But in 2012, around the same time as Pinterest moved to San Francisco, the hot local app was Path. A mobile social network founded by a former Facebook executive, it is a beautiful and useful app. But being Silicon Valley’s darling did not help Path to reach the masses, who were soon to fall for something quite different: Snapchat. While filling a similar need – sharing photos on the go – Snapchat is as inelegant and fast as Path is well-crafted and considered.]]>
…and received a ton of responses. I’m not going to embed them or name names – I respect a lot of the people who chipped in, and I’m going to be pretty ruthless in my dismissal of their arguments.
The replies fell into two broad categories, of which I’ll give both charitable and uncharitable interpretations.]]>
Three of HTC's materials suppliers were also indicted for allegedly helping HTC design executives make false expense claims of over NT$33m (US$1.1m).
In its indictment, the Taipei Prosecutors Office said Chien, who has been detained since 31 August, had stolen and leaked key icon designs to his would-be Chinese business partners in Beijing in June. The designs were for HTC's yet-to-be-unveiled smartphone interface. Prosecutors are claiming that all but one of the accused has confessed with a maximum jail sentence of 10 years; the report also says that two of them have been "forgiven" by the company. So how valuable were those designs exactly?]]>
Sure, I hear moans from Silicon Roundabout that the government is sucking up all the best talent in London, but while they’re saying that, GOV.UK increased signups to the organ donations register by 10,000 every month with just a bit of clever A/B testing as a side project. I could be working on your socially network website that tries to convince parents that fruitshoot isn’t awful for their kids (I have actually done that), or I could be doing what I’m doing now, helping bring real change to the office of the public guardian so they can do their job better.]]>
This layout is so standardized that we think about it as almost inevitable. But the layout was, in the 1950s, the result of a good deal of strategizing and testing on the part of the people of Bell Labs. See the diagram: it's amazing what was considered. They also identified those with lower error rates, and those where it was quicker to key the number. ]]>
Is it nasty? Yes, it’s hideous, and it’s going to make coming home at night and trying to plug in your phone that much more complicated of a procedure. Can you use your current microUSB charger with these new microUSB 3.0 ports? Yes, but you’re really going to have to pay attention to where you’re sticking the cable in so you don’t do any damage. Flagship phone but not run-of-the-mill phone. Compatbility FTW. The dual plug has already been on portable hard drives for some time. Using it on phones will be a fascinating stress test of the plug design.]]>
To me, Apple is encouraging us to look back to those design values. Going back even further, think of books that only use one well-chosen font, in black, on one well-chosen paper, in white, laid out with well-chosen spacing. The goal is that you will get lost in the story and forget that everything you see was carefully designed. Not many app designers have given clues about how their revised products will look; Behringer offers some screenshots. First thought: removing the black element at the top and using white all over makes the screen seem bigger, even though it's the same size.]]>
What could help? Trials would help. That would allow someone to download an app and see the difference first hand, not just trust a screenshot. Apple has been clear, though. They prefer freemium. Getting out of the App Store itself can help. Building enough value to charge a subscription could help.
Productivity apps can’t survive and bring the long-term value customers demand at $2.99 or $4.99. At the end of the day, though, the app stores, whether Apple, Google or the like, are not going to solve our problem [2]. The only thing that will is rethinking the products so we can get out of the app stores and differentiate. Loren Brichter (author of Tweetie, which became the official Twitter app) then responds in the comments with data showing that trials can hurt sales of games. So what is the answer?]]>
But had any of them used one to order pizza? Almost all had, and several said they kept flyers and even had them taped on the fridge door. So are they badly designed? I asked again. It was like the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the peasants are trying to work out the tortured logic of what it means if a witch burns: b-because… they’re made… of wood?’ Design is what it does, not what it looks like. And what pizza flyers do is sell the desire for pizza. (Thanks @JonathanBaldwin for the link.)]]>
The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. Thoughtful post.]]>
It was obvious that Cook understood Apple, loved Apple, and was clearly the right man to make the decisions necessary to preserve Apple.
Decisions like firing Scott Forstall.
Forstall spoke to the interns as well. It was an incredibly impressive talk, and an incredibly disturbing one. Forstall was clearly the smartest person in the room; what was disturbing was that he obviously knew it, and wanted us all to know it as well.2 When the news broke about his firing, I was totally shocked, yet totally unsurprised.]]>
iOS 7 is not perfect; this new design framework will evolve and improve over time, just like iOS’s original aesthetic did.]]>
How is it a step forward to create a tile inscribed with the name of the program? An old alphabetized DOS listing is easier to navigate than a wall of tiles, on which nothing is immediately familiar. Our innate pattern recognition is short-circuited by similar tiles. You have to read text rather than react to an iconic image. And while colored tiles help a little, it's still problematic. For once, Dvorak actually makes a good point - though the tiles also contain icons, but being reversed (white on colour) they're not as easy to recognise as a non-reversed colour. It's the same as trying to read white text on coloured background - it's slower than black on a lighter colour. (Thanks @rquick for the link.)]]>
QR Codes – Designed to check the simplicity boxes of speed, ubiquity, and small number of steps, QR codes really dropped the ball on cognitive overhead. “So it’s a barcode? No? It’s a website? Ok. But I open websites with my web browser, not my camera. So I take a picture of it? No, I take a picture of it with an app? Which app?”
