I started working at Punchcut earlier this year, and we’re continuing to hire folks into our design team to support a growing client roster. I’m having a great time with all the smart folks here, and we’ve got some fantastic clients who are turning to us to generate strategies and designs for next generation mobile experiences. We’re looking for senior interaction designer rock stars to join in the fun right in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
Check out the job description, and also the Punchcut web site.
If you think the gig sounds exciting, please drop me a line.
Interesting in that it’s in the Times.
“As it turns out, Mr. Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens. It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.”
Link: On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff (nytimes.com, via)
Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.
“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that they are disconnected and disjoint from other overlays—knowing how to access one doesn’t yield a physical sense of how to access another one; they do not scale to give a unified, cohesive interface. ”
Link: Mobile Firefox and Designing Without Modal Overlays (azarask.in)
Putting People First has a translated section of a French report about mobile phone use by teens.
”...for adults the mobile is a hyper-personal device, an intimate black box with data that absolutely need to be protected. For teenagers on the other hand, the mobile is often as little confidential and intimate as their blogs. They are instead identity and exhibition spaces of oneself, with “museum galleries” of photos, ringtones, videos, and music to share with a community of peers: archiving makes only sense if it can be shared.”
Link: French ethnographic study on teens and mobiles (experientia.com)
Francesco Cara from Nokia talks about the mobile ecosystem.
Link: Evolution of the mobile communication ecosystem (liftconference.com)
Nokia’s written up a short article that highlights some examples of what they believe is good design for mobile.
Link: Mobile Design Showcases (nokia.com, via)
July’s Wired tells the story of Android.
“As soon as programmers started playing with the emulator, they saw how big Google’s ambitions were. The company was trying to make programming for a cell phone analogous to programming for a PC or the Web. Coders were told that their applications would have constant access to the Net, not the usual mobile hurry-up-and-wait feel. Working with the cloud — enabling programs to push or pull info to or from the Web — was a must. All Android phones would know where they were at all times, either by tapping into onboard GPS or by cross-referencing cell towers using a proprietary database owned by Google. And applications would be allowed to share information, which at the simplest level meant the kind of copy-and-paste functionality across all programs that cell phones currently lack.”
Link: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web (wired.com)
Morten Hjerde has taken a long hard look at text input field design.
“Edit-in-place is preferable in most cases. A person can see the context, and the visuals is consistent. Full screen editing is preferable when the user is likely to enter a large amount of text. Predictive text (T9, etc) may only be available in full screen edit.”
Link: The anatomy of a text input field (sender11.typepad.com)
“Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what call you just missed because you couldn’t get to the phone on time. It’s easier to accidentally completely delete a new MMS than to send it.”
Link: The right information, at the right time (littlespringsdesign.com)
Rachel Hinman’s going on a generative sprint for the next three months.
“For the next 90 days, I’m going to think about, sketch, draw, and prototype ideas about mobile design and post them here. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I don’t know what is at the end of these 90 days. I’m just gonna commit to thinking about it every day for 90 days and have faith that something good will be on the other side.”
Link: 90 Mobiles in 90 Days (90mobilesin90days.com)
23 June 2008
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Tagged: adaptivepath, blog, carrier, concepts, design, handset, interactiondesign, ixd, manufacturer, mobile, phone, ui, userinterface
Just came across a blog published by Kevin Arthur called Touch Usability. The blog tracks articles related to touch UIs, and has a great collection of content.
Link: Touch Usability (touchusability.com)
A hypothetical redesign of the USAA mobile user experience.
“Utilizing these well-designed, iconic images already on the web site sends a message of professionalism that says “Our company is second to none. We offer style and class. We take no shortcuts, etc.” It also gives the application a little bit of an interactive feel, much more so than the plain, dry text links offered currently.”
Link: Design for Users: Branding Yourself in Small Spaces (design-for-users.com)
“With the new UI, we were able to use the entire screen for user input. This came really handy when we approached the workflow for envelope-free check deposits which allow much shorter processing times and the ability to print receipts with an actual image of the check. It also saves the bank processing costs.”
Link: That design is money! (physicalinterface.com, via)
