Color Theory for Designers

 User Experience, Web Development  1 Response »
Feb 122010
 

I think this is a great read, even for non-designers out there.

Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color

Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in somone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background.

Color Theory For Designers, Part 2: Understanding Concepts And Terminology

If you’re going to use color effectively in your designs, you’ll need to know some color concepts and color theory terminology. A thorough working knowledge of concepts like chroma, value and saturation is key to creating your own awesome color schemes.

Color Theory for Designer, Part 3: Creating Your Own Color Palettes

Here we’ll be talking about methods for creating your own color schemes, from scratch. We’ll cover the traditional color scheme patterns (monochrome, analogous, complementary, etc.) as well as how to create custom schemes that aren’t based strictly on any one pattern.

 Posted by triplez at 09:30

Multi-touch needs new ways of thinking

 User Experience  2 Responses »
Dec 182009
 

For those who hear me talk about multi-touch and how we need to rethink new ways away from traditionally what we know as a screen and interacting using a single point, 10/GUI is a concept I felt focuses on what works and fully leverages on it, what doesn’t and provides a solution for it. Generally, on the hardware side of things, a touchpad is the way to go for multi-touch surfaces instead of a multi-touch screen. But what I’ve always been complaining about is that our current way of dealing with User Interfaces has been so centric around a single point touch that we’re trying to refit new multi-touch capabilities and concepts into an old single point touch interface, which I think is ridiculous. 10/GUI conceptualizes and makes multi-touch native to manipulating the User Interface. Yet, I felt we can do more in terms of User Interface concepts and just let our whole single point centric preconceptions be forgotten. For once, let us rethink everything from icons to menus to buttons and try to break away from the whole single point dictatorship and free ourselves into a multi-touch paradigm of interacting with our computer. What do you think of 10/GUI?

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

 Posted by triplez at 09:30  Tagged with: , ,

HTC is ‘Quietly Brilliant’

 Technology, User Experience  3 Responses »
Oct 302009
 
HTC Quietly Brilliant

HTC Quietly Brilliant

HTC has a new brand positioning called “Quietly Brilliant”. In fact, HTC seems to be getting the fact that a mobile device is now ubiquitous in everyday life. A few people asked me what I thought when I heard the new branding “Quietly Brilliant”, and going back to my British English roots, I declared out loud, “Brilliant!”. Not so quiet after all.

“Quietly Brilliant” really embodies the philosophy of an ubiquitous lifestyle where a mobile phone just does great and brilliant things while being all natural, behind-the-scenes and “quiet” about it. This very much follows what User Experience (UX) geeks have been trying to achieve all along. Will HTC be able to achieve this ubiquitous stage of Zen? In order to follow through with this new branding, and their “YOU” campaign, they must first look back at what they have achieved, improve their existing ubiquitous technology, and bring it to the next level.

Their existing TouchFlo 3D has brought Windows Mobile phones up one level, emerging as a unique phone above every device. Their new HTC Sense UI for Android phones has given new meaning to how one perceives an Android phone. My recent foray into the HTC Hero has satiated my need for a mobile device that suits my lifestyle, yet discovered that HTC Sense still requires a lot of work. My hope is that HTC follows suit to their new “Quietly Brilliant” branding and develop both the HTC Sense UI and HTC TouchFlo 3D beyond what it is today.

HTC, going forward and strengthening your branding, my humble word of advice: Hire more UX experts and invest your time on making your technology “Just Work”.

Below are the marketing campaign videos for this new “YOU” campaign that will hopefully be a series of campaigns surrounding this new “Quietly Brilliant” brand.

 Posted by triplez at 11:06  Tagged with: ,

Books on Usability

 User Experience  1 Response »
Oct 092009
 

Here’s a great listing of books on Usability. Here are some books I highly recommend from the list:

Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach Through Design, by William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
As the title says: a description of a hundred basic principles of usability and design. Few of these will be new to you, but it’s good to have them collected in one place with simple description and a few illustrative examples of each principle. Serves as a nice checklist to read through as you are thinking about the usability of a design problem. For example, one technique is “highlighting”: the book gives the guideline to highlight no more than 10% of the information and lists five common ways to highlight (bold, different typeface, color, inverting, and blinking). Reading this short description may give rise to the following questions about your design: Did we highlight something that users should be directed to give special attention? Did we highlight too much? Did we use the best highlighting technique for the context, or should we use one of the others?

The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
This book is the best introduction to the importance of usability in design: much of the value comes from the fact that it is not about computers but about all kinds of other things that we suffer from every day (even nerds can identify with the examples in this book, though they usually claim that “well, typing mumble-foo-META-F4 is not that hard to remember” when confronted with an example of bad user interface design). This is the paperback edition. The hardcover edition was entitled The Psychology of Everyday Things, leading to the often-cited acronym POET. The two editions are the same despite the different titles.

Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things, by Donald A. Norman (buy in the U.S. or buy in the U.K.)
Don Norman presents his theory of the three levels at which people engage with designs: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. Many traditional appearance designers have focused on the visceral level, usability has traditionally been strongest at the behavioral level, and many marketing experts have focused on the branding aspects of reflective design (while ignoring other angels of how people think about their personal history of using products). Norman brings it all together in a unified theory of design. The book is the most useful for readers who are designing physical objects where the visceral level has more dimensions to work with and where users also get more time to engage the reflective level. Web design is more dominated by the behavioral level, but the other two certainly matter as well.

