via wok-design:
Really cool. 35mm movie camera iPhone Adapter - Lomokino
via yousayyeah:
What a deliciously exciting user interface. All the navigation is either touch, swipe or pinch.
(Source: macrumors.com)
Analyzing How Agencies Describe and Present UX
via cunningham-emily:
I’ve been poking around, looking at how different agencies describe User Experience (UX), and whether or not they call it UX explicitly. Though obvious to UXers, you can sure learn a lot about how an agency thinks about itself from its information architecture! I analyzed the information architecture and content related to describing UX for POP, ZAAZ, Razorfish, Forum One, and Neudesic. I’ll first list two summaries of my observations — one on hierarchies, the other on term usage — then I’ll do a brief walk through on each company with screenshots.
Google’s director of Android user experience Matias Duarte just stopped by The Verge trailer here at CES to make a special announcement.
via courtneybolton:
Facebook published their Design Principles. Not sure why it took them 8 years.
- Universal: Our mission is to make the entire world more open, and this means reaching every corner, every person. So our design needs to work for everyone, every culture, every language, every device, every stage of life. This is why we build products that work for 90% of users and cut away features that only work for just a minority, even if we step back in the short term.
- Human: Users return to our site to be surrounded by friends and other people near to them. This is a central promise of our product, that the people you care about are all in one place. This is why our voice and visual style stay in the background, behind people’s voices, people’s faces, and people’s expression.
- Clean: Our visual style is clean and understated, to create a blank canvas on which our users live. A minimal, well-lit space encourages participation and honest transparent communication. Clean is the not the easiest approach to visual style. To the contrary, margins and type scale, washes and color become more important as we reduce the number of styles we rely on.
- Consistent: We invest our time wisely, by embracing patterns, recognizing that our usability is greatly improved when similar parts are expressed in similar ways. Our interactions speak to users with a single voice, building trust. Reduce, reuse, don’t redesign.
- Useful: Our product is more utility than entertainment, meant for repeated daily use, providing value efficiently. This is why our core interactions, the ones users engage daily, are streamlined, purged of unnecessary clicks and wasted space.
- Fast: We value our users time more than our own. We recognize faster experiences are more efficient and feel more effortless. As such, site performance is something our users should never notice. Our site should move as fast as we do.
- Transparent: Users trust us with their identity, their photos, their thoughts and conversation. We reciprocate with the utmost honesty and transparency. We are clear and up front about what’s happening and why.
A UX case study of Google Maps
via tangentsnowball:
An exhaustive, extensive article about how the little-known maps website has been refined over years, from colour palette to interface.
via userflow:
Not all website visitors are created equal. Users come from different sources, with varying levels of knowledge and engagement, and with different goals. It’s up to you as a user experience designer to map those in-bound user flows to conversion funnels that provide value to the user as well as the business.
via lookalign:
evolution of foursquare
Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from your friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.
For more see: http://bergcloud.com/littleprinter/
The announcement: http://bergcloud.com/2011/11/29/announcing-little-printer-and-berg-cloud/
UX as an Effective Marketing Tool
Hipmunk, a startup in San Francisco, entered the crowded online travel search market in 2010. Their approach was novel: show all the most relevant results on a single page, and help users visualize the tradeoffs between the options. In doing so they bypassed the traditional product strategies in travel search, which relied on saturating the user with either features or ads. Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk’s co-founder and CEO, will explain the ideas and execution behind Hipmunk’s unique take on travel search, and how a singular focus on UX has given Hipmunk the most fanatical following of any travel search site in the last decade.
28 years young!
Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction.
BBC Weather Redesign Process
via ckalima:
An awesome post by Melanie Seyer, the lead designer of the BBC Weather product within BBC Future Media, outlining the process and thinking behind their mid-November refresh.
A seven-foot motion-actived interactive wall we developed for the national fitness chain; Bally Total Fitness.
“The wall includes four separate applications – an unprecedented variety of functions for a device of its size and complexity. The most simple is the Bally Logo Break, which helps users learn how to control the screen by shattering the familiar red Bally logo into many smaller pieces, then moving them around to reveal fitness and nutrition tips. The Nutrition Wall application helps users gain knowledge that will help them inside the gym and out. The Workout Counselor enables gym members make the most out of their experience, providing exercise recommendations to target specific muscle groups. Finally, the Future Self application is a sort of “funhouse mirror” that shows users what they might look like if they keep at their workout routines.” - Manifest Digital Blog
Technical details:
- Developed with Adobe Flash (actionscript 3) for the whole front-end application interface
- SoftKinetic IISU SDK for communication from the Kinect to Flash- Four 46” LCD displays mounted vertically
- Xbox Kinect for motion sensing
- Logitec HD Pro Webcam C910 for taking high definition captures of people
For more info check out: http://visualadvance.com/portfolio/interactive/bally-results-center
