Product Management
UX/UI & Interacion Design
Thoughts and Links
Google Maps is one of the best Web-Apps ever created. There might be discussions about the costs for website owners, but as a consumer it's a blessing. Most functionality like creating your own maps etc. on the other hand is not so obvious and this tutorial gives an easy overview on how to make Google Maps even more useful.
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Great Guide on how to migrate your Facebook Application Profile Page to a Facebook PageFacebook is sometimes confusing, but they try to simplify. I and many others have setup a Facebook Application to integrate Services like Facebook Comments into their blog. This Applications had a on Profile page (looked like a Fan Page) and used these Pages instead of creating a separate one. These Application Profile Pages lacked some features and are now deprecated by the end of the Month.
So hurry up if you want to preserve your "Likes" and Vanity URL and migrate now.
#Facebook #Application #Migration
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Migrating an SFC Application to a Fan Page Still getting emails about this one, so here's a quick rundown on how to do it. First, if you were already using a Fan Page, then you are not affected at all and don't have to do anything. Please stop...
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I've tried the first iteration of the Berlin based startup called Wunderlist and I wasn't impressed. After Remember The Milk, Any.Do and the 1 million other task managers I tried I'm pretty spoiled. It seems to me that 6Wunderkinder didn't do their research work properly, as with many "new" products coming from startups solving "new" problems. They solve problems already solved - often times more cleverly or they don't solve them at all.
And Wunderkit has the same problem as ALL software has - it starts out nice and clean with just the minimum functionality because someone felt, that the current solution is too clunky and overloaded. In a second step they add functionality because the minimum set of features just meets the demands of a minimum set of customers - if you want to be sustainable and grow you need more customers and you have to meet their needs - by adding new features.
After a couple of versions you end up just as clunky and feature rich as the solution it was replacing.
As for Wunderkit the addition of social features is one that breaks the whole "get something done" principle and honestly the design is not readable not practical. It's nice to look at - if you don't care about design in it's real sense and I'm sure it fits nicely in the Apple world of "undesign" that all the iPhone Apps are famous for.
#taskmanager #startup #design
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How to avoid the "Lock in Effect" in Wordpress Themes and PluginsWordpress is a great open source platform ... but open might turn into closed by using certain plugins and themes that prevent you from moving on ... here is a good guide on what to look out for.
#wordpress #guide #themes
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Google+: View post on Google+About the “Lock in Effect” in WordPress Themes and Plugins The WordPress themes and plugins market is huge these days. With all that wide range of products available, we sometimes stumble into situations where we’d like to change our mind, i.e. use a different plugin or theme instead of the one we’re currently using. Eventually we figure out that it’s incredibly tough to replace some of the themes and plugins, because as soon as they’re deactivated, all (or part) of our data is lost, and the new theme or plugin that was supposed to replace the old on...
I like this list, and especially that you could vote on the "before" logo as well. And there are more than one example where the old logo has got just as much votes as the new one. This means IMO that many re-designs are motivated by changes on the management level of the company/firm/... and not driven by necessity.
#corporate #identity #design
Reshared post from +Ian Hex
And now time for Part 2 from Brand New, this time: The Best Identities of 2011 -> http://goo.gl/UX8Wv
Of all the ones listed, I love, love, love the new OCAD University identity, because it embodies everything that should be done in modern-day identity design: it's simple and timeless, yet typographically pure, totally fluid, flexible and has a near limitless range of application; it's doesn't have to be consistent because it's coherent.
To be sure to check these out.
Also, happy to see the Little Chef redesign got on there.
#hex_logos-identities
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I had to try this out immediately. The Currents App from Google might not be the perfect Flipboard killer, but with the associated Google Edition Producer you can pimp your content to play nicely with it. I tried a couple of the "convert your blog to an app" tools, and they didn't work for me. I haven't customized it completely, but sure will digg more into it and present my findings here ... and in my Google Currents Edition.
#google #mobile #reader #editions #frankie
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Frankie - Surprise yourself for Android, iPhone and iPad Art director, Designer, former Developer and Product Designer, won some awards and love empowering the design community with tutorials, tips, industry insights, mobile design, creativity tools.
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about making something good looking, oder elegant or "uncrappy" or emulating real things in a digital way. It's about re-imagining - re-combining and make it financially viable. It should make you say wow - or simply go out of your way. Here is an example of how "folding" is applied in a unique way.
#productdesign #chair #creativity
Reshared post from +Peter McDermott
Folding Chair 3.0
The last folding chair I shared with you was pretty cool, but this one takes the cake!
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I always like a great deal when it comes to fonts - and this 75% off sounds pretty good to me. Offer code is TNB7563 and is sold at The Northern Block - sale runs until christmas. The font itself seems at first sight very similar to Helvetica, so it can be used as an alternative to that, but it has an edge, so it will get more attention - stick out and have people look at it twice ... and sometimes we just want that, don't we.