Usability Engineering, by Jakob Nielsen (revised paperback edition). Buy from Amazon USA or buy from Amazon U.K.
Basic textbook that covers the entire usability engineering lifecycle from early product conceptualization through design and evaluation to field installation and follow-up studies. This book focuses on the practical methods that can be applied at each step with a particular emphasis on “discount usability engineering” methods that can be used despite the most severe deadlines and budget restraints. The full table of contents is online

 Posted by triplez at 09:30  Tagged with:

10 User Interface Design Fundamentals

 User Experience  No Responses »
Oct 082009
 

Kyle Sollenberger sums up 10 User Interface Design Fundamentals, and most of them can be used on almost any design you do other than UI. But here’s a 1 liner I can sum up everything you need to have. (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). Yes. Just be overly obsessive in every little detail.

  1. Know your user
  2. Pay attention to patterns
  3. Stay consistent
  4. Use visual hierarchy
  5. Provide feedback
  6. Be forgiving
  7. Empower your user
  8. Speak their language
  9. Keep it simple
  10. Keep moving forward

There you have it. 10 fundamentals of User Interface Design.

 Posted by triplez at 09:30  Tagged with:

Norton 2010 Launch

 Technology, User Experience  2 Responses »
Oct 072009
 

Yesterday, I went to the Norton 2010 Launch, and I must say it is definitely a very interesting and unique launch. It was held at the Singapore Flyer, at one of the event halls. It started out with a very casual registration and dinner. Followed by 3 different games (like what?) that essentially brings out the theme of the event, “Get Safer, Smarter, and Faster”.

The 1st game was “Spot the difference” of two pictures of Da Vinci’s Last Supper (Faster). The 2nd game were to solve anagrams, and they were focused on security keywords (Smarter). The last game was to create an egg catcher out of scraps (Safer).

After all the games, the actual event commenced, with Effendy Ibrahim first up, followed by David talking about Norton’s new technology in Norton 2010.

The last time I used a Norton product was many years back, and the impression I had was that Norton was a very resource-hogging, cpu-intensive, clunky and annoying huge piece of junk that takes over your computer, decreasing your computer’s performance and usability, including increasing boot-time.

That was all in the past. In Norton 2010, they focused on making it light on memory – using only just 10MB at idle, faster scanning speeds, fewer intrusive popups, increases boot time by only a little, and installs under 1 minute. But the most impressive technology that separates Norton from the rest of the other security suites is an additional new level of security, codenamed Quorum, that essentially uses the concept of “Crowdsourcing” to discover any new malware that isn’t already in the database of malware signatures. Quorum uses the opinions of the masses to determine the “reputation” of a certain file based on some statistical algorithm which allows Norton 2010 to determine whether if a file should be denied or allowed based on this “reputation”. This allows faster and quicker propagation of malware discovery, allowing it to determine a new malware within an average 1 hour. This is just the tip of the iceberg for Quorum. There are many other ideas in the works that makes use of this concept, like being able to determine whether a particular application is unstable or will crash your system, and various other interesting ideas for quick propagation of information regarding a certain application.

Another technology, System Insight, is useful for technically-inclined users (friends and family of the technically-inclined). The constant performance monitoring of applications allows these users to correlate poor performance with activity on the PC, including new downloads and installs. This will enable users to figure out (for friends and family) what exactly is slowing down their computer and remove or mitigate the cause.

In terms of the User Interface, and the toolbar, I’m not impressed with the space-eating toolbar, and the gratuitous animation which does not bring any additional value at all to the user. Thank goodness it isn’t an often used feature. If Norton needs some recommendations with UX, look me up and I’ll recommend several great UX gurus. Installing toolbars and taking over precious real-estate space on your screen, especially when netbooks are becoming popular, isn’t really the way to go. Random fancy, gratuitous animation just because it looks cool does NOT add any value to the user experience, but might even slow down the animation performance on slower computers. It is the epitome of BAD user interface design. With that said, I’m pretty impressed with how they represented System Insight and performance monitoring in a timeline, which is something that actually make sense.

Other than that, I am pretty impressed with the improvements they have made in terms of speed, and memory resources. With regards to the event, it was great and enjoyable. Enjoy the photos below.

Some additional interesting read of Gratuitous Animations and Design:

Using WPF for Good and Not Evil
Effective Motion Graphics and Animation
Gratuitous Graphics and Human-Centered Website Design

 Posted by triplez at 09:30  Tagged with:

Usability Marathon

 User Experience  No Responses »
Oct 062009
 

Usability Marathon is a series of webinars in usability and user experience (UX), opens on Monday, October 12, 2009 and goes through Wednesday, October 21, 2009. It is organized for the second time by UIDesign Group (Moscow, Russia), however, this year the event will be held solely online.

The Usability Marathon 2009 will consist of a series of free online webinars. The webinars are scheduled according to Moscow time; however the online format enables participants from all over the world to attend.

