Posts Tagged: ui

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1
Aug 10

Why UI simulation can suck

I was hanging out at the Nikon store in Kuala Lumpur today, embracing my inner camera geek while a DSLR sensor was cleaned. Up on the big televisions I saw a video advertising the very cool looking S70 touchscreen camera.

I know well how underpowered the CPUs on these devices are, so I was impressed that Nikon had been able to pull this UI off. I walked over to the display and picked up the demo model.

Problem was, it was not much like the video. Response time was slower and motion effects were minimal. It felt like a very different camera to what I’d seen.

Designers are often accused of creating demo-ware that doesn’t correlate with reality. This was at the other end of the cycle: marketing folks creating a simulation of a product that doesn’t match what exists in the world.

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28
Jul 10

Mobile email triage

A video about a project out of IBM’s research labs aimed to better support mobile email triage. Help is sorely needed in this area, and while this project definitely shows some research-labs rough edges, it’s got some interesting ideas for rethinking mobile email.

Link: Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email (youtube.com)

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5
Jul 10

Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines

“The goal is to clearly direct end users to the content they want. Metro interfaces are supposed to embody harmonious, functional, and attractive visual elements. Ideally, good UI design should encourage playful exploration when interacting with the application and people should feel a sense of wonder and excitement. A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage.”

Link: Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines (microsoft.com)

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2
Jul 10

Windows Mobile and the data centric UI

“With the iPhone, Apple put together an extremely simple modal interface that works, one that people of all ages and backgrounds understand right away…Microsoft’s approach is completely different. Instead of becoming another me-too cellphone, like Android and the rest, the Windows Phone 7 team came up their own vision of what the cellphone should be. In the process, they have created a beautiful user interface in which the data is at the center of user interaction. Not the apps—specific functions—but the information itself. At some points, in fact, it feels like the information is the interface itself.”

Link: Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple (gizmodo.com)

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27
Jun 10

Designing a ‘unique’ UI

“Interface fragmentation seems to be a somewhat desirable thing. Okay, let’s call it “interface uniqueness.” You set the look of the product to reflect (or create) a brand feel that is related to the device it lives on, but is clearly differentiated from other apps or sites available to the same device. This is valid, and we work on projects like that all the time. Right this minute I have a team working on new interfaces for a mobile web browser. But interaction has to be grounded in the common device interaction language. We’re not changing the interaction for that browser in any notable way.”

Link: Interaction fragmentation, and avoiding it (littlespringsdesign.com)

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9
Mar 09

Camera UI tour

“Here’s a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).”

Link: Click: A Visual Tour of Camera Interfaces (gizmodo.com, thanks Dan)

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24
Feb 09

Engadget is underwhelmed by Windows Mobile 6.5

“Instead of demonstrating its technical prowess and vast resources, Microsoft limped out a half-hearted rehash of an OS we’ve seen all too much of, and managed to blind most onlookers with a storm of big time partnerships and bloated PR. While their major competitors (and even some allies) in the mobile space seem bent on changing ideas about how we interact with our portable devices, the company proved once again that it’s content to rest on its laurels and learn little from its mistakes.”

Link: Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark (engadget.com)

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20
Jan 09

Saffer talks about gestural interfaces

Link: Tap is the New Click (vimeo.com)

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11
Sep 08

The iPod can’t scale

Dave Gustafson pointed to a great Gizmodo post that looks at the absurd place the clickwheel iPod has gone over the years with all the functionality that slowly got added to something that originally was designed only to play music.

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“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to click—nearly triple that of the original iPod version (and that’s not including Nike+ integration on nanos). Plus, the new system has five screens just for settings, all of which are unrelated to the main “Settings” menu. How did things become so complicated? The iPod went from doing one thing really well to doing a bunch of things pretty well. But the UI was never redesigned to accommodate the functionality…Right now Apple’s sending city traffic down a one-lane, unpaved road.”

Link: A Sad Fact: The iPod’s Clickwheel Must Die (gizmodo.com, via)

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7
Sep 08

The state of touch technologies

The latest of the Economist’s Technology Quarterly has a survey of the history and state of touch technology.

“The double click does not translate terribly well to touch screens, however. This has led some researchers to look for alternatives. In developing his multi-touch screen, Dr Han found that there can be more to touch input than simply detecting contact. He has found a way to determine how much pressure is being applied. Adding a thin polymer layer, scored with microscopic ridges, to his touch screens causes the bright spot created by a finger touching the screen to vary in size and brightness depending on the pressure. This makes it possible, for example, to drag an item on the screen and then, by pushing harder, to slide it under another item. ”

Link: Touching the future (economist.com)

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22
Aug 08

Ten Future UI Concepts

Smashing Magazine describes some future UI concepts, including several for mobile devices.

“Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.”

Link: 10 Futuristic User Interfaces (smashingmagazine.com)

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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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23
Jun 08

An idea every day

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.”

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Link: 90 Mobiles in 90 Days (90mobilesin90days.com)

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