posted on 19 December 2011 | 2:32 pm

About

Notation for systems that use touch screen interfaces for input.

Notation Systems

• Cue, by P.J. Onori
• Gesturcons, by Ron George
• Gesturecons, by Ryan Lee
• Open Source Gesture Library, by Gesture Works
• Touch Gesture Reference Guide, by Luke Wroblewski
• Touch Notation, by Matt Gemmel
• Touchscreen Stencils, by Kicker Studio

Reference

• Android Gestures
• OS X Lion: About Multi-Touch gestures
• Using Gestures in Windows Mobile
• Touch Gestures List, by Luke Wroblewski

See Also

• Gesture Notation

Posted on 12 December 2011 | 8:20 pm

If you're looking for gifts for your team, Nick Finck has once again rounded up a massive list of gear for UX geeks. Thanks, Nick.

Posted on 28 November 2011 | 7:26 pm

I made a minor update to the OmniGraffle UX Template. The grids were screwed up in the last update I made, so snapping wasn't working. Some guides were also pretty sloppy, so I cleaned those up as well to keep things nice and neat.

Thanks to Jayson Elliot for the heads up about the grid snapping problem.

Update your templates here.

Posted on 28 November 2011 | 4:57 pm

Using InstaCSS is a much easier way to look up CSS docs than Googling. Enter a CSS property in the search box, and the panel below dynamically shows matching properties. Simple. If you're a Mac user, it seems to me like it would be useful tucked into a Fluid menu item like this.

Via Think Vitamin Newsletter

Posted on 23 November 2011 | 5:46 pm

Theresa Neil's forthcoming book, Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, is set to be released by O'Reilly in the Fall of 2011.

Theresa launched a site to go along with the book that includes a fantastic gallery of 70 user interface design patterns for mobile devices with 400+ supporting examples from iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian applications. The gallery covers a broad range of problems from designing your application's navigation to choosing the right invitation technique.

Check out the pattern gallery, and subscribe to be notified when the book comes out. She's giving away 5 free copies to subscribers.

Posted on 17 November 2011 | 3:50 pm

Reframer is a collaborative web app for collecting and analyzing qualitative data. You start by capturing data into the app—things like customer feedback, free text responses in surveys, emails, interviews, and usability test data. The system then uses the aggregated information and provides a view reframed with quantitative values based on a significance rating that team members apply. These values can also be used to prioritize issues to assess feasibility. The metadata additionally allows you to identify trends and themes, and show relationships in data based on correlated tags.

Looks like a fantastic way to get all of that data out of spreadsheets and into a living tool for both quick capture and simpler analysis. They offer tiered plans from free to $249. Paid plans come with 30 days free. More info here.

Posted on 15 November 2011 | 8:58 pm

In case you haven't checked it out, the Interaction-Design.org Foundation is an outstanding project started by Mads Soegaard and Rikke Dam to create free and open educational materials for the HCI and IXD communities. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction is the main project, where they've engaged professors and designers to contribute chapters that include HD video and commentary.

Mads and crew will soon release a chapter on Social Computing and its relation to social media, written by Tom Erickson, veteran researcher in social computing at IBM Watson Research Lab. The chapter includes multiple HD videos with interviews of Erickson.

These materials have apparently taken 10 months to produce and involved 3 editors, 2 peer-reviewers, and a camera crew of 4 people. There is also commentary by some renowned designers like Elizabeth Churchill from Yahoo Research and Andrea Forte from Drexel University.

The group have prepared a preview for Konigi readers. The text and HD videos are completely free and can be viewed here: http://interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/social_computing.html?p=0230.

This is an incredible new resource. Be sure to check it out.

Posted on 9 November 2011 | 10:27 pm

Meaningful Transitions is the thesis project of Johannes Tonollo, an interface design student at the FH Potsdam, Germany. Johannes wrote his Thesis on "Transitions in the User Interface," in which he analyzed how motion in the user interface can be a helpful extension to static elements to enhance the user experience.

The collection of transitions is clustered into 6 different categories: Orientation, Spatial Extension, Awaking Controls (Awakening?), Highlight, Feedback, and Feedforward. His description of the effectiveness of each transition forms a pattern-like-library for motion in interface design. Each transition provides a short summary and abstract animation on the category overview. Be sure to click each item to view a detailed view that provides a description of the transition, explanation of when it can be useful, and a description of the benefits for using that transition as a design solution. Several items also provide a real-world example of the solution in use.

Excellent stuff, and impressive execution. Check it out. The thesis is also available in a downloadable PDF in German.

