Alex Yra

Managing UI Complexity

Thu 17 Sep

Excellent piece by Brandon Walkin on designing user interfaces.  A must-read for creatives involved in application design.

So you’re thinking about becoming a designer?

Thu 30 Jul

Liz Danzico sought out the advice of digital designers, to reply through video to the question:

If you could tell only one thing to aspiring designers about getting into the field of design, what would it be?

Improving the Phone Interface of the iPhone

Tue 28 Jul

Dave Cronin makes some really good points in criticizing the iPhone’s phone functionality for indicating missed calls and voicemail.  Even better, the suggestions he makes on how to improve the interface are pretty smart.

The Definitive Guide to Flash Intros

Thu 16 Jul

I’ve provided this handy flow chart for all web designers and marketing people to consult before they put a Flash intro in place. Use this and no matter what your product, no matter who your target audience, you will always reach the right decision.

I love this flowchart.

Honda takes top spot in Web Site Satisfaction for the second time in a row

Wed 24 Jun | Add Remarks

The Honda Automobiles website ranked highest in usefulness in shopping for a new vehicle in a study conducted by J.D. Powers and Associates:

The semi-annual study, now in its 10th year, measures the usefulness of automotive manufacturer Web sites during the new-vehicle shopping process. New-vehicle shoppers evaluate Web sites in four key areas: appearance, speed, navigation and information/content.

Honda ranks highest with an index score of 883 on a 1,000-point scale, performing particularly well in all factors driving satisfaction. Following Honda in the rankings are Porsche (862), MINI (861), and Jeep and Infiniti in a tie (860 each).

“Providing a satisfying Web site experience greatly increases the likelihood that a new-vehicle shopper will visit the showroom for a test drive, which creates a solid opportunity for manufacturers to increase dealer traffic,” said Arianne Walker, director of marketing/media research at J.D. Power and Associates. “Given Honda’s growing market share compared with 2008, their top-performing Web site, in addition to many other factors, is just another component of the brand’s success.”

A tremendous amount of work went into redesigning the Honda Autos site, with careful consideration towards usability, navigation, and speed.  With a goal of a best-in-class user interface and user experience, this win is personally gratifying (even sweeter considering the website beat the competition by an overwhelming margin in the previous study).  Congrats to the team at Honda and RPA for a job well done.

Kottke on Google and Design

Fri 20 Mar

In many cases, I’d trust a good designer with 10 years of experience over The Numbers™. That 10 years represents an internalization of thousands of instances of The Numbers across a broad range of experience. At other times, the quantitative approach is useful. Part of being an effective designer (or an auto mechanic or an engineer or programmer etc.) is learning to recognize the right mixture of the two approaches.

PDF Browser Plugin 2.3

Fri 20 Mar

Schubert|it’s PDF Browser Plugin takes the PDF Render within Mac OS X to the next level.  Plus, it also works on Firefox and OmniWeb. 
Via Daring Fireball

The Shift to Holistic

Thu 12 Mar

Mark Hurst, regarding “experience” specialists:

This moment, as tough as it is, presents a genuine opportunity for the holistic-minded, the generalists, the generally smart and curious (you know who you are!) to come out from hiding and WORK YOUR MAGIC. You’re not just a senior user interaction designer; no, more importantly, you’re someone who cares about the customer experience - if I may say, the holistic experience - which will determine the life or death of the company, durnit, and you’re going to roll up your sleeves to give the company the best chance possible to survive and maybe even grow in this environment. Shout that to anyone who doubts what this mindset can do.

via 37 Signals

The “Sixth Sense” wearable technology

Wed 11 Mar

From TED: Wearable technology extends one’s user interface to their current environment. Amazing.

This demo—from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry—was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.

Via Justin Taylor

A visual comparison of camera interfaces in 2009

Tue 10 Mar

As the number of features for compact cameras continue to expand, it becomes more important to make those features easy to find and activate - while still providing the ability to “just take a picture”.  Gizmodo sampled the user interfaces of compact cameras made by the major digital camera makers to see how they fare:

The better ones tend to use a list or grid style, where everything is clearly laid out and easy to access, and more UIs seem to be trending toward the branching list model—when you highlight something, you can see its parameters underneath it. Fonts are rough on some but clearly polished on others. This is a make-or-break issue, since quick visibility is key when you shift from a button UI, or a visual one that only relies on icons.

