The already impressive TIme magazine designed for tablets is improving. If I were a magazine editor I’d be very excited right now.
Archive for the ‘Design’ Category
Time magazine reinvents the magazine
11th June 2010Begrudging the hype
10th June 2010At 3Sixty, we’ve each been taking turns to bring one of the new iPads home and put it through its paces. What’s apparent, from my evening with the new Apple device, is the hype is – rather annoyingly – entirely worthwhile.
Eloise (7), Thom (3) and Emily (5) get their first look at the iPad.
My children tried it first and were captivated by the huge screen and tactile interface. Tilting the unit to steer around a race track in 3D, or flicking licorice torpedoes about for the dodo and his friends in Atomic Antelope’s Alice in Wonderland. In short, they adored it, and it was difficult to finally pack them off to bed after half-an-hour’s exploration and discovery.
The other people I really wanted to try the iPad were my 60+ in-laws, who live just… next… door…
Anyway! Being “the only geek in the village,” so to speak, means you get lumbered with tech support for the entire family and surrounding area. Now, my in-laws are pretty good with a computer, all things considered, but they certainly don’t enjoy the process of using one. (You can probably guess the operating system…)
Not so with the iPad — something I fully expected as soon as the rumours about Apple’s planned “iSlate” began circulating many months ago. I have never seen either of my in-laws smile when using a piece of technology, but they were equally as smitten with the iPad as my kids.
They loved the huge, pin-sharp screen, as well as the way the device feels in your hands; not a single utterance of “heavier than I expected” was heard.
However it’s also worth pointing out that my in-laws very quickly recognised the iPad isn’t an all-singing, all-dancing replacement for their current laptop; quite far from it, in fact. They can’t load their photos onto it easily, nor their music. They can’t watch films on it without a lot of manual faffing around on a separate machine before-hand — not likely to happen with two people enjoying their retirement.
Let’s be honest; the process of having to plug things into other things, make sure they’re talking to each other by whatever mystical, opaque process is necessary, then find and literally drag a long list of serial numbered files across this connection still isn’t as easy as it should be, regardless of how highly Apple thinks of its iTunes software.
But the fact remains that the iPad has really captured the imagination of the whole gamut of computer users. Would I have one? No. But then I already have a desktop, a laptop, a netbook, an Xbox 360, a Wii, an iPod nano and an excellent Android phone to keep me connected and entertained whenever and wherever I want.
Would my in-laws want one, though? Yes, I think they might. And I’m still certain it would be an excellent fit, once they get used to the media-related shenanigans.
UX London 2010 – day 3 roundup
24th May 2010Joshua Porter – Designing for the usage lifecycle
Joshua had a few interesting websites to share:
- Flickr microcopy group: where Joshua keeps interesting bits of microcopy he’s come across
- 52weeksofUX blog: a blog co-authored with another Josh
- ABtests.com where people can upload their results from split-testing
And here are a few interesting thoughts I noted down:
Focus on the small things, a ton of little changes can make your design significantly better / can increase conversions considerably.
The only data that matters is your own – don’t rely on other people’s testing to make your decisions.
Usability used to be about “Is your software usable”, now it’s increasingly about convincing users “Why should I use this / What can it do for me?” This is a shift from a tool problem to a cognitive / domain problem.
The usage lifecycle goes like this
- Unaware of the service
- Aware of the service (interested) – acquisition
- First time user (signed up) – activation
- Regular user (finds the service useful) – retention
- Passionate user (engaged) – referral
It’s more important to know where a user is in the usage lifecycle than to know who they are, because that tells us what their immediate problem is.
Usability of form design (reducing friction) is not the major hurdle to getting users to sign-up, the biggest challenge is giving them a reason to sign-up. Once users are motivated they’ll battle through relatively unusable interfaces to get what they’ve been promised.
Design strategies for increasing sign-up
- Immediate engagement (lazy registration)
- Write to reduce commitment (answer the immediate questions and concerns might have around sign-up)
- Have different levels of descriptions for different levels of users’ commitment
- I know I want to sign up
- I want to make sure this is for me
- I’m skeptical
- Leverage social influence (let undecideds observe the actions of current users)
Our goal is user happiness!
Dan Lockton – Designing with intent: How to influence behaviour online
Dan’s research was interesting as it transpires he’s read my wife’s PhD and I think he might have used some of it as the basis for his own! It’s a small world…
His talk was all about designing with intent, that is design that’s intended to influence, to change users’ behaviour.
He’s catalogued his findings as cards that can be found on designwithintent.co.uk. The cards can be used as a source for inspiration when generating ideas, much like Stephen P. Anderson’s getmentalnotes.com.
I thought Dan’s workshop was particularly interesting because he was one of the more leftfield speakers at the conference. His background is very much in industrial design and a lot of his example are from the world of product and industrial design.