iCloud / PhotoStream – When we heard Steve Jobs preach the utopian future where all of our photos and data would be seamlessly synchronized among all our devices, we smelled the Apple simplicity we’d all grown to love. But in practice, iCloud is rife with cognitive overhead — it only backs up your most recent photos, it works on certain select apps but not others, you have to create an icloud.com email account for it to sync your mail and notes but not everything else. Oh, and it works on new iPhone and iPads and Macs running OS X v10.7.4 or later, but not your PC or Android tablet. Try explaining that to your mother. There's quite a long list you could add to that. The "how to do it right" examples are great too.]]>
This antipattern seems to be going away more and more as companies are beginning to figure out the following simple UX equation:
Long sign-up form before you can use the app = Delete app
However, a fair number of apps still force customers to sign up, sign in, or perform some other useless action before they can use the app. The case study he then cites is priceless.]]>
GOV.UK turns this typical scenario on its head, allowing people to navigate by topic or service. Sure, someone can find out what agency is behind this, but many won’t care. The citizen has been connected with a government service without needing to understand an org chart. Very quietly and thoroughly, gov.uk is integrating everything.]]>
I can still remember some of those early meetings, with 3 or 4 of us in a locked room somewhere on Apple campus, with a lot of whiteboards, talking about what iMovie should be (and should not be). It was as pure as pure gets, in terms of building software. Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. That's how it always went. Iteration. It's the key to design, really. Just keep improving it until you have to ship it.
There were only 3 of us on the team, growing to 4 within the year, with no marketing and very little infrastructure around us. There was paper over the internal windows to keep other Apple employees from knowing what we were doing. iMovie 1.0 really was an amazing product. How many people does the average startup now have coding products that are far less innovative?]]>
The reservoir of this disease of erroneous infographics is internet marketers who don't care whether the information in their graphics is right ... just so long as you link it. As a Christmas present to, well, everyone, I'm issuing a plea to bloggers to help stop this plague in its track. You'd hope, right? McArdle points out the errors in a few infographics. However this post is from 23 December... 2011.]]>
I criticize because I care - that goes for Sense, TouchWiz, and MotoBlur too. I want the Android user experience to be good, and this is a big component in making it better - open, honest discussion of what sucks (and, hopefully, receptive developers). If you always think everything is awesome all the time, and that polish, "nit picking," and user experience don't matter, then you turn into desktop Linux. No one wants that. A really thoughtful, user-experience-led piece. Matias Duarte, head of Android's design, consistency and UI team, responds (briefly) at the end.]]>
Here’s spokesman Tom Neumayr’s take: “The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right. We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.” To get rid of the skeuomorphisms?]]>
I've certainly found in my own experience as a designer that women tend to place less emphasis on having so-many thousand apps or impressive speeds and feeds. Technology matters, but women don't really see their phone as a gadget.]]>
Did my eyes deceive me? They did not. As I walked closer, I saw that the Envy signage on the boxes below the printer matched that on the printer itself. It was true. HP had developed an Envy printer and put it out to the public.
That’s the exact moment I knew the Envy sub-brand had jumped the shark. Envy was an outgrowth of HP's acquisition of gaming PC company Voodoo; now it is being applied to everything, to no good effect.]]>
These products have a design language that’s become part of their brand identity. That language is not only important to the companies, it’s important to their customers. When you go to a Mustang show—and think about the fact that there are Mustang shows—you’ll see few if any cars from the 1980s, when Ford abandoned the Mustang design language and made cars that, well, didn’t look like Mustangs. Note what he says about Coke bottles later.]]>
The Compass is very high-tech, with its flat-black, die-cast magnesium-alloy case, and bright, sharp electroluminescent display (ELD). No other system packed so much speed and power in as small a case, and none had such a unique and large, easy-to-read screen, allowing full 80x24 text.
Of course, all of these great features raised the price significantly. At $8150, the GRiD Compass 1101 was the most expensive personal computer you could buy.
Originally developed for business executives, GRiDs were also used by the U.S. military 'in the field', and by NASA on the Space Shuttles during the 1980's and 90's. It's even been said that the US President's "nuclear football" at one time included a GRiD computer. RIP Bill Moggridge.]]>
Now perhaps those engaging in the "you can’t patent round corners" debate have either no appreciation for consistent design philosophy or never taken a step back and looked at all of Apple’s products. Because when one does take a look at all of Apple’s products you will see that every piece of hardware follows the four perfectly asymmetrical rounded corners design.]]>
“Look what has happened to companies like Nokia, Motorola and BlackBerry, which didn’t do as Samsung did,” Mr. Song added, referring to competitors whose failures to adapt quickly to the smartphone boom driven by iPhones have drastically reduced their market shares. “Samsung may lack in innovation, but right now, no one can beat Samsung in playing catch-up.”]]>
The hard disk that hosted my /home directory on my Linux machine failed so I had to replace it with a new one. Since this machine lives under my desk, I had to unplug all the cables, get it out, swap the hard drives and plug everything back again.
Pretty standard stuff. Plug AC, plug keyboard, plug mouse but when I got to the speakers cable, I just skipped it.
Why bother setting up the audio?]]>