Posts Tagged ‘Mobile’

Mobile Prototyping Tools (Part 1 of 2) – Axure

Thursday, July 15th, 2010

In the recent past, I have been tasked with designing mobile applications for iPhone. Axure is the prototyping tool we use at Evantage and it has served me well in terms of creating prototypes for mobile applications and demonstrating them on a laptop. However, I have had trouble viewing the prototypes on an iPhone. The screen size shrinks on the iPhone making it difficult to read the content on the screen. In the near future we expect to use these prototypes to gather feedback from users and design applications for other devices (Android, Blackberry, iPad, etc). To ensure that we have the tools at Evantage to meet the demand, I spent some time looking at the workarounds with Axure and pros and cons of other mobile prototyping tools designed for the UX community.
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Recommendations to Improve iPhone Social Media Apps

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

Besides using my iphone as a phone, I also use it to read emails, tweets, facebook status updates, yammer posts and TFLN (texts from last night). Most of the applications I use serve the same purpose—they provide content from various sources/ individuals, and they all have either an equivalent desktop application or websites. As I’ve become intimately familiar with these apps, I’ve begun to appreciate some of things that one or another does, and I’ve found it increasingly annoying that all of the apps aren’t following suit.

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Insights on Designing Better Healthcare Solutions

Monday, May 17th, 2010

What are the key trends in the healthcare industry? What implications do they have on the solutions I am designing? You might be familiar with these questions if you are a product planner, business analyst or designer. Lately, my projects have been focused in the healthcare space. Because of this, I have developed insights into the key trends and analyzed their implications for creating better design solutions. In this post, I’ll share those insights and provide tips on how to design around them. Hopefully you’ll find them helpful and share some of your tips too.
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Top Trends for User Experience Professionals

Monday, January 25th, 2010

2010 seems like a turning point for user experience professionals. The decade has seen success stories like Amazon and Zappos that have made businesses sit up and value the power of understanding customer needs. There has been a surge in people across generations using online media for everyday activities and some of the trends in social media, mobile applications and technology have opened new doors for user experience professionals. At Evantage we have started experiencing the impact of some of these trends.
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Does Your Website Really Need a Mobile App?

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Word on the street is that if you have a great site you should create a mobile app.  I’ve been hearing it a lot from clients lately that everybody is on their phone and “if users could access our information then our product will be more valuable.”  Is this just a fad or is it valid?  Well, that depends on your customers and your business goals. (more…)

The Aesthetics of Interaction: A Response to Tog’s iPhone Home Screen Redesign

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The week before last, the legendary Bruce Tognazzini posted an article to his AskTog column proposing a solution to several problems he sees with the home screen. I read it, but my reaction was not the fawning idolatry I’d expected. It’s very difficult for me to say this but… his redesign is inelegant. The problems he identified are real and relevant, but I couldn’t help but react negatively to what I perceived to be an aesthetic dissonance in his solution. It doesn’t fit the playful aesthetic that is characteristic of the iPhone OS. So I’ve let the problems steep in my brain for a few days, and I think I’ve come up with a more elegant (or at least more iPhone-ish) solution.

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New Article Written For Johnny Holland

Monday, August 24th, 2009

Last week I published an article on Johnny Holland, an excellent online magazine about interaction design & research. I talk about how flaws in the iPhone’s user experience design illuminate the problems that user experience designers will be grappling with in the immediate future, and I provide some methods to explore in order to address these problems. So far, the article has generated a lot of discussion. People have reacted strongly against and strongly for some of the points I make in the article. Read it over lunch (it’s long) and throw in your two cents!

The iPhone is Not Easy to Use: A New Direction for UX Design