Honda: Dream the Impossible

Mon 09 Mar | Add Remarks

This relatively new site of short films documents Honda’s philosophy and history of innovation.  These stories feature employees of American Honda Motor, and notable figures such as racecar driver Danica Patrick and actor Christopher Guest.

Visit the Dream the Impossible Documentary Series Website
nytimes.com: “For the Honda Brand, a Cinematic Stroke”

What is filling out a form in Flash like?

Tue 16 Dec | Add Remarks

The next time someone asks you why creating a form in Flash is a bad idea, point them to this link.

You can’t beat that description.  Or can you…?  Comment away!

‘America’s Other Auto Industry’

Mon 01 Dec

WSJ on why “transplant” car makers (such as Honda,Toyota, BMW, Kia and others that make 54% of the cars Americans buy) are in better shape than Detroit’s big three:

The root of this other industry’s success is no secret. In fact, Detroit has already adopted some of its efficiency and employment strategies, though not yet enough. To put it concisely, the transplants operate under conditions imposed by the free market. Detroit lives on Fantasy Island.

(via Daring Fireball)

My vote counts even if I like lizard people

Mon 01 Dec

Chris Fahey on voter intent and user behavior :

In Minnesota, they are currently recounting the ballots in the Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken. As part of the process, they are re-analyzing thousands of ballots that were discarded during the initial optical-scan machine count due to problems with the ballots themselves — usually stray marks and incompletely-filled-in dots. Usually, a human being can figure out the “voter intent” when the machine failed in the initial count.

Sometimes, however, the voter intent isn’t all that clear. Minnesota Public Radio has put up photographs of some of the more interesting examples of disputed ballots. And, in a weird kind of democratic recursiveness, is asking visitors to vote on the votes!

g-speak spatial operating environment: the future in Minority Report is already here

Tue 25 Nov | Add Remarks

Oblong Industries’ g-speak “spatial operating environment” is one of the first notable examples of how the traditional human-computer interface is evolving beyond the traditional mouse and keyboard paradigm.  While most have seen this type of interface exemplified in the movie Minority Report, the g-speak interface has been in development since the 1990s at MIT and is currently used by government agencies and universities in a variety of areas.

The overview video of the g-speak SOE in action is truly amazing.

Khoi Vinh on the importance of social networking to interaction design

Mon 24 Nov

I recently came to this conclusion: as an interaction designer, if I’m not actively using social networks, then I’m just not doing my job. It’s obvious to say, but social media is the evolving, messy, inexorable and probably bright future of this business. Its all-comers approach to the creation of content and value is exactly in line with my philosophy for how design needs to change in order to matter in the coming decades. Still, that inevitability hasn’t stopped me from more or less ignoring these networks for too long.

It’s a given: in 2008, with sites like MySpace and the emergence of Facebook and Twitter, social networks have become a part of the zeitgeist.  Anyone working in online interactive media has a responsibility to understand how people use and interact with these networks.  It is the future, and it’s not the last of new things to come along. You can choose to ignore it, but it begs the question: if your customers use these communities in a significant way, can you really design for effective solutions without taking these into consideration?

NPR: Auto-Tune and “The T-Pain Effect”

Mon 24 Nov

For examples of Auto-Tune, check out Cher’s Believe; T-Pain’s Can’t Believe It; or, more recently, Kanye West’s Love Lockdown.

Writing Good Alt Text

Mon 24 Nov

Two rules of thumb I use when writing alt text for images are these:

• If you were to describe the document to someone over the phone, would you mention the image or its content? If you would, the image probably needs an alternative text. If not, it should probably have an empty alt attribute.
• Does the alternative text of any images in the document make sense if you turn off the display of images in your web browser? If not, change the alternative text so it does make sense and does not provide redundant information.

