Narration X

Flashy Friday Interface Fun

A couple of engaging interfaces I stumbled upon this week:

Don’t Click looks like its been around since 2005 but has been getting some mixed reactions on an IxDA community thread this week! Garish design but innovative concept!

Legends telegraph is Nokia’s latest product newsletter offering. The interface emulates an old fashioned newspaper that you can ramble around by dragging and dropping your mouse. The page is dotted with digital video vignettes that give the overall impression of something from a Harry Potter movie.

Check ‘em out!

Faster than wireframes

Today at work I spent six hours in a room with a product manager reworking the flow and interface design of a product demo. This may seem like a long time to be in a room, but we were paper prototyping, an activity that is commonly used in user-centered-design because of it’s fast and cheap nature.

A key benefit that I derived directly from this activity was the ability to quickly and directly update the designs, iterating on the input provided by the sales and dev teams during many lightning feedback sessions. This process saves so much time as it facilitates faster group-consensus-building around a design and provides a low-tech medium to elicit a range of opinions from the stakeholders.

Developers tend to overlook the fact that the final artifact that you hand them looks like a stack of hard-to-read scrawl written by a seven-year-old, when you explain what the point of it all is. In an agile environment paper prototyping can really unclog bottlenecks, encourage communication and promote rapid iterations.

But don’t take my word for it – use the following links to prove that your not crazy next time you start paper prototyping at the office!

http://alistapart.com/articles/paperprototyping
http://www.paperprototyping.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_prototyping

Summer Update

I have been beneath the surface of more creativity than you can shake a stick at over the past few months. Namely, a software project at work and a demo version of my first album at home. I also have been helping my partner set up a company brand and website, and some logo side projects. I even had a cameo role in a friends movie. Over the next few months I intend to share my new insights into the various activities that I have been engaged in. Some of the topics I would like to discuss include.

• The presentation of the presentation layer
• Using personas in design: My “A-HA” moment
• Wireframes, mockups and prototypes: not just design tools
• One-man music making
• Promoting a music demo online.

In the meantime sit back and enjoy my friends movie “The Athenrides”

User Interface twelve

User Interface Twelve seems to be abundant with intriguing presentations and discussions. This conference takes place in Cambridge, MA; USA from November 5-8 and has an excellent line-up. Some of the highlights for me are:

Larry Constantine presents Interaction Design in an Agile World, a full-day seminar about reconciling the disconnect between the processes and principles of Agile Development and User Centered Design.

Other nuggets of noteworthiness include an interview with Luke Wroblewski, Where Visual Design Meets Usability.

and a seminar called Communicating Product Concepts with Comics by Kevin Cheng at Yahoo!

Designers Eurodisney

I am so happy when I hear that events like the CHI conference 2008 are being held in Europe.

Scenario Cycle

Some slides to assist with the thinking and creation of Scenarios from a really interesting looking Dutch company called DTN.

Entering bSpace

bSpace is the University of California Berkeley’s instance of Sakai, the open-source online collaborative learning environment. I spent the last nine months working on the visual and interaction design for the new bSpace skin.

I am excited to announce that the site has been launched: complete and tested with brand new skin. You need to have a Berkeley Login ID to see the good interaction design stuff but here is a link to the bSpace landing page where you can at least get a sense of the visual design.

On a slight tangent, it was a great experience connecting, learning and collaborating with the stellar folks at Berkeley. It was especially satisfying to work in an environment where there was an appreciation for research as an important part of the design process. Sometimes, in the fast-paced commercial design world, any “discovery-time” at the beginning of a design project, can be seen as a luxury rather than a necessity.

However, I believe that research and having the time to do it pays off — in time. It is a crucial step to understanding the realm and context of the client and the target audience. It also sets the foundation and tone of the design. I always prefer making a design decision based on research. Knowledge is never wasted.

Jakob Nielsen on the iPhone

The iPhone has been receiving positive reviews. Lets see what the usability maven Jakob Nielsen has to say about it. Here are some interesting comments from his email on 9 July 2007. See his Web site at http://www.useit.com/.

DON’T BUY AN iPHONE
Buried toward the end of the New York Times review of Apple’s new mobile phone are the following damning statistics. Time to download homepages of some websites:

* NY Times: 55 seconds
* Amazon: 100 seconds
* Yahoo: two minutes (!)

The iPhone reviewer also experienced several dropped phone calls.

(Readers outside the United States: you may remember the concept of “dropped calls” from the mobile services you used in the late 1980s. Sadly, they are still a fact of life on the lower-quality networks in the U.S. And the iPhone’s network is reportedly the lowest quality of them all.)

Advice for consumers:

Don’t buy an iPhone - or any Internet phone - that doesn’t run on a much better network. It doesn’t matter how good the on-screen user interface is. What’s important is the *total* user experience which is ruined by minute-plus response times and dropped calls. The best mobile browser is useless when pages arrive at a snail’s pace.

Advice for businesses:

It’s still not time to launch a mobile Internet strategy in the U.S. Wait until we catch up with Europe and Asia in mobile connectivity.

(Disclosure: we did work with one client on making their service mobile, but that was a special case where mobile access made immense sense. Thus it was correct for this company to pioneer a mobile design and to do the extra work to make sure it was as usable as possible within the current technology limitations.)

Eventually, it will be time to add mobile components to websites and intranets, even in the United States. By then, you’ll need a separate design for mobile devices.

The iPhone has 20% of the pixels on a small computer monitor. Yes, this is twice the pixel count of the previous generation of smartphones, but still too little to support the interface-rich design style that dominates current websites.

When I analyzed leading companies’ homepages, I found that only 20% of the screen real estate was allocated to content of interest to users:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030210.html

Interestingly, 20% is exactly the amount that will fit on an iPhone. So a different design that stripped away all the overhead would deliver the same info for mobile as for the desktop.

The impact of the network on the iPhone’s total user experience is a good example of a general lesson: usability is a chain that’s no stronger than its weakest link. Take e-commerce: navigation, search, product photos, product descriptions, the shopping cart, checkout, and site credibility all need great design. If any one of these fails, then no sale.

My colleague Tog likes the iPhone, but he is commenting on its on-screen UI, which I like as well, so we are not really in disagreement. See:

http://www.asktog.com/columns/072iPhoneFirstTouch.html

Remember:

user experience = UI + everything else touching the user

Over the top iPhone reviews

As Apple.com is my default homepage in Safari, I have not been able to avoid the barrage of hype surrounding the launch of the iPhone. I appreciate innovation as much as the next person but some of the reviews are beginning to get a little out of control.

“The Best Phone that Anybody Has Ever Made.”
“Steve Jobs has said, repeatedly, that this is the best iPod that Apple has ever made, and it is. It’s also the best phone that anybody has ever made,” says Lev Gossman (Time). “The user interface,” Grossman marvels, “is crammed with smart little touches — every moment of user interaction has been quietly stage-managed and orchestrated, with such overwhelming attention to detail that when the history of digital interface design is written, whoever managed this project at Apple will be hailed as a Michelangelo, and the iPhone his or her Sistine Chapel.”

Friday Film: IT Pro

Ancient Europe, a new technology emerges and usability is born!

Thanks to Shandy King for the post on embedding You Tube videos into wordpress