Having some struggle to color charts and graphs used in UI your designing? Using color palettes like Kuler is one thing, but we, UX practitioner, should be better than that. This article gives you a very quick and solid instruction based on human factors.
via PerceptualEdge
Windows 8: The Boldest, Biggest Redesign In Microsoft’s History
I’ve been Mac user since 2008. Before that I was Windows user all the way since 1993. I wasn’t a big fan of Microsoft UIs back in the day. It was just ok design and visually not interesting at all.
Now that Microsoft made the biggest UI design on their leading OS, Windows, I have to say it’s actually quite interesting change. Yes, I know some people had a very hard time finding how to turn off the computer or other very basic functions. That was quite messed up. However, it doesn’t simply mean the design itself is bad. If you look closely, there is many interesting designs in it and you can absolutely learn from it.
It’s more educational for UX practitioners to think about WHY they designed this way and WHAT intention was behind it. I recommend to do it, It’s quite a good practice.
Related note: Look at UI and interaction design around Control Panel. It was most painful part for most of users. See how they managed this part. It is not perfect at all, but you see lots of effort.
Yes, they are likely to be forgotten when days are busy.
Not new, but good to read it again.
- Focus on the Primary Task
- Elevate the Content that People Care About
- Think Top Down
- Give People a Logical Path to Follow
- Make Usage Easy and Obvious
- Use User-Centric Terminology
- Minimize the Effort Required for User Input
- Downplay File-Handling…
Symantec did a very interesting social experiment. They left behind fifty smartphones on random sites in a city, and tracked the log how these smartphones were used by people who picked them up.
The result indicates 96% of people tried to access your personal information, 89% accessed personal app, 83% accessed business related app or files, and only 50% tried to return these phones to original owner even there was owner info.
Symantec suggested to have three things to avoid compromise:
1. Set password on your phone
2. Have app that can erase all data remotely
3. Install app that can remotely find the current coordinate of your phone
Minimalist Web Design: How Minimal is Too Minimal?
One major aspect of usability study is to take out unnecessaries and well present essentials. In that perspective, minimalism is one significant design approach to get things right. This article will help you to think about “what is a proper way of minimalism” with out messing up.
Minimalism, interestingly enough, is usually born out of excess. In all arts, in all ways of life, we start out by taking and adding whatever we can.
When we start to realize that more is not necessarily better, and that we can get by with less stuff, we try to simplify by removing unnecessary elements so we can focus on what’s truly important.
There is still the fat-finger problem, which the users’ finger occlude a target they are about to touch and it causes inaccuracy/error, exists on Kindle Fire. In addition to this article, I would like to say that touchable area mappings on Kindle Fire and iPhones/iPads are slightly different: actually iPhone’s touch area mapped almost 5-6 mm lower than a graphical object, while Amazon Kindle mapped a bit more above than that. (See Holtz and Baudisch, 2009 to understand the reason behind this offset)
Since iPhone/iPad/iPod touch interaction is de-facto standard in mobile touch device world, such a deviation could cause user confusion and unnatural feelings.
Amazon Kindle Fire came to multi-touch device market much later than Apple. Amazon could have taken advantage of newcomer’s flexibility by putting much ambitious design in their design, but what they brought is quite conservative design, which, in fact, is much less cooler than their competitor’s device in my perspective.
Source: Jacob Nielsen’s Alert Box
New generation Mental model vs. Affordance
I expected this day would come, but not this early.
O, Apple, you made any product designer’s life so difficult.
We now have to make everything finger interactive.
Thanks Celestesaurus for posting this!