How to embed high quality versions of YouTube videos

Sun 23 Nov | Add Remarks

If you’ve been on YouTube lately, you may have noticed that some videos have an option to view a better version via a “watch in high quality” link that appears underneath the player.  While this is great (and a much better alternative to the normally crappy video that YouTube serves up), what if you wanted to embed the high quality version on your own site?

The good news is that it is possible to embed these high quality videos.  For each of the URLs in the embeddable code that you get from YouTube, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto the end (where “D18” in that extra code refers to the resolution - 480p - of the high-quality video).  The result:

Pretty, cool, right?

In addition to the Format 18 video, some videos have HD-quality versions called format 22, meaning the video is available in 720p.  Take “Dancing Matt”, for instance: 

To embed these videos, you simply replace the “18” in the code with “22”.  However, you need to make sure that the video is available in this format.

More on this and other YouTube-related hackery at kottke.org

Installing Adobe Creative Suite 4 Sucks

Tue 18 Nov

Pierre Igot describes in detail how the installation process for Adobe CS4 on the Mac is user-unfriendly.

How People Really (Learn To) Use the iPhone

Thu 13 Nov

Insightful analysis of novice iPhone users’ interaction with the iPhone user interface. (via Daring Fireball)

Build Your Own Muppet at the Whatnot Workshop

Wed 12 Nov | Add Remarks

The Muppet Whatnot Workshop at fao.com allows you to design and build your own muppet:

A very simple and easy-to-use puppet configurator.  Alas, there is no option to make a kermit the frog.

First Impressions of Sprint’s Now Dashboard

Mon 10 Nov | Add Remarks

1. Wow.
2. Is all of this information real? The sources seem legit, but is that count of babies being born or houses being built an accurate up-to-the-second account of what’s going on right now?
3. I’m a thinking too much about this?

The Big Picture: The next POTUS

Wed 05 Nov

A great collection of photographs of President-Elect Obama over the past year, all the way up to his win on election day.

Engadget reviews the New Xbox 360 Experience interface

Thu 30 Oct

My take: Wii Channels in OSX Coverflow mode, Xbox style.  Not a bad thing, just saying. It’s a thorough review with lots of nice screenshots.  Very impressive.

The iPhone’s Legacy

Sat 25 Oct

John Gruber of Daring Fireball on why the iPhone is the greatest gadget ever made:

The iPhone was the first phone that brought what we used to think of as ‘desktop quality’ software to a handheld platform. Software where you just say, ‘Wow, that’s a great user experience’, not merely ‘Wow, that’s a great user experience for a handheld’.

SNL: Interactive Map Hilarity

Sat 25 Oct | Add Remarks

Fred Armisen uses his awesome interactive political mega-map to show… how he can make Michigan bounce.

An endorsement: MonoPrice A/V Cables

Sun 19 Oct | Add Remarks

If you have -or just got- a newfangled HDTV, chances are you also have some kind of source that pipes in High-Definition video content (like a Playstation 3, an HD Tivo or a regular cable box that displays HD), which also means you need cables to connect the two.  But before you spend $80 on that expensive, overpriced HDMI cable over at the big box stores,  consider MonoPrice, where you can get the same cable of equal quality for only $10!

Another example:  While the Nintendo’s Wii Component Video Cable goes for about $35 at Best Buy, the equivalent cable goes for under $5 at MonoPrice.

They have a wide selection of cables and the quality is quite good, which is why MonoPrice gets my endorsement for the source for computer and A/V cables.  My rating: 5 out of 5!

The MacBook Unibody Disassembled

Sun 19 Oct

iFixit:

This may be the most beautiful laptop we’ve disassembled.

2009 Honda Fit Experience

Tue 14 Oct | Add Remarks

New microsite for the All-New 2009 Honda Fit.  Based around a simple story, the Fit is a “hero of efficiency”, where you must control the it to defeat gas-guzzling enemies in an effort to save Fit City.  Using simple arcade-style gameplay, the Fit’s high fuel economy and useful features are highlighted to communicate the benefits of this popular small vehicle.

Go save Fit City at fit.honda.com.