Archive for the ‘Interaction Design’ Category

UI Guidelines for Skeuomorphic Multi-Touch Interfaces

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Gestural, multi-touch user interfaces have made using a computer interesting again. This is good and bad. But two big names in usability, Jakob Nielsen and Don Norman, are concerned that it’s canadian pharmacy cialis

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. I am concerned that their response to the situation, a call for new guidelines, is a reactionary backlash that could hinder innovation and beauty in interaction design.

After scoffing at the idea at first, I sat down to think about whether it was possible to develop guidelines that are open enough to allow for innovation, playfulness, and beauty but strong enough to keep usability high. I think it might be, and these are my first thoughts about it. What follows is a series of conversation-starters, potential guidelines that need to be tested and vetted before they can be solid. For now, the discussion will be limited to skeuomorphic interfaces, but additional guidelines are necessary for multi-touch UI in general and novel UIs specifically.

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Playfulness, Usability, & Context: The Three Pillars of a Delightful User Experience

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

When I bought my first iPhone almost three months ago, I also acquired a new obsession with the role of playfulness in user experience design. Recently, a fortunate coincidence occurred that has allowed me to explore this new obsession deeply. Tw

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o iPhone developers each released new measurement unit conversion apps within a week of each other and also documented their design processes on the Web. As if that weren’t enough, both of these applications, taptaptap’s Convert and Tapbots’ Convertbot, were designed with the idea of delightful experience in mind. The two apps are very different despite all these similarities, and those differences got me thinking about the relationship between playfulness and usability in creating delightful interactions. I succumbed fully to my obsession and roped in some iPhone-using coworkers to participate in an informal comparative usability test. What I learned, led me to compelling insights about the relationship between usability and playfulness.
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Reflections on the 2009 IA Summit

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Two days of workshops, three days of intensive talks and my brain is swimming with all the things I’ve learned and interesting discussions I’ve had. This is my humble attempt to gather my thoughts and put them down in blog form.

First, I’m going

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to say that if given the choice of only attending one conference a year, I would still choose this conference. It’s one of the more inexpensive conferences to attend and as Karl Fast said during 5 minute madness, it is designed by us for us. We only have two selected speakers and the rest are submissions sent in the by the community. It’s a great space to see what is happening in the user experience realm. On an individual basis, we spend the year solving problems and creating great user interfaces for our clients, on this occasion we get to compare those experiences and learn about some great new technique that will improve how we do our jobs.

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Falling in Love with Machines: A Case of Low Expectations

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

I have a long and intense history of falling in love with machines. As a User Experience Designer, I likely pay more attention to machines than most people, but what most people also don’t know is that I am paying attention to how Emotional Freedom Technique E-book

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are engaging with their machines. What I’ve found is that there are three things that inspire people to fall in love with their machines, two of which make sense and the third blows my mind.

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