The crew at 37signals posted a few pictures of their different sketch styles.
(via @rotkapchen)
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1880-the-different-sketch-styles-of-the-designers-at-37signals
It's not terribly newsworthy, but Facebook's design team announced that they've stopped rounding corners on all elements. I noticed, however, that they kept the slight (3px?) rounding of names in the To: field of the messaging section. That somehow feels like a natural place for an exception to rounding corners for some reason. You know, so you don't get impaled when backspacing in the field. Kidding. This is a quote from their announcement.
Since we introduced rounded corners to Facebook, their consistent use has been spotty at best. The corner radii vary, and it sometimes feels arbitrary which corners are rounded and which are not. Additionally, they add an extra layer of complexity to the code (note: IE, please add support for border-radius).
As part of the effort to simplify our visual style, the design team recently decided to go back to our square corner roots. In doing so, we hope to champion cleanliness and the razor cut look that Facebook is known for.
See. It's a "razor cut" look. Pardon me while I roll my eyes loudly. Design-wise, it does have the boxy Facebook feeling of the original, without the muddy bluish gray backgrounds in the sidebars. It's never been known for being beautiful, but I like that they're being decisive about their identity and settling on a consistent style.
Brandon Walkin's article "Managing UI Complexity" offers some excellent pointers or reminders of concepts and techniques that help reduce complexity in an interface, including progressive diclosure, contextual actions, aligment and hierarchy. There's an abundance of examples with screenshots and deconstruction of interfaces to demonstrate the techniques in practice.
http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/2009/08/10/managing-ui-complexity/
[I]f you make it easy to talk to me, I will immediately be a lot more likely to keep talking.
Zeus Jones has a great write up about using conversational language and cues to invite users through interactions. The deconstruction of the lazy trial/registration process in Tumblr is used to demonstrate how this type of engagement makes the learning process natural and inviting. The discussion picks up on the Cluetrain meme of markets as conversations, positing that systems are conversations, and turning front ends into actors that use conversational language as interface. Afterall, if software is to be social, then it may as well learn social skills.
http://www.zeusjones.com/blog/2009/conversational-ux-design/
Keith Lang, co-founder of plasq.com, wrote a fantastic article for Think Vitamin about UX Myths. It's full of references and examples debunking stuff we hear repeated enough times that they begin to go unquestioned.
The top 10 UX myth list:
Some of these become so ingrained, that it takes a lot of effort to convince clients or colleagues otherwise. I've struggled with many of these beliefs, holdig on to some of the earlier in my career, e.g. I remember heated debates about and broad versus deep and the number of click to get to destinations. I struggle with #2 people read, and #5 preferences and handling options. Those can be huge challenges when you're looking for ways to simplify existing software.
There are so many nuggets here to be appreciated, and a few observations in UIs that I wasn't aware of. Check it out. If any of the references are new, you'll be surfing off the links for days.
Thanks for showing off your sick fast skills, Nick, and shaming us all. Oh, and it looks like that's going to be a really useful site. I didn't miss that.
You can download the OmniGraffle wireframe stencil Nick is using here for free, by the way. ;)
Janko at Warp Speed demonstrates a technique using jQuery to provide a navigable table of contents menu using the headings in your page content. I particularly like the method he's come up with for displaying headings to show the proportion of content for each section relative to the whole. I think you could do some nice styling to display the blocks as small multiples of proportion and scale in the margin. Nicely done and would work well with longer content, e.g. wiki pages.
http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2009/08/20/Table-of-contents-using-jQuery.aspx
CSS-Tricks wrote up a tutorial demonstrating how to use CSS clipping to use image sprite on inline elements that flow with content. This is a nice little technique for small icons that you want to come immediately after text, for example. Check it out.
Fred Beecher wrote the excellent article "The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for User Experience" on Johnny Holland to talk about why the iPhone is not easy to use (at first), and why it changes the game for user experience designers. The examples illustrate how gestural interfaces are hidden, and lack the affordances of physical buttons. But the real story here is how the iPhone brings one thing to the experience that is more important than usability—fun.
