“Flat Design”? Destroying Apple’s Legacy… or Saving It : Cheerful. No argument here: Jony Ive has produced some of the best industrial design in the history of consumer products. He’s done it by cutting out all the extraneous parts. By eliminating edges, by smoothing and streamlining. But what works beautifully for hardware does not work for software. The “purity” of Jony’s designs inspired a lot of reflection in the software design community. A few critics got their panties in a twist over the software that ran on those pure devices.
The faux leather, stitching, and colored backgrounds. Because it was “skeuomorphic.” This kicked off a witch hunt against anything that is remotely “real” in its style — stitching, yes, but also buttons, outlines, and shading. There was never any evidence that a few decorative pixels hurt the user. But based on the saber rattling of a few, Apple killed it all. There are design choices that can harm the user But a little faux leather isn’t the problem. Apple used to lead the industry in usability That Apple is gone, now. Books: The Del.icio.us Lesson. Personal value precedes network value. The amazing popularity of the bookmarking site Del.icio.us is one of the hallmarks of the current social software renaissance happening on the Web. Along with Flickr, Del.icio.us is a poster child of tagging, a simple feature whereby people attach words or phrases to an item.
In the case of Del.icio.us, those items are bookmarks. While Del.icio.us rose to prominence, much was made of the ability to aggregate the tags that the service’s user population created. The resulting framework, called a folksonomy, promised to redefine web navigation. If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy. In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content. Blinded by the Aggregation Light. Google Instant Previews - Eye Tracking shows it's game changing - SimpleUsability News SimpleUsability News - SimpleUsability Market Research & Usability Testing\ and Eye Tracking in Leeds, Yorkshire, UK.
Users always surprise because their behaviour changes with their environment. The online experience, and more specifically the tools that users have available to them when searching, is evolving with the introduction of Google Instant and Google Instant Preview and behaviour will be changing again. Google Instant Previews allows users to see what a website looks like before committing to click through to the website. Next to each listing on the results page a magnifying glass icon appears. After users click on this once, a preview appears of that page to the right hand side. Subsequent hovering over other search results listings also previews pages. There is much consternation about the consequences of this and how it will affect users and also affect future website design. How do users decide?
Who is this company? A different way of choosing Where we normally see users scanning for keywords, with Google Instant Preview there is more possibility to compare and contrast before choosing. Digg’s Design Dilemma. This past week’s Digg controversy is one in a growing number of incidents that suggest that a small group of users are having an undue influence on the promotion of stories. In response, Digg is changing the way that it handles votes by adding complexity to its ranking algorithm. I think that’s the wrong approach, so here’s another idea: change the actual design of the site…that’s the real problem. The most recent controversy happened on September 5th, when someone named jesusphreak posted Digg the Rigged? , an in-depth article exposing some of the curious details of recently-popular stories on digg. Many of the stories, jp pointed out, were dugg by members of the Digg Top 30, or the 30 most popular digg members (popular being measured by number of stories submitted that were promoted to the frontpage).
The Top 30 includes Digg founder Kevin Rose. This was not the first time that someone has pointed out this phenomenon. These incidents, taken together, are more than coincidence… Digg vs. Thoughts on the Friendfeed interface - Bokardo - Mozilla Firefox. Note: Before I wrote this Paul Buchheit (of Friendfeed) had responded to others’ posts with a great post of his own Overnight success takes a long time and asked for feedback on the Friendfeed service. Consider this my contribution… Some modest suggestions for improving the Friendfeed interface Friendfeed is getting a lot of chatter in […] Note: Before I wrote this Paul Buchheit (of Friendfeed) had responded to others’ posts with a great post of his own Overnight success takes a long time and asked for feedback on the Friendfeed service.
Consider this my contribution… Some modest suggestions for improving the Friendfeed interface Friendfeed is getting a lot of chatter in the blogosphere about what they should do with their service. I’m sure I don’t know the bigger issues that Friendfeed are dealing with, but I do have some observations about the interface, which I’ve summarized below. But first, a little rationale about how I got to these suggestions. (click for full-size) Ugliness, Social Design, and the MySpace Lesson. I’ve been attempting the impossible: trying to get a clear picture of the whole MySpace/Ugly issue.
But before I continue, if you haven’t seen Ze Frank’s Piece on Ugly, go watch that. In it, he says: “Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool. Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your MySpace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. In addition to Ze’s point of view there are several other viewpoints floating around… In addition to Ze’s point of view there are several other viewpoints floating around. MySpace succeeds despite its design MySpace is poorly designed and succeeds despite that.
Many have asked: Could MySpace look better? Do you think Steve Jobs says at the end of the day: “Well, our stuff is well-designed…who cares how many people use it?” Design is All About Use Design all about use. You can’t predict what people will like. Visual vs. 10 choses qu'un designer web ne vous dira jamais. NdT : ceci est la traduction française de 10 things a web designer would never tell you avec la permission de Paul Boag, un billet tiré d'une présentation satirique (voir la vidéo). Travailler avec des designer web est un cauchemar. Vous ne rencontrerez jamais pareille coterie de snobs butés. Ils parlent en permanence de « blanc tournant », de « composition » et du fait qu'ils ont fait les beaux arts (comme si ça comptait comme des études !). Quand il est temps de choisir le design de votre site web, ce sont les dernières personnes que vous devriez écouter.
Ce qui suit sont les dix choses que vous devez savoir concernant la gestion d'un projet de design web, et qu'un designer web ne vous dira jamais ! 1. Avant de choisir le designer web avec lequel travailler, assurez vous qu'ils soumettent au préalable quelques designs pour votre site web. Ce qui est très bien avec un travail spéculatif, c'est qu'il n'est pas contraint par la « compréhension du business » ou le « retour utilisateur ». Bonnes pratiques par padawan. Facebook’s Brilliant but Evil design. Seth Godin writes how 8 billion dollars worth of gift cards seeps through the cracks each year. Astounding number. He rightly points out the reason we buy so many gift cards: it is not socially acceptable to give cash as presents. But when we shift that cash into a gift card, we lose the risk of giving an unwanted gift while giving something more socially appropriate.
Such a small, yet large, difference. In Chapter 4 of The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler discusses a similar distinction between “extrinsic” motivations and “intrinsic” motivations. This distinction is important in social design because so many of the activities people participate in online are motivated from a desire of social standing, not economic standing. Take the case of a New York Times article recommendation. But if I’m getting paid money to give you that recommendation, then my motivation is in part economic, and that changes everything. When friends deal with friends, money often makes no sense. UX. Webdesign. Graphie. Ergonomie. UX. Interaction design.