The Portfolio of Brian Talbot, Web & User Experience Designer An Idea for a Digital Keepsake and Momento based on Real-World Activity As part of the Rails Rumble rules/tradition, teams of no more than 4 individuals have 2 days to create an app that leverages social media/3rd party data. With this in mind, the Spotcard team skipped formalities and identified simple use cases to help define an initial scope. We all loved Gowalla, the geo-location game/service, and wanted to leverage its rabid and physically active fan-base as well as its curated visuals to make something its users would value. The act of checking in somewhere signifies a user wants to mark this moment down for posterity and share with friends/family - there's another object that has done the same job in the physical world for decades, the post card. Why not try to marry the two together?
Pagination Gallery: Examples And Good Practices Advertisement Structure and hierarchy reduce complexity and improve readability. The more organized your articles or web-sites are, the easier it is for users to follow your arguments and get the message you are trying to deliver. On the Web this can be done in a variety of ways. UX is for Cheesemakers, Too I’ve worked as a user experience designer for large corporations and agencies for a few years now, and have found a lot of inflated terminology creeping into my vocabulary—alarming anyone who hasn’t ‘gone corporate’. So when I was asked to help a small Orkney Island dairy farm to sell their product, I had cause to rethink: do most of the phrases and practices we use actually mean anything to anyone but us? I have no doubt that the service and UX design ethos works.
The Secret to Designing an Intuitive UX Imagine that you’ve never seen an iPad, but I’ve just handed one to you and told you that you can read books on it. Before you turn on the iPad, before you use it, you have a model in your head of what reading a book on the iPad will be like. You have assumptions about what the book will look like on the screen, what things you will be able to do, and how you will do them—things like turning a page, or using a bookmark.
When is Learnability More Important than Usability? Is it ok to ask your users to learn your interface? As UI design is maturing and the web is becoming a more advanced land of complex interfaces is it now unreasonable for every feature to be instantly usable? Touch devices have also entered the mainstream and added a multitude of interactions that UI designers can lean on. So, how do you know when it is ok to hide features and ask your audience to learn your application? Is ‘learnability’ now more important than usability? Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn't) Use Them - Articles Drop-down lists are great – when used correctly. If there’s anywhere between 7 and 15 options, a drop-down list is usually a really good fit. You can put a healthy amount of information in your form without cluttering the entire page, because the list’s options are hidden when you don’t need them. However, many sites are using drop-down lists with too many options (more than 15) or too few (less than 7), resulting in a poor user experience.
Interface Origami In a previous post, I mentioned a way of thinking about interactions and interface within a framework of depth and space. The ideas were centered around the digital space, but as a designer I find it’s important to remove myself from that space and explore solutions that can originate in physical space. One of the easiest ways to do this is to break out scissors and paper. With paper you can remove the constraints of working in pixels to fold, tear, flip, curl and manipulate the medium to discover solutions that may have otherwise been missed.
Don’t Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms By Caroline Jarrett Published: March 21, 2010 This is my first Good Questions column for UXmatters. Why It’s Important to Sketch Before You Wireframe Have you ever had an idea for a website or application? It’s easy to come up with the idea, but the hard part is understanding how that idea will take shape in user interface form. This is where sketching is useful. Sketching happens in many professions that involve creativity and construction. Even Leonardo Da Vinci had to sketch out his inventions before he started to build them. No matter how smart you are, It’s impossible to go from a simple idea in your head to immediately building it out without hashing out the details in between. Hand Gestures Dramatically Improve Learning Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it's possible to help children learn difficult concepts by providing gestures as an additional and potent avenue for taking in information. "We've known for a while that we use gestures to add information to a conversation even when we're not entirely clear how that information relates to what we're saying," says Susan Wagner Cook, lead author and postdoctoral fellow at the University.
Why ‘Ok’ Buttons in Dialog Boxes Work Best on the Right by anthony on 05/25/11 at 11:30 pm Designers often question where to place their ‘Ok’ and ‘Cancel’ buttons on dialog boxes. The ‘Ok’ button is the primary button that completes the task action. The ‘Cancel’ button is the secondary button that takes users back to their original screen without completing the action. Based on their functions, what is the best order to place them? How to Design Content Filters for Better User Browsing by anthony on 10/24/11 at 9:51 pm Where does one start when they visit a website and want to find content that interests them? They could start from the beginning and browse through all the content until they find something they like. But that can take a lot of time if what they’re looking for isn’t on the home page.
Data Visualization and Infographics Advertisement The main goal of data visualization is its ability to visualize data, communicating information clearly and effectivelty. It doesn’t mean that data visualization needs to look boring to be functional or extremely sophisticated to look beautiful. To convey ideas effectively, both aesthetic form and functionality need to go hand in hand, providing insights into a rather sparse and complex data set by communicating its key-aspects in a more intuitive way.