As a user experience designer, I thought my job was to make things not suck. Until recently. As technology has evolved, human behavior has evolved along with it. Since behavior is the basis of user experience design, my job has evolved as well. Now, my job is to make things people love. At the 2009 IA Summit, Karl Fast articulated the value proposition of user experience design with sparkling clarity. “Engineers make things,” he said, “we make people love them.” And then he held up an iPhone as an example.
This is a crucial change, the importance of which cannot be overstated.
It's cool to me that creating pleasurable and fun experiences has become such a meme because the issue of usability has become less important when compared with the feel of the product. It's always there in terms of principles, but I personally never want to lean on it as a crutch when designing. I think we sometimes equate usability with sterility and boredom. This is an odd thing to see myself write, since I've spent so much of my time trying to design usable things, or make things other people create more usable.
I think the point about finding fun and exploiting the users' willingness to play are key. Having an 8 year old son that is really into games of every type (card, board, video, and schoolyard games) has helped me gain a different perspective on interface design. It's not just in terms of seeing his immediate adaptability to the iPhone without the burden of reference to older interfaces. Most kids from pre-literacy learn to push and pull buttons and screens right away until something happens. But what I've been experiencing is how a child's curiosity, continual exploration and willingness to absorb information and fail quicker to get to desired goals is such a positive thing in terms of the learning experience.
One thing that has also immersed me in all of this fun learning is that we homeschool our son here in NYC. I've used gaming a great deal as a part of the learning experience with my son. I went through a period years ago when he was very young where I read Got Game and Everything Bad is Good for You. Our son talked us into getting him a GameBoy Advance so he could play with an older child, and my wife and I thought, "Why not make it part of his learning experience?" And we've been doing that with whatever he becomes interested in.
It's great that Fred mentions the game Fluxx. We've been playing this game all summer, and I bought blank cards to make our own rules. To my son, games aren't just about accomplishing goals and earning stuff, they're also largely about becoming an actor in the story and taking that experience to think of new games he wants to create. Fluxx is a great example of a game that lets users become more active participants in the rules.
MMPORG games immerse the gamer in a world where the player is part actor. SIM games like Spore bring God-like power to gamers. Games with creation mode like Little Big Planet allow users to re-cast the rules and experience. All of these create a different kind of user mentality that will be more interested in not only exploring the hidden, pleasurable world of easter egg interfaces, but who will also want to do more, explore more, and view computers as social and recreational tools as much if not more than tools to get things done. And that opens up the range of elements and methods you can use in interfaces.
These are great challenges. On my last large project I spent a lot of time working on game interfaces to push creation of user generated content within a video watching community. A few years after leaving, I see that none of that experimental work got to see the light of day. But I found the experience of thinking about how playfulness and even play within the application could make the use more pleasurable and as a designer it was incredibly exciting. I've jumped into a totally different world—enterprise software—where the challenge to make the experience pleasurable is even greater, and the implementation of these types of UIs more subtle.
I think what I take away from Fred's article is that we can't overlook the value of play, and I would add that empathy for the different experience of the younger generations who value things and possibly approach using things differently than we might. For more on this topic, read Fred Beecher's article in Johnny Holland.
http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2009/08/the-iphone-is-not-easy-to-use-a-peek-into-the-future-of-experience-design/
MOBIFY is a service that lets you create a mobile version of your site for free. You start by entering your site url, and selecting regions of your page design to be used in the mobile template, using their online template editor. For many sites, one template may be sufficient to serve all of your page types. After selecting regions, you may change their order in preview mode, as well as add custom HTML and modify CSS. Custom domains are supported, and with an upgrade, you may remove the Mobify branding and receive web analytics. You can use it with a plugin for your CMS, or by simply inserting Javascript into your site, which redirects to the mobile version.
I've tried several mobile services in the past. This one is perhaps the easiest I've had the experience of setting up. The initial setup time was maybe 15 minutes, plus the time to wait for the CNAME to update on my webhost. You can try Konigi mobile at m.konigi.com, or view konigi.com on a mobile device.