#font #type #helvetica #alternative #sale
Reshared post from +Ian Hex
Like me, I know that +Graham Smith has a love for neo-/grotesque typefaces. Today, I was alerted to Jonathan Hill's (thenorthernblock.co.uk/heltar.htm) redrawing of the elusive Haas Unica typeface; it's called Heltar -> http://goo.gl/9Ilx6
"Having grown up in Sheffield and been completely immersed in the work of The Designers Republic I became very drawn to their treatment of Helvetica, especially the close tracking of the letter space. This visual investigation led me to the study of the font Hass Unica, a so called improvement to Helvetica. In-order not to replicate and become a clone of Unica I redrew all the characters from scratch improving optical appearance, developing subtle corrections and reshaping individual letterforms. The result is a remixed neo-grotesque font that has strong general optical balance with great rhythm under close tracking."
The lowercase italic e is... interesting.
And, until Christmas, you can purchase the entirely family at 75% discount.
#hex_typography
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Yesterday was a great day for heading down to Kitsilano Beach and False Creek and try out if I can make some nice shots for a HDR experiment. I quite like the result, but I'm new to HDR and some other shots (I didn't upload them) didn't come out as expected.
Comments are welcome and suggestions also :)
#vancouver #photowalk #hdr
In album Vancouver Highlights (6 photos)
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One of the first books I read (ok I just watched the pictures and drawings) was about the Apollo missions to the moon. In there was a very similar visualization, but this new one, gives a much better feel for the distance.
#data #visualization #moon #astronomy
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How Far Away is the Sun? Another Visualization. - Brad BlogSpeed About. Brad Goodspeed; I'm a dude. Sometimes I write things down on the internet. I'm certainly not expecting you to find all of them interesting, because I've never met anyone who shares ...
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This is a great article for designers and users - balanced and well thought out. What it doesn't cover is why Apple and other firms are going towards skeuomorphic designs - maybe because they try to make technology for the "rest of us" by emulating the things "the rest of us" used in the past. This way we hinder real innovation, because this is not re-thinking a solution. #apple #design #UI
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Why Siri is like skeuomorphic UIs: the magic is just skin deep By now you've probably heard of the widely reported case of Siri's alleged pro-life stance. Walking the dogs this morning, I thought through what I
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Every year the discussion about labeling retouched photos of women (mostly women) in media arises. It my eyes the whole discussion misses the point in the sense that it assumes that "common people" are too stupid to recognize that the photos on the covers are fake. Especially for celebrities I cannot see the danger of highly retouched photos - why? Simply because while on one side the cover photos of magazine show highly stylized versions of persons who will be thrown under the bus by the yellow press showing shocking "paparazzi" photos where we can see them un-retouched.
Interestingly enough the audience for both photos is the same. So I don't really see the danger.
On the other side I hear more often how someone is surprised to see that a celebrity actually looks like on TV when they see them on the street ... doesn't that tell you that we "know" what is real in what not?
#retouching #photo
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Researchers Create Way to Measure Photo Retouching Faced with an increasing backlash against portrait retouching, researchers have crafted a program to quantify just how much the picture has been tweaked.
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Lights: An amazing display of WebGL power. Kiss your Flash goodbye If you've ever read about WebGL and wondered what it could do, Lights will be a great example for you. In short, WebGL is a way to display 3D graphics in the browser, without the need ...
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I love to see that the European Parlament embraces net neutrality. While we sometimes point fingers to Europe for their overbearing privacy laws etc., but Europe is also the place where the User is more important then any corporation or state (exception may apply). Regarding net neutrality I just want to add one argument why we need it - Net neutrality should be renamed in Net preservation, because it preserve the status quo ... the internet as we know it now. It has become as big and important because it was neutral and there has be no differentiation between services and content. This must continue to not halt the innovation and the growth of this important media.
#media #internet #neutrality
Reshared post from +Kol Tregaskes
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European Parliament adopts net neutrality resolution Net neutrality should be enshrined in European Union law, says the European Parliament, which adopted a resolution calling for net neutrality on 17 November.
Network neutrality is a principle that states that internet service providers to not give any content preferential treatment. Any given video, article, web page should get just as much bandwidth as another. Supporters of net neutrality warn that if it is abandoned, ISPs will create fast lanes for web traffic, where content from paying p...
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As usual the small details count and the self publishing aspect for independent artists is a big deal. If you are not part of the publishing associations you are cut out of airplay revenue etc, but you also give up most of your rights to publish the music yourself - it's not only the media companies hurting artists.
The font was designed for smartphone screens, but I will try it out for other screen designs as well - the screen density is similar. #font #android #opensource #roboto
Reshared post from +Matias Duarte
Hello Roboto When we announced Ice Cream Sandwich I also got a chance to introduce Android’s new typeface Roboto. Today I’d like to talk about how Roboto was born — why we decided to create it, and the design choices we made in the process.
