How do you map the flow of a mobile application? Can you provide examples?
I’m currently working on the IA/UX for a mobile application and as I’m mapping it out it doesn’t seem like a traditional site map makes sense nor does a flowchart. Can anyone point me to a good set of symbols that make sense …
Sending a formatted email vs. sending a PDF as attachment
I am working on a site that will have a “send to email” feature for semi-personalized content (think something like a short shopping list). We already will have a print-friendly view of this content available on the site. We …
Common screen resolution?
I’m developing a web application which is quite information heavy. This means that every pixel available in the screen for display helps a lot, to avoid the UI looking too cluttered and to display relevant data.
I was wonder…
Showing how many users voted that a comment was helpful
I’m building a site with items that can be reviewed, and users can vote whether or not reviews are helpful to bubble the best to the top Amazon-style.
Amazon, Yelp, and almost everything else I could find shows the number of people who fou…
Do designers ever do any kind of web work in Illustrator?
Yes, I only use Illustrator!
Switched over a few years ago from Photoshop and never looked back.
Why the switch? In one word, Agile. The process begs for something a bit more quick, open, and lightweight – whilst at the sometime offering great scalability to take graphics across different mediums (electronic & print). A definite must if your working towards an RIA output, there are now many plugins that output to XAML and even HTML5 – I’m currently outputting for Flex (or SWC’ing)
With the added capabilities of pixel locking and pixel preview. It makes it the perfect tool for application design. Combined with all my brand and iconography work which would be vector based anyway – everything becomes seamless.
Illustrator also offers the ability to design multiple GUIs over several artboards that can be outputted to PDF (I’ve ditched the .ai file format altogether!) This is great for quick presentations, emailing, sharing, collaborating, etc.
In fact, its changed my whole teams workflow where architects and designers all build within illustrator and develop wireframes and increment fidelity to final design in the one application. No need for Balsamiq > Omnigraffle > Photoshop round trip – just way too many file formats!
Its now got to the point where I wonder why most ‘designers’ (especially web) still use Photoshop? Quite simply, its an image retouching tool for bitmap/raster graphics. Not a design tool.
Best UI approach to align the column titles of reports
I would like to know what the best approach is to align header columns according to their data type.
I haven’t found any Human Design Interface articles explaining this.
Should the header column follow the same alignment that its data va…
What do people think of Color’s interaction design?
This is hands-down the worst UI I’ve ever seen in an iPhone application, and I’ve seen a lot.
They seem to have done everything backwards. They’ve started from a UI that typically comes from years of usage where most of your users are power users. Normally, when you launch an application, you start with a UI tailored to people who have no clue how your application works.
When you present such a novel interface, you should do some hand-holding, especially if it isn’t self-evident. I personally don’t believe in UIs that are not self-evident, but at least provide instructions if you’re going to hide the functionality from people. They have taken a mystery meat approach to the navigation. I keep accidentally discovering new areas or functionality in the most bizarre ways.
Follow the human interface guidelines.
In an attempt to to be unnecessarily innovative, they’ve defied all of the standard navigation paradigms of the meticulously designed Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). This would be fine if it was an improvement upon an already existing notion within people’s minds, but, instead, they have chosen a very abstract UI that doesn’t make sense in any world.
Those are my major complaints. The idea behind it is worth exploring, but please, please, bring the UI down to earth.
How do you explain user experience design to a layman?
My strategy involves three things:
- Connect UX to personal experiences with things UXers design
- Distinguish between something they understand (eg, what engineers and programmers do) and something they don’t (what UXers do)
- Describe UX in terms of what UX designers do for them (make something they love that improves their lives) instead of what UX designers do (user research, wireframes, strategy, card sorting, persona, etc)
In practice, my approach is as follows.
First, I ask people to name their favorite information thing. I get them to think of something they can’t imagine living without. Something that came into their life in the last ten or twenty years. Answers vary, but people usually mention something—website, app, device, service, etc.—that involves information, interaction, networks, and the digital realm. Typical answers are Google, iPhone, Facebook, Kindle, Xbox, GPS, eBay, Netflix, and so on.
Then I distinguish between 2 kinds of people who created that thing
- The engineers who made that thing work. I say these people make sure that thing, whatever it is, does what it is supposed to do. We call them programmers, developers, and engineers. But no matter the title, this person’s highest priority is making it work.
- The UX designers who made that thing work in ways people love. I say these people don’t make the thing work. Instead, they make you love the way that it works: what it looks like, how it feels, how to use it, how it’s organized, etc. We call them information architects, interaction designers, usability engineers, and more. But no matter the title, this person’s highest priority is making things work in ways that people will love.
People get this in my experience. They immediately understand the value that UX has for them. They don’t how that value is created, but they understand that there is value and, roughly, what the value is.
Of course this is a vast simplification of UX. It deliberately overlooks business, marketing, support services, and so on. It also lumps a whole group of creative people under the title of UX and doesn’t make distinctions between types of UX practitioners.
But when the point is to help someone outside UX to understand UX at a high level, I’ve had more success with this than anything else. And it’s a good gateway to deeper conversation about how good UX happens.
Rate vs Like/Dislike
I’m writing a web page that will allow people to rate “objects”. I was thinking of giving users the classical 5 star rating… but then I remembered the like/dislike approach and how YouTube changed from the 5 stars to the li…
Rate vs Like/Dislike
I’m writing a web page that will allow people to rate “objects”. I was thinking of giving users the classical 5 star rating… but then I remembered the like/dislike approach and how YouTube changed from the 5 stars to the li…