UX London 2010 – day 2 roundup
20th May 2010The first workshop I went to today was Good Design Faster by Leah Buley, and it was awesome. I’ve noted down the gist of the workshop:
Clients want great user experiences and they want them faster.
Wireframes are good for documentation, but not for exploring possibilities, they don’t show any flow or journey.
The danger of wireframes is to fall in love with 1 idea and to design yourself into a corner.
The answer to this is to generate lots of ideas to a very low fidelity, to exhaust the different options before you settle on one that you choose to refine.
You can then put together these lots of ideas on a sketchboard – which shows all ideas next to each other at the same time, and within the user journey. This makes it an ideal tool to discuss and critique with others, including the client.
The second workshop was How to think with pretty pictures (demystifying concept models) by Stephen P. Anderson. Again, the gist of the workshop is below:
Concept models are used to make sense of complex stuff
The process flow for creating a concept model is to first get the data together through research. Wikipedia is a great source of information.
The second step is to see where the patterns and similarities in the data are.
The third step is to see which shapes can support those patterns.
The fourth and final step is to come up with a metaphor that brings the concept model to life.
Sports Illustrated Magazine – HTML5
20th May 2010A collaboration between TWF, Google, and SI for the Google I/O 2010 Keynote Presentation. This is very exciting.
UX London 2010 – day 1 roundup
19th May 2010After the first day of UX London, I thought I’d summarise the talks that really resonated in as few words as possible.
User Experience design only has meaning when someone actually uses what we’ve designed (Jesse James Garrett)
Search is an interactive and iterative activity, queries evolve (Peter Morville)
The biggest problem to solve in UX design are the steps we need to take to move users along to the next stage in the UX lifecycle (Joshua Porter)
If we increase users’ motivation to do something they will usually muddle through even if usability is very poor. Therefore we need to use what we know about human behaviour to get users motivated. (Stephen Anderson)
(Stephen has kindly summarised what he knows about human behaviour on 52 cards: getmentalnotes.com. Sadly they are not available yet. Happily he gave everybody a quarter of the cards at the conference). Stephen’s talk was by far and away the best one of the day, even if he got the graveyard shift.
Make users look good (Michael B. Johnson). Pixar sounds like a great company to work for.
Looking forward to tomorrow’s workshops!
Back from SxSW
22nd March 2010
It’s great to be back after an exhausting but fun week. Pete, Laura and I are really excited by everything we saw and heard.
For me the interesting things have been:
The importance of social media. I met a chap called Jason, who’s only job at a local Austin bank was to blog and tweet, partly customer service, partly branding. A really nice touch was that I hadn’t realised the hotel we stayed in, (The Sheraton), had been following my tweets and tweeted me last night to say ‘You’ll be missed. See you next year! Travel safely’.
Behavioural economics: Books like Nudge, Predictably Irrational. Etc. Were repeatedly referenced and several examples of how this type of insight had steered designs was everywhere.
Mobile apps and Geo location: 2010 appears to be the year that this is really going to take off. One great example was by the developer of ShopSavvy He can tell advertisers to the second, when and where someone is looking at a product. This allows them to push a relevant ad, either for that product, (like a 10% off voucher), to nudge them to buy. Or for a competitors product.
CSS3 + HTML 5 + web fonts: Microsoft explorer 9 is going to support them too, so expect dramatic changes to the online experience over the next 12 months. Very exciting.
The Future of Wireframes
3rd March 2010Admittedly, this looks like the kind of post you’d skip (unless you’re an IA), but, bear with me because the author Nishant Kothary from visitmix makes a few good points. Like:
Print is about seeing, web is about doing.
&
Holy guacamole, Batman! Elliptical hotness! Okay, that’s not a good point, but, it is a nice quote!
Check it out: The future of Wireframes
Going local
17th February 2010The Guardian has today started its planned experiment to dabble in reporting regionalised, local news events.
Beginning with Guardian Leeds – and with Cardiff and Edinburgh versions also launching imminently – Guardian Local will feature news stories as well as guest opinion pieces from around the target area.
What with Newspaper Club already drawing massive interest from all over the web, it seems the demand for news hasn’t diminished, as media tycoons of yore would have you otherwise believe. If anything, demand appears to be increasing, but in parallel with the need for richer, more tightly focussed and easily-consumed information.
Do you have a Flavor?
5th February 2010Flavors.me is a new social media aggregator, that lets you collect your identities and output from a range of common networks and show them all in one place.
Not very exciting or unusual, in and of itself. But what makes Flavors a bit special is the really simple, attractive interfaces you can create using it – think “interactive business card,” but certainly more fun!
We’ve been tinkering with it at 3Sixty this morning, using the invite code heat.
Pete Fairhurst
Jonathan Waring
Andrew Arnott
Chris Thurling
Iwein Dekoninck
Matt French
Kate Thorpe
Laura Fletcher
Dave North
Bonny Colville-Hyde
Nick Raven