Why replace Droid? Droid is a great font family which served Android well over the years, but it was designed and optimized for screens that were much lower in pixel density than today’s HD displays. To be legible at smaller sizes, and to avoid turning to anti-aliased grey mush, the letter forms had to be quite dramatic. They had a tall x-height and a very regular rhythm so that they snapped to the pixel grid crisply. The bold variant was significantly wider than the regular text, because when a letter’s vertical strokes are one pixel thick, the only way to be bold is to double! It’s no surprise that on high rez screens, and at larger more dramatic headline sizes, Droid struggled to achieve both the openness and information density we wanted in Ice Cream Sandwich.
What were we looking for? Most important was to create something that matched our ambitious design goals for Ice Cream Sandwich. Emotionally we wanted Ice Cream Sandwich to enchant you, to be attractive and eye-catching. Our new typeface had to be modern, crisp, and structured to match our new emphasis on open layouts and rigid grid alignments, but also friendly and approachable to make Android appealing, and a little bit more human.
Interactive display is a new and still evolving medium and what it demands from type design is subtly and uniquely different from print. We wanted to take maximum advantage of ultra high density screens like that of Galaxy Nexus, yet still be crisp and legible on lower resolution displays like that of Nexus S. Because Roboto would be used for the UI we wanted to make the bold very similar to the metrics of the regular weight, so that text could gracefully switch from bold to regular (like when you read emails in your inbox). We also wanted to include tabular figures (numbers that are all the same width) so we could display times, dates and other counters without having the characters jump around.
Finally we wanted Roboto to make a design statement in and of itself, in the same way that we wanted every screen on the device to have a strong and unique design point of view. Yet, just like the rest of the UI, Roboto is ultimately a medium for your content. We wanted Roboto to have a design character that made it recognizable, to be distinctive when you were paying attention, but never be overbearing or distracting.
How did we make it? We realized early on that we needed something with a strong geometric backbone to hold up to our new open “Magazine UI” layouts. When we got rid of the boxes and bevels, dividers and other structural crutches, the more humanist fonts of our legacy felt uncomfortable and a little chaotic. Naturally we looked at some of the circle based geometrics like Avenir and Futura, but they’re very demanding in the rhythm of their metrics and ultimately were a little too soft for the crisp corners that we were using in the UI. The breakthrough came quickly when we settled on a straight sided grotesk.
Roboto’s straight sided capitals and distinctive racetrack-shaped rounded letters turned out to be perfect for our needs in a system font. It is space efficient and and holds its own for the short terse messages that are so common in UI. It has a high degree of compatibility with legacy designs created for Droid, because in almost all cases the same size Roboto sets in the same amount of space. Yet because of Roboto’s more structured forms we can actually set it smaller and with tighter line spacing, allowing us to put more information on the screen without inducing claustrophobia.
One of the potential drawbacks of a grotesk font is that the structured evenness of the type can make it more difficult to read. We started by softening up the lower case letters, and then experimented with opening up some of the glyphs to get a more diverse rhythm. We found that by adding a little more diversity to the lower case the font become more readable. In particular, we opened up the ‘e’ and ‘g’ while keeping the ‘a’, ‘c’ and ‘s’ characters closed. The rhythm starts to compare more to book types and makes for really nice reading over longer spans of text.
In the end we were iterating ceaselessly on minor details of the letters, extending the character set to Greek and Cyrillic, and tweaking the rendering so that Roboto would look just as good at all sizes and resolutions. In fact our work is not yet done as we continue to extend the character set and begin to hint Roboto so it works as well on computers as it does on Android devices. Still, I’m terrifically proud of the work the team and our lead typographer did in an ludicrously short amount of time. Roboto is a new foundation for Android and the team really deserves kudos for their accomplishment.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little ‘behind the scenes’ peek at Android’s evolution. I had fun writing it, so let me know if you’d be interested in hearing more.
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Good interaction design has nothing to do with looks. Some interfaces look dreadful but work great, some look great but are painful to use. I often have to argue with fellow designers about how pretty or good looking a certain design is. Not only old school designers coming form print design (where I had the same discussions) have the impression that if something looks good, orderly and clean it also works well.
Even going beyond the taste of what looks good I often argue that the looks are a secondary thing and that we have to concentrate on the goal of the project - may it be to convey a message or to perform a task.
Google for example has been the posterchild for not being able to pull of a decent user interface - while the search page is probably one of the best UI decisions ever made.
Designers should remember that visual elements are meant to improve the user experience - looking good is part of that, but if it gets in the way of the goal it's a fail.
I will rest my case with this finding where in a test, the not so good looking vertical list has outperformed the nice grid view. It underlines another point - do test your designs.
#ui #ux #design #visual #testing
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westiseast.co.uk - Product listings - a surprising AB test result
These are the results of an AB test that finished recently on a product listing page - I think you'll find the results surprising.
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