Emotional Interface Design: The Gateway to Passionate Users. We’re changing.
Our relationships online and in real life are shifting as we become more public with our private lives. Online social networks have helped our real world social networks transcend time and space making it easy (and seemingly essential) to share the triumphs, tragedies, and trite moments of life. No longer do you simply tell your best friend that you’ve broken up with your boyfriend. It feels natural to many people to tell hundreds of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends. No matter how you feel about the appropriateness of over sharing, the shift towards a public private life is changing our expectations of the relationships we create online. Figure 1: Kenny Meyers uses humor in his portfolio to connect with his audience. Oh how times have changed (figure 1). Usable = Edible We’ve spent the last decade-plus striving to create usable web interfaces.
When we go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, we’re hoping for more than just an edible meal. Figure 2: Basecamp is usable. Get Mental Notes. Code-Free Mobile App Prototyping « adjustafresh – user experience design. 7 Feb, 2012 There’s a lot of talk recently in the design community about the utility and value of clickable mockups & prototypes.
I agree that they can be very effective tools for a number of reasons—primarily the ability to clearly communicate user flow and proposed functionality to stakeholders on the business, design, and engineering teams. Prototyping is especially valuable when designing mobile experiences, allowing users to experience the prototype on a tablet or smartphone. They’re extremely useful for early & ongoing usability testing of design concepts prior to moving into code (in most cases, things get more expensive to change once programming comes into play). Here’s a (mostly) quick & dirty way to transform your ideas into clickable prototype goodness without any code. Keynotopia To The Rescue While designing a native mobile application recently for a large insurance client I used PowerPoint templates designed by Keynotopia to give me a jump-start on the wireframing process.
Focus On: Design Trends in Mobile Apps for iOS. Apple’s mobile operating system has gained a huge following in just a few short years.
Although it can take months of dedicated study to even begin programming iOS apps, there still seems to be a solid market of intelligent developers. In the last year alone we’ve witnessed the iPad2 and iPhone 4S releases which have both appeared stunning. And along with these advances in technology comes a much larger demand for iOS apps. I’d like to go into a few design trends which have become prevalent in mainstream iOS interfaces. Designers have started following innovative and whimsical methods for constructing beautiful app layouts.
Offset Center Tab Button Surprisingly I have run into this feature a lot more in the social network-type applications. The benefit of this tactic from a metrics perspective is that you’ll see a lot more active sharing using that center button. Another cool example can be found in Tumblr’s iOS app. Popup Modal Views Link Icons User Profile Badges Custom Loading Animation. What Is Your Mental Model? Rosenfeld Media has just released Indi Young’s Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy With Human Behavior.
Boxes and Arrows sits down with Indi to talk about: * The origins and evolution of the mental model * How the mental model is a way of visualizing nearly any research data * What shortcuts you can use to get started on a mental model with minimal time investment * Why “combing” an interview is like riding a bicycle * How Webvan failed because it ignore the mental model of its customers If you’re unfamiliar with Indi’s mental model diagrams, download the excerpt(.pdf), check out the “book’s description”: for more information on the method, or visit “this Flickr set”: for images from the book.
Discount for Boxes and Arrows readers: Get a 10% discount by purchasing the book “directly from Rosenfeld Media”: Just use the code BARMMM10. Mental Models: Origins & Evolution Boxes & Arrows: Our readers would benefit from the story behind the Mental Model. B&A: Interesting. Comparing Methods.