Posted on 25 October 2011 | 3:37 pm

Sauce Labs provides browser testing services for front end development and quality assurance. Their Scout service lets you test your public or private web app in any browser via a VM that's run in the cloud. Enter a URL to test, select an OS and browser, and a virtual machine runs in the web page so you can test in that configuration on demand. Scout can record and save screenshots and video of every session, and they can can be shared, embedded etc. with a dev team, which is nice for bug reporting. JIRA integration means those same videos and screenshots can be attached to JIRA incidents as well. They also let you run automated Selenium tests in the cloud with Sauce OnDemand, for those of you who work with QA automation tools.

I also liked what they describe in this blog entry discussing the security measures they take. Every session gets a fresh VM that’s never been used by anyone else, and at the end of your session, the VM and all its data is completely destroyed. Good for peace of mind if you're paranoid about such things.

Plans are tiered, starting with a free personal plan that gives you 45 minutes of testing per month. You can use it here.

Posted on 24 October 2011 | 7:52 pm

Usabilla is one of the remote, unmoderated usability test services I've reviewed and used in the past (full disclosure: they also now sponsor this site). They've added mobile testing to their remote, unmoderated testing service. The new feature lets users participate by using their smartphones or tablets to test the screenshots or urls you specify in each task or scenario.

As with their past offering, participants are stepped through each scenario and asked to respond by adding markers to screens and notes/responses to your questions. I ran test scenarios on both iPhone and iPad, and the interface is clean, and simple, and optimized to work well with both devices. Read more here.

Posted on 24 October 2011 | 7:37 pm

animate.css is a stylesheet created by Dan Eden for doing common, cross-browser css3 animations for things like transitions for emphasis. To use them in your project, simply add add the stylesheet and link, add a class to an element, or call the animation yourself in your CSS file.

Posted on 18 October 2011 | 9:23 pm

The Steedicons set by Kyle Steed contains 300+ hand drawn icons available as a font or in vector format (.ai, .eps, .csh) for Illustrator, Photoshop, or the wireframing tool of your choice. The bold, sketchy icons would would work perfectly in Balsamiq Mockups or alongside the Konigi Sketch stencils.

Here's a small sample of the icons available in this set.

Buy them here.

Posted on 10 October 2011 | 7:33 pm

The Doodlekit Icons set contains 700+ hand-drawn icons for use in sketch-style wireframes. You can buy them in vector format to use in the design tool of your choice, or download the free set of 32 x 32 px PNGs.

Here's a screenshot of the icons in the new custom icon feature that's available in the pre-release version of Mockups.

More info here.

Posted on 10 October 2011 | 7:14 pm

I'm in love with this Journal Bandolier made of recycled bike inner tubes, made by Cleverhands and sold on Etsy. The bandolier is a strap fitted with small loops for carrying pens, pencils, and other handy tools wrapped around a journal, planner, or other book. I ordered one for the small 3.5" wide Moleskine. Bandoliers for other notebook sizes available as well.

Posted on 10 October 2011 | 12:07 pm

Adam Pritzker deftly combined this image of an Apple I and this Steve Jobs quote on design from an interview in 2000 that appeared in Fortune.

“In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.” - Steve Jobs

There's an expression of that soul of the creator, in the running failures and successes of the executed design, that attempts to make a connection with the user of the product. Some products are imbued with the soul of a passionate creative force, others become refined to the point of feeling somber. Underneath the surface of Apple products, there's always been a sense of human connection, either in the literal early smiley Mac icons, or in the more polished and subtle interactions and connections we have with machines using our touch screens today.

There's no way to understate how much Apple products have influenced what I do every day. I learned Basic and how to type in high shool on an Apple II. I played Tetris for the first time on a friend's original beige Mac. The first computer I ever spent my own money on was a PowerBook 520c, the very one I learned HTML on. With each successive generation of polish, in every one of these machines I've touched, I've always felt that connection, and that desire to want to play with computers. I wouldn't be doing what I do now if Jobs' Mac never existed.

Every product starts somewhere, but as with people, the soul is what sustains the connection. It's heartening and inspiring to me to think back on this legacy of product design and where it started. It makes me feel like every naive notion I have about design is OK as long as I have a passion to improve and deliver something with soul.

Posted on 7 October 2011 | 3:23 pm

These form design crib sheets provide examples for laying out forms to get users through the process efficiently. Created by Joe Leech at cxpartners, and available for OmniGraffle, Photoshop, or in PDF vector format.

Via @theresaneil

Posted on 3 October 2011 | 6:48 pm

Browserstack allows you to stop relying on screenshot web apps or using multiple virtual machines to do your testing. The service gives you remote, web-based, VNC screen sharing using the web browser you choose, so you can test your web sites and apps in real time rather than relying on static screen comparisons.