Each guest speaker is an exceedingly experienced international professional from countries including the United States, Germany, Australia, and China. They are leaders in user experience, usability research and interaction design, authors of popular books and publications, participants in the largest conferences, or chief consultants and directors of UX companies.

The Marathon audience is both experienced and novice usability and UX specialists, interaction designers, developers, project managers, UX team leaders and managers of companies developing digital products and services.

Registration for the webinars is now open at the event’s website: http://marathon.uidesign.ru

I’ll be attending most of the online webinars, but for those interested, these are the few in particular I think will be great:

Selling UX
Daniel Szuc | Apogee, Hong Kong, China

Imagine we need to sell UX to an organization. Not all organizations have the same level of interest and receptiveness to UX. Some just don’t care.

What should we know about an organization that will help us sell UX more effectively? What sort of questions should we ask about the organization, its people and its culture? What can we learn from organizations where UX has become part of the corporate DNA? What factors can increase our chances of promoting UX successfully to an organization now and in the future?

This presentation will tap into more than 10 years of experience in selling UX into different markets and organizations. We will share the successes, pitfalls and failures.

UX Vision, Strategy and Teams
Susan Wolfe | Optimal Experience, Australia

Many organizations try to apply user experience (UX) expertise and best practice principles to their design and development processes. However, when done as discrete activities on particular projects, it is rarely yields a truly satisfying result in the end. To be successful, an overall UX vision must first be established for the organization, and a strategy for realizing that vision must be developed. It’s only then that the organization stands a chance to create a single, consistent face to its customers.

The challenges of doing so are many, including creating the vision and then enabling different groups such as product development, marketing and customer service to deliver on that common vision. During the webinar, Susan will draw upon her extensive experience as well as the result of surveys with successful user-centered design and UX teams worldwide to share practical approaches to creating and implementing such a strategy.

Measuring User Efficiency
Jeff Sauro | Oracle, USA

How long does it take to complete a task? Obtaining task time metrics is important for benchmarking and improving the efficiency of an interface. Conducting summative usability tests to gather these metrics is expensive and usually comes too late in the development cycle to make changes. Using a modification of Keystroke Level Modeling Jeff will show how to accurately estimate experienced users task times using only screen shots and prototypes.

 Posted by triplez at 09:50  Tagged with:

Getting Buy In for Usability Testing

 User Experience  1 Response »
Sep 222009
 

Here’s a great set of presentation deck really focused on getting people to buy in to the whole usability testing. This is one of the biggest problems I have convincing people to actually care about usability. I might be able to use some of this ideas to get buy in for general software testing within companies. It is tough to introduce these best practices to a bunch of developers already set in their ways, or have no idea why testing should be done. Anyway, I hope you might find some use from this presentation deck.

View more documents from Perfetti Media.
 Posted by triplez at 11:30  Tagged with: ,

Slate Tablet PCs will be back

 User Experience  No Responses »
Jan 072009
 

With the advent of multi-touch capabilities, and the iPhone popularizing this capability, together with Windows 7 having multi-touch capabilities in-built to the operating system itself, I will expect slate tablets (i.e. no keyboards, just screen) to be back, better than before. For those who have forgotten, slate tablets died out long ago in preference for the convertible tablets (i.e. keyboard and screen).

To get into the market, it first has to be light enough, and a screen wide enough to be comfortable. Together with a “Slate Stand” for desktop usage, this will enhance multi-touch on the desktop itself. We now are seeing laptops so slim (1 inch thick) and so light (2 lbs) with screen sizes of 13.1” or larger, I predict that this will be the critical factors in bringing back the slate tablets.

If somehow, someone is able to integrate a “Slate Stand” as part of the tablet design, that will be awesome.

Imagine a “Slate Stand” being a supporting stand to tilt the tablet in a 20 to 40 degrees angle (adjustable of course) for easy touch screen experience. I’m thinking just a fold under the laptop which can increase and decrease the degree angle as the fold gets closer together. Imagine this: / :underneath your laptop, and flattening out: —— :when you don’t need it.

Together with full size keyboard which will “slide in and out” virtually on the screen with a flick of a button (or gesture, or on some text input) and each key is big enough for our fingers, I think we’ve got something pretty good going on here.

Re-engineering applications’ user interactions to make full use of multi-touch, and we have endless possibilities. Hey, that’s what WPF is for. *wink*

Let’s hope to see it out there soon!

 Posted by triplez at 07:03  Tagged with: ,

Blaming the User

 User Experience  No Responses »
Jun 232008
 

Is it better to have a user implicitly learning how an application work easily by discovery, rather than explicitly learning how an application works through training and books?

If something goes wrong with an application, is it really a “problem between the keyboard and the chair”? Or is it because the “User Experience” isn’t sufficient or consistent to assist with implicit learning?

Sometimes people in the “Computer Industry” need to think more about the user and how to ease their pain, instead of blaming them and create more pain for them.

I’m always amazed when a user tells me “It just works! Amazing!” instead of “How do you do this?”. That’s “User Experience” for you.

Think about it.

This is my rant today.

 Posted by triplez at 15:14
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