Posts Tagged: principles

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20
Jul 08

Modal overlays

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)

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24
Jun 08

Mobile design basics

“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)

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20
Apr 08

7 considerations for designing converged devices

Peter Odum has written about design principles for converged devices. Here’s a summary of the principles he outlines:

  1. Our devices are an ecosystem.
  2. Design for reasonable consistency.
  3. For users, content drives convergence.
  4. Intelligent discovery encourages adoption.
  5. Don’t burden users with content formats, formatting and packaging of content.
  6. Context, not just content, is king.
  1. Redundancy is useful.

    Link: Convergent Experiences, Diverse Devices (idlemode.com)

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1
Jan 06

The soul of mobile devices

A nice little vignette.

“In recent years, the challenge in designing interfaces for mobile devices has shifted from finding ways around technological limitations to finding ways around technological overload. Consequently, more so today than ever before, it is important for designers and handset manufacturers to place more effort into first identifying the core purpose of any new product and then building everything else around it.

“With everything from mobiles to portable game consoles becoming one blurred mess, it may be time to take a leaf from Apple�s iPod and design new products with strong, identifiable characters and purposes. It may be time to give new products their souls back.

Link: Back to basics: searching for the soul of modern mobile devices (mobileinnovation.co.uk)