via www.youtube.com
I'm happy to see SI make a move away from Flash and Adobe AIR. It's becoming clearer and clearer that HTML5 is going to be the platform for rich media in the future. This makes me happy.
05/21/2010
05/18/2010
Tumbling Snippets by WooThemes
This is a great looking theme and a wonderful IA for a scrapbook style of blog (which is precisely what I've got going on here.
I'm not convinced that having multiple columns is the way to go for me, but it seems a lot of people like it.
02/02/2010
And then what?
I downloaded the Hot Potato app to my phone moments ago. From what I understand, they let you have conversations with your friends in real time about current topics. The screen to the right is what I saw when I opened the app for the first time. Really?
While I would prefer to see some actual content on the first screen, I'd at least like some direction about what will happen after I connect with Facebook.
Whenever I start using a new app, there is some basic level of trust required. If I found out about it from a friend, I may trust it more, but I need some sign from the app that connecting with Facebook will serve some purpose. From this screen, there's nothing to go on.
While downloading an app is a good first step towards engagement, it's obviously not enough. Since the app was free, I am merely perplexed, but I would be pretty upset if I had paid for this.
I'm going to keep my eye open for apps that have a really welcoming first screen. The first impression can sometimes be everything.
01/26/2010
Realism in UI Design
The image on the left is a face of a specific person. The image on the right is the concept "face;" it could be any person. When designing user interfaces, we rarely ever want to show a specific entity; typically, we want to convey an idea or a concept. Details can easily distract from that idea or concept.
via uxmag.com
01/09/2010
12/20/2009
Trolley Scooter
Airports can be awful, but I would love to zip around on this thing. It makes lugging around heavy shit a lot of fun.
12/13/2009
Designing a Menu
Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, high-profit item—in other words, an item for which customers are willing to pay a good deal more than it costs to make,” Poundstone explains. “A puzzle is high-profit but unpopular; a plowhorse is the opposite, popular yet unprofitable. Consultants try to turn puzzles into stars, nudge customers away from plowhorses, and convince everyone that the prices on the menu are more reasonable than they look.” Poundstone uses Balthazar’s menu to illustrate these ideas.
via nymag.com
Author William Poundstone discusses the topic at further length in his book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It).
12/10/2009
The Right Way to Unsubscribe
For a brief time, I was getting a few emails a week from Williams-Sonoma and said, "Enough, sir. I do not want any more of your electronic mails." So I clicked the "Unsubscribe" link in the email and was sent to a page that looked like this:
This is the right way to let someone unsubscribe. Oftentimes I leave because it's just too much, but I would like to hear about offers from Williams-Sonoma. So I just set it for once a month instead. They keep me on their list, and I'm not annoyed with them. In fact, I kinda like them. Everybody wins!
12/09/2009
Using Contrast to Upsell
When you look at the covers for the Blu-Ray and DVD versions of Julie & Julia, it's pretty obvious that there is a lot more contrast in the Blu-Ray cover. It's just an artifact of how the images were output, but I like the idea that the studios are using richer color and sharper imagery for the covers of their HD discs. I'd like to think the full-screen DVD cover would have black bars on the side.
12/06/2009
Eko: A Traffic Light with a Progress Bar
via infosthetics.com
Waiting is always a lot easier when you know how long it's going to last. As explained on the Eko site:
Eko light is a simple yet, highly practical concept for traffic lights that not only helps preserve the environment by reducing pollution but promotes safer driving as well. Eko can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort while significantly improving overall traffic dynamics.
12/05/2009
Buffering Content with Ajax
This is what it looks like when new Tweets come in while you have twitter.com open. The other day I posted a tweet while this notification was still visible. My tweet appeared on top. I clicked the notification and the other tweets were slotted in below, which I found impressive.
I discovered that they're creating new list items as soon as they are ready and just hide them. I figured this out using Firebug, which I love. See:
Adding the elements as a background task is smart for a lot of reasons, but it had the side benefit of keeping everything in its true order. Yay.