Enter a URL to test, and select a target browser in the version of your choosing and screen resolution. A VNC connection is opened inside the web app, giving you remote control of the target browser. You test your pages in real time via the VNC screen share, and each browser is configured with developer testing tools (Firebug, Chrome Developer Tools, IE Testing Tools, etc.). The service also allows you to set up a tunnel to test your local server or html pages in their remote browser.

Pre-paid, metered plans are available at 10 or 30 hours, or buy monthly or annual plans for unlimited, unmetered testing.

I've never been a fan of screen-capturing testing tools, except for single-use tests like the email newsletter testing. I use multiple VMs running IE browsers mainly. BrowserStack looks worth the money if you're tired of constantly installing and switching VMs. I know I am. I've been doing a trial for the web app I'm working on and the time savings looks worth it to me.

Posted on 30 September 2011 | 3:08 pm

I find inspiration in the literature that examines games and play as factors in creating delightful and engaging experiences. I like to think of how this applies to products outside of the video gaming industry. I've had Thomas Malone's 1981 paper, "Heuristics for Designing Enjoyable Interfaces: Lessons from computer games" on my desk for a while. I finally got around to reading it and found some interesting ideas that resonated with me.

The paper asks why users find games captivating and proposes guidelines for designing enjoyable systems. What I found relevant for interface design are Malone's observations about the experience with toys versus tools, and how to incorporate elements of game play to make tools more enjoyable.

One of the distinctions he makes is that when using tools, their interfaces tend to become virtually invisible, to allow the user to focus attention on tasks that satisfy their external needs and goals.

I don't think all tools become invisible, but well-designed, efficient interfaces for business software tend to feel this way. I also think of it this way—I don't go to the library to experience the library, I go to satisfy a need external to that physical place. The collection of the building, its contents, and it's staff are the tool, and more importantly they are simply a means to an end. The same is true of research databases or search engines. Most business software is focussed on fulfilling needs and goals, and the ones that I've used that feel efficient tend to have interfaces that fall away so I can focus on tasks.

We're using tools during large portions of our work day, and to some extent, for power users, their utility sometimes makes them boring, and we seek out ways to find challenges using them. I found this passage particularly relevant to me.

In a sense, a good game is intentionally made difficult to play, but a tool should be made as easy as possible to use. This distinction helps explain why some users of complex system may enjoy mastering tools that are extremely difficult to use. To the extent that these users are treating the systems as toys rather than tools, the difficulty increases the challenge and therefore the pleasure of using the systems.

Interesting idea, although the conflict of simple versus complex presents a challenge. With tools, simple features are great for satisfying that 80% of users that need efficiency, but the 20% of power users can probably stand to go beyond that simpler experience. For them, the challenge is to find ways to unlock the hidden features beneath the iceberg.

I thought of it as an iceberg representing features (excuse the cliche metaphor). The tip represents defaults and simple features for the majority of average users, and the larger mass below the surface represents power users and the often hidden, advanced features they use.

The conflict really has to do with power users. They want to push the tool to do more, they want to do advanced things. What Malone proposes in this case is to build in a progression of increasingly complex levels, and the analog in the business tools world would be access to advanced features, whether they be built into the interface itself, or require expert-level expertise to access those features. Have you ever looked at the insanity of an MS Excel spreadsheet loaded with macros? That's the kind of analog we're talking about. Or in a SaaS environment, it's an API that gives access to data.

There are simpler examples from our world. Some IAs use these kinds of expert-level skills to get access to data from websites to come up with information graphics that help us visualize that information when wrestling with server log analysis or content inventories. I did a lot of this with tools like Graphviz in the past. In traditional design tools, it could mean pushing an advanced feature in graphics software to do things beyond what they were intended for. I'm thinking of things like using JavaScript and Scriptographer in Illustrator, in this case.

Malone talks about building multi-layered systems in games in order to push advanced users to become more engaged and sustain their use with the game.

[A] multi-layered system could not only help resolve the trade-off between simplicity and power. It could also enhance the challenge of using the system. Users could derive self-esteem and pleasure from successively mastering more and more advanced layers of the system, and this kind of pleasure might be more frequent if the layers are made an explicit part of the system.

What he's talking about is common in games—providing an ecosystem that supports leveling up with the purpose of providing incentive and reward via building up expertise and engagement.

This reminds me of what Kathy Sierra talks about in her talks on creating awesome users. Experiences that progressively introduce and teach users about advanced features have a better chance of sustaining engagement with them. This is something we all want in our products.

