smashLab's Eric Karjaluoto writes about outmarketing the big guys by getting personal in his book Speak Human. He's adding a sneak preview of a new chapter every few weeks, so you can read it online for free. Read the sample chapters on the book site and find the links to buy via Amazon.
Via swissmiss
The Omni Group posted some photos and a little story about their progress working on prototypes for the OmniGraphSketcher for the iPad. The app is a simple graph drawing and data plotting tool that they're creating an iPad version of. Apparently no one at Omni Group is sleeping much while their iPad apps are being developed, but they are doing some interesting things with hardware prototypes, including mocking up the hardware with 3d printers.
http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/02/25/designing-omnigraphsketcher-for-the-ipad/
LA UX designer Sarah Mitchell has posted an excellent set of sketch notes from Interaction 10. Go to her blog entry to read the accompanying written notes.
Peldi from Balsamiq shares some power user tips and tricks for Mockups controls. In this video he shows keyboard shortcuts and methods for selection, snapping, layering, locking, aligning and zooming.
Microsoft has been doing some interesting work with Bing Maps. The augmented reality demos at the TED conference this week generated some buzz. The photo and video overlays were cool.
"We see this space, three-dimensional environment as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out," says Bing Maps' Blaise Aguera y Arcas. "Maps, directions are really just one of them."
Whitney Hess has published the sidebar on Onboarding from the Designing Social Interfaces book by Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish, as a featured article on UX Mag. Whitney's article describes how to use onboarding to get users from sign up, to becoming oriented with your site and actually using it.
http://uxmag.com/design/onboarding-designing-welcoming-first-experiences
UX People is a conference showcasing Britain's talent and achievements in User Experience Design.
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A place to exchange ideas and unveil excellence, UX People is a non-profit making event that celebrates the UK’s place at the forefront of the field. User experience experts from some of the country’s biggest organisations will be giving stimulating talks, leading in-depth workshops and sharing industry insights.Come to teach...
UX People is committed to helping the rising stars of Britain become the world-class speakers of tomorrow. It is the perfect place to gain experience as a speaker and make valuable contacts. Presenting at UX People is the first step towards sharing Britain’s impressive user experience industry with the world.
I'm a bit too busy to blog seriously yet, having just gotten back from my vacation. In the meantime, enjoy this help menu I discovered when opening iSquint, an app that I found in my Applications folder, and only launched to see what it was before I AppZapped it.
Sorry for the downtime. Konigi went down for most of the day yesterday because a spike in traffic and number of database requests caused the databases to be taken offline. With our web host's help, 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 I suppose. Again, sorry for the interrupted service. I think i day of downtime to move the server is pretty good, so I'm just happy we're back in business.
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.