Sorry for the downtime. Konigi went down for most of the day yesterday because a spike in traffic caused the databases to be taken offline. So we've moved Konigi to a virtual private server, and now we're able to run our own database rather than share database resources and limit the number of requests we can make. These are all good problems, and the growing pains are to be expected. Again, sorry for the interrupted service yesterday.
I've gone south for the winter until mid February. I'll be around to handle stencil sales issues and to moderate entries occasionally, but for the most part will be swimming with the fishies. See you in a few weeks!
-Michael (jibbajabba)
Will Evans shows us how he sketches and wireframes interfaces in this cool video, which is a nice preview of what you may see in his upcoming talk on "The Right Way to Wireframe" at IXD10. Incidentally, he's using OmniGraffle with our free wireframe stencils. Will says this about wireframing:
Increasingly, as designers of interactive systems (spaces, processes and products for people), we find ourselves stretching the limits of communication tools to explore and document what it will be like to interact with the things we design.
We describe wireframing as a form of design communication that enables stakeholders, team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future problem spaces and solutions.
We create wireframes to inform both design process and design decisions. Wireframes range from sketches and different kind of models at various levels of fidelity looks like, behaves like, works like to explore and communicate propositions about the design and its context.
We think that the wireframing strategies user experience designers use are often constrained by the tools they feel most comfortable with: problem space, domain, expertise, theme, context of problem, bias towards types of design tools and documents, timeliness of artifacts created. For this reason, a session that attacks one business problem from the perspective of four different designers will provide attendees with a unique understanding and set of strategies and tactics to improve their own practice.
Craig Villamor and Luke Wroblewski summarize the new interactions we'll be seeing in the iPad.
During Apple's 90 minute unveiling of the iPad this week, a lot of new multi-touch interactions were shown off. But they went by fast. So as a service to digital product designers everywhere, we took the time to extract 8 minutes of new user interface demos from the iPad keynote. Now you can quickly just catch the UI in action on Apple's new native iPad and iWork applications.
In a default Google Analytics setup, the information you have about your users’ navigation behaviors and preferences is limited to which pages they viewed and where they came from. But what does that really tell you about how your users behave inside your web pages? Not much, and that’s where all the juicy behavioral insight comes from.
Learn how to tap into your users' behaviors with Google Analytics, Event Tracking, and jQuery.
Insight into the complete design process for the redesign of Nearby Tweets. Web app developers and entrepreneurs will hopefully gain some ideas or reinforce their own processes. Users may find it interesting to see what goes into the design of a complex UI. Read the full case study.
Napkee gets an update with iPhone controls and now covers 100% of what you find in Balsamiq Mockups. What I'm most excited about are the export settings. Under the HTML settings you can now define a title for your exported files, a new name for the Icons folder and you can specify an external CSS file that will be included in each export. More info on the release here.
Instead of throwing in my 2 cents on the "wireframes suck", "lorem ipsum ain't so bad" discussions I'll just echo what Joshua Porter (@bokardo) has to say on the matter:
Lorem Ipsum, wireframes, personas, etc are just tactics. The only thing that matters is: Do people love what you built?
Amen, brother. Here's 1 cent... I agree with Karen about Lorem Ipsum.
ForeUI have announced a 2.0 release that includes community features for sharing UI components and importing into your library, new element panel management that lets you categorize elements and choose which to display, a powerful tree-based page management window, global properties/variables that can be retrieved by scripted expressions, and custom events that can be triggered from scripted expressions. Sophisticated stuff.
Disclosure: ForeUI are sponsors of Konigi
UX Exchange throws down on The Best UI You've Ever Used.
Stack Overflow throws up The Worst UI You've Ever Used.