I love the idea behind this. It becomes our responsibility as interface designers to know how to identify the tip of the iceberg to provide the simple defaults, but simplicity isn't all. We might keep the majority of our users working with the obvious features, but we want to provide the conditions that will let them become expert, and over time keep them feeling continually challenged and satisfied. Our challenge comes in knowing how to push the iceberg up, or teach the user how to swim deeper below the surface.

Posted on 28 September 2011 | 10:32 pm

All the OmniGraffle users out there will want to check out Todd Moy's list of tips and tricks that all OG power users need to know. The character replacement one in particular will save you time. Although I tend to just clone an entire object's style the style brush with W and OPT+W, you should definitely learn about cloning discrete styles with chicklets. You'll wonder you never did.

Check them all out on Viget Advance and level up your OG skills.

Posted on 27 September 2011 | 10:23 pm

New iOS Design Pattern: Slide-out Navigation – Ken YarmoshI find the slide out really undermines discovery but appreciate how it keeps things super clean. Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? – QuoraAmazing answer. The Next Chapter: All Eyes on the Future (err, the past) at Back of the [...]

Posted on 30 January 2012 | 5:01 pm

Eric Stromberg — How to Make an Impact During the First Month of Your Startup JobGREAT list right here. The Discreet Shift to Twitter | Monday Note"It now seems Facebook’s usage is undergoing a split. Active Facebookers become increasingly engaged, spend more time doing more stuff, while “reasonable” users (above 25) become more reluctant and [...]

Posted on 5 January 2012 | 5:01 pm

14 Of The Year’s Best Ideas In Interface Design | Co.DesignLots to get inspired by on this list. 10 things we learned about Apple this year – SplatFGreat list from Dan. Get a Recipe Every Time You Check-In at a Grocery StoreNeat! Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplementsExcellent, informativem infographic. How to Curb [...]

Posted on 1 January 2012 | 3:00 am

Foursquare + Square = Killer Small Business Social CRM « I’m Not Actually a Geek"There is no CRM for offline small businesses" < great quote. Voulez-vous check-in avec moi ce soir? || faberNovelRealtime social heatmap of New York, Paris and London, using foursquare check-ins. Clear Indications That It’s Time To Redesign – Smashing UX Design"While [...]

Posted on 23 December 2011 | 4:00 pm

Twitter for iPhone: A history – Jeremy StanleyGreat historical walkthrough the evolution of Twitter on iPhone. Gimmicks and Patterns in Interface Design | The Intercom Blog Redesigning Gesture Icons – A Proposed System — Some Random DudeAwesome set of icons to use when communicating gestural interfaces. Gifts for User Experience Geeks 2011 | Blog | [...]

Posted on 9 December 2011 | 8:01 pm

li { padding-bottom: 0.5em; } The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog) You Don’t Have to Tweet to Twitter « abovethecrowd.comReally smart post. Here’s The Information Facebook Gathers On You As You Browse The WebWee! The RunKeeper Roadmap: Building A Successful Startup Through Community and DataLove the team at RunKeeper and really excited about how [...]

Posted on 29 November 2011 | 2:00 am

My 10 years of blogging: Reflections, Lessons & Some Stats TooExcellent retrospective on 10 years of blogging from one of my favorite tech bloggers, Om Malik. A Review of Stamped for iPhone | Bridging the Nerd GapNo disrespect to Oink, TinyReview and others but Stamped has won my heart. Between the simple + elegant UI [...]

Posted on 28 November 2011 | 2:00 am

Condition ONEKiller immersive video experience for the iPad. Hope we start seeing more and more of this kind of stuff. LukeW | UI16: Experience Leadership Case Study: RadioShack Finds Foursquare Customers Spend More | Street Fight Everybody Hates the New Google Reader, Especially The People Who Designed Google Reader | Betabeat — News, gossip and [...]

Posted on 15 November 2011 | 4:00 pm

Never Ask a Busy Person to Lunch. Here’s Why… Every Child Is A Scientist | Wired Science | Wired.comThe moral is that parents and teachers must navigate the fine line between giving kids a taste of knowledge – the universe is not all mystery – while at the same time preserving a sense of ambiguity and [...]

Posted on 9 November 2011 | 3:00 am

Elad Blog: Hire For The Ability To Get Shit DoneA thousand amens. Codecademy Looks Like The Future Of Learning To Me « UncrunchedI cannot say enough great things about Code Academy. Rands In Repose: The Rands TestLopp's blog is a gem in general when it comes to management and this post is a great example [...]

Posted on 29 October 2011 | 2:00 am