Designing for iPad: Reality Check

Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines: About the Guidelines for Creating Great Mac OS X Apps Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines describes the characteristics of the OS X platform and the guidelines and principles that help you design an outstanding user interface and user experience for your Mac app. Mac OS X Human Interface Guidelines does not describe how to implement your designs in code. When you’re ready to code, start by reading Mac App Programming Guide. At a Glance Aqua is the overall appearance and behavior of OS X. Interface Builder (a graphical UI editor in Xcode) is the best way to begin building an Aqua-compliant user interface. Great Apps Begin with an Understanding of the Fundamentals Before you begin designing your app, you need to get a feel for the OS X environment. Most people are not acquainted with the principles of human interface design, but they can tell when apps follow the guidelines and when they don’t. People Expect a Great User Experience that Integrates OS X Technologies OS X users have high standards for the apps they run. How to Use This Document

Usability Testing Tool Review: Usabilla We’re seeing a boom period in the development of new tools for usability testing, which is a great trend that foretells better web experiences in the coming years. Today I’m going to look at Usabilla, which my friend Keri Morgret and I used on her site Strike Models, which sells products for building remote controlled battleships. Service description: Usabilla shows screenshots of your choosing to testers and asks them questions which they answer by clicking and/or annotating over the image. You choose what questions to ask from a preset list and/or provide your own. You can provide the screenshots or just input the URL and Usabilla will take the screenshots for you. Usabilla hosts the test (it appears in an overlay). What the service isn’t: Usabilla does not recruit users for you from a panel that they manage. Here’s what the marked up screenshot looked like, with points (circles) and notes (squares). Value of insights obtained: Pretty high in many cases, perhaps 8.5/10. Some examples: 1. 2.

My five commandments for wireframing « Boagworld Design: The estimated time to read this article is 5 minutes I am a fundamentalist when it comes to wireframing. Its almost like a religious furore. However, I am not writing this to convince you of the value of wireframing. Thou shall not neglect to wireframeThou shall not wireframe aloneThou shall not be afraidThou shall start with pen and paperThou shall test thy wireframes Let our sermon for the day begin with “Thou shall not neglect to wireframe”. Thou shall not neglect to wireframe From my perspective things start to go wrong when you decide to skip wireframing. This is such a small change it doesn’t need wireframing The client won’t pay for wireframes There isn’t time to wireframe The problem is that these objections simply are not true. Thou shall not wireframe alone Another big danger I have observed in wireframing is what one of our developers calls the ‘chinese whispers effect‘. I believe the best way to overcome this problem is to wireframe as a group. Thou shall not be afraid

The condescending UI I have a kneejerk reaction to most modern computer user interfaces (also, all microwave user interfaces). I've used plenty of excuses over the years: my "eye for design," my love of minimalism, a sense of utility. Today, I finally put my finger on it, and it's not just a desire for the-computer-as-pure-machine, or a spartan aesthetic. Growing up I was always very small for my age. My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. An example of this is the dramatic, quasi-utilitarian animated transition. But it's not just functionality, there's something deeper that bugs me, about the decorations themselves. And of course, there is the transgression of the century: Apple's downward spiral into overt 1:1 metaphors. For reference, here's where we started: Oh, how "far" we've come! Of course, seeking out an aesthetically pleasing interface seems a nice goal. Related Items haiku microsoft apple ui user interface beos

The Value of Good Design Drawar has published a couple of interesting posts about the importance of design and aesthetics for online businesses last week. The main premise is this: businesses succeed and fail on the web regardless of how well designed their sites are. An ugly website will succeed if their product or service is good, so why bother making something beautiful? Now, Paul Scrivens' position on this is that you should care, and that pushing out something that’s just good enough isn’t what web designers should strive for. I agree. I also think that good design, and good aesthetics for that matter, oftentimes make business sense. It’s not difficult to find examples of businesses with beautiful websites but no traffic. Of course on the other end we have pig ugly websites that are wildly successful. This will vary depending on your product or service, but in many cases it can and will make a difference. The easiest example is of course Apple. Take the case of Facebook. Good design speaks.

Designing for Social Interaction It took both the telephone and the mobile phone 15 years to amass 100 million users, but Facebook did it in 9 months. We see more and more people becoming connected on online social networks, and it seems our networks are growing exponentially. But the reality is, social networks rarely add to our number of connections. We’ve already met almost all the people we’re connected to on social networks. We’re already connected to these people offline. Social networks simply make the connections visible. The average number of friends on Facebook is 130, and many users have many more.2 Yet despite having hundreds of friends, most people on Facebook only interact regularly with 4 to 7 people,3 and for 90% of Facebook users, 20% of their friends account for 70% of all interactions.4 We also see this with phone usage. We also have varied interactions with the people we’re not as close to. We have many diverse relationships with the people in our lives, yet the web doesn’t support this very well.

Cocoia Blog Andrew Parker - The Gong Show: Metric-Driven Design 10 Marketing Resources Every App Should Provide | Web.AppStorm This is for all you web app developers out there. There are ten resources every app should make easily available to members of the press, including bloggers, via their website. These are resources for people interested in sharing information, reviews or thoughts about your web app — with a few being tremendously helpful for your users. If you offer a web app or service, you need to check this list to see what kind of marketing you’re missing. Why? These are the top ten application and service resources, for both web and desktop, I find commonly missing. I would like to point out that this is coming from someone who evaluates 15-20 or more applications and services each week. 1. It might seem obvious, but a [relatively] high resolution logo is often hard to find when I’m reviewing an app or service. Logo The typical blogger almost certainly won’t contact you for a quality logo and will use something crappy, reflecting poorly on everyone. 2. Icon 3. Descriptions 4. Video Demonstration 5. 6. 7.