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URL Design
Good piece. Also, if your development platform doesnt let you have full control over the design of your URLs, get a new one.
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On admin interfaces
A few minutes ago, I tweeted the following: “Starting to feel like any site which requires a separate admin interface is not fully baked. Am I crazy?” A couple people responded asking for more details on what I meant, so I logged into the admin interface (or backend, or CMS interface, or whatever you want to call it) of my personal site, and started this here blog post.
Which is ironic, because the point of my tweet was to say that, more and more, I’m wondering if these kinds of interfaces are necessary, or even helpful.
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Smashing Magazine: 9 Common Usability Mistakes
Good stuff here.
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Django snippets: Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI
Simon throws together a handy snippets which allows for orderable inlines using drag and drop (via jQuery) in the Django admin. Sweet.
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Ubiquity for Firefox
The latest from the amazing Aza Raskin, Ubiquity for Firefox is sort of a Quicksilver for your browser. Definitely cool stuff.
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iPhone GUI PSD
Apparently is prototyping elements day on jeffcroft.com. Here’s an awesome-looking PSD full of iPhone widgets. Via Wilson.
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GUIMagnets: Prototyping made sticky
Small flexible magnets with GUI widgets on them, designed for use while prootyping on a whiteboard. Freaking great idea. Via J.B..
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CNN launches “backstory” feature
I’m not really sure I like the Coverflow-style UI CNN.com is using for this, but I like the concept, as it solves one of my longest-standing complaints about online news. As a person who doesn’t really keep up on news day-to-day, I often jump into a story several days in (when something gets really big, instead of at the very beginning). The problem I often have is that the articles I find at that point are all about the latest developments in the story, and often assume I already know how it all started and what has happened to date. This “backstory” feature attacks that problem by providing a chronological UI to all the stories related to a particular current event. It works, but I personally would rather just see a chronological list of bullet points that catches me up without all the glitz. Still, I’m happy to see someone trying to address the problem.
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Khoi Vinh: Highly Demographic Language
In response to the question, “is an interface designer a salesman?,” Khoi answers affirmatively, saying, “interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.” He goes on with a very intelligent and thought-provoking piece that includes the following:
> If you think about marketing as a way of communicating the benefits of a designed product to users, then it’s clear to me at least that good interfaces do that. To make an interface ‘user friendly’ is to communicate the value of features or content to a user, and to do so in as expedient and succinct a fashion as possible. At a low level, expressing functionality as a tab, or providing a summarized view of complex information, or positioning like features in close proximity to one another — or any number of nuanced decisions that designers make — is very much about marketing that functionality to users.
I think sometimes designers get a little too full of themselves, thinking of their work as “art,” and forgetting that, in almost all cases, we’re doing jobs for commercial clients whose end game is to make money. Ultimately, all designers are salesmen, no matter how many levels of abstraction away from the actual transaction we sit.
As a sidenote, Khoi’s writing really shines in this piece.
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Michael Heilemann: To Read Old Stuff, Go Left
Michael Heilemann says that pagination widgets should always point left for older stuff. I’m not sure I agree — but I totally se his point. It’s a tricky thing to solve with things like blogs, as they’re naturally in reverse chronological order. I know I’m not consistent about it; I tend to just do what feels right at the time.
To illustrate the problem, consider two scenarios: a blog has “next” and “previous” page links. I would say “next” should pointing to the right, so left is newer stuff. Now, a daily archive page shows all the content posted on one day, and has links to “next day” and “previous day”. I would say “next day” should be on the right, meaning left is older stuff. Clearly, this results in inconsistent interfaces (in one scenario, older stuff is to the right, and in the other, older stuff is to the left). What do you think? Should this be consistent?
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Sprint Instinct Full Video Walkthrough
Gizmodo has some walkthrough videos of the Sprint Instinct, the company’s “iPhone Killer.” In watching them, I definitely feel like this is probably the second-best thing to an iPhone out there, UI-wise. It doesn’t look quite as simple, elegant, and sexy as the iPhone, but it is a pretty well-done copycat. And, it does have a few features the iPhone doesn’t (3G, GPS, text-to-speech). I don’t think it’s an iPhone killer, but it’s probably the closest thing to one made thus far. I wouldn’t blame a Sprint customer for buying this guy instead of paying $200 to switch to AT&T.
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J.B. at A List Apart: Writing an Interface Style Guide
My good buddy Boltron has a great little piece in the latest ALA about writing a style guide for interface design. Style guides are commonly used for more overarching brand guidelines, but much less commonly address interface design for digital products — which is a shame, because they’re really very appropriate for many organizations, especially larger ones who have several different teams doing this kind of work (like, oh, I dunno…the company Jina works for).
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Daring Fireball: The Unsatisfying State of Twitter Web Clients for the iPhone
Gruber compares web clients for Twitter on the iPhone. Personally, I think Thincloud is pretty good (and my favorite of the bunch), but it still hasn’t been enough to make me give up Twitter over SMS. Gruber says Twitter over SMS is too annoying — I disagree. I find it to be perfect. It has all the feature John wants, works well, and has the most “iPhoney” interface of all.
All that having been said, I hope (and suspect) someone will create a killer native iPhone app for release after iPhone 2.0 is out.
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Sarah Harrison: things that confuse me
My good friend Sarah Harrison (aka sourjayne) has started a blog about her UX research and thoughts. Good stuff so far. Check it out!
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Silverback: Guerrilla usability testing from Clearleft
Silverback, from our friends at Clearleft, is a really nice new Mac app for usability testing that makes uses of Macs’ built in iSight, the Apple Remote, and more. It’s a simple app, but it’s extremely well-designed (as you’d expect from Clearleft!), and appears to do what it does very elegantly. If you do usability testing with live subjects, you really should check it out. Also noteworthy to an animals lover like me: Clearleft is donating 10% of the profits to saving the gorillas. Awesome.
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Google Android UI Gallery
Google’s Andriod mobile phone UI is heavily inspired by the iPhone, but not so much so that I’d call it a rip off. It’s not as sexy as the iPhone’s UI, but it looks every bit as usable. Bottom line: the iPhone trounces it in the style department, but Andriod still looks better than 99% of mobile phone UIs. Bring it on, Google.
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Leopard Stacks “overlays”
This is a freaking great idea. Sadly, it’s a pain in the ass to implement, so I won’t bother. But this is exactly the sort of thing Apple should have built-into Stacks to make them better. I love the concept of Stacks, but the implementation is definitely lacking. I’m sure it’ll get better over the next few releases of OS X — just like everything else has.
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Authentic Jobs: UX Design Lead at Microsoft
Mad UX design skillz? Come work in my neck of the woods, over on the East side at Microsoft. Great campus, great pay. Can’t really beat it.
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DesignInterviews.com: Nick Finck from BlueFlavor.com
Helen over at DesignInterviews.com talks with my co-worker Nick about Information Architecture and other web matters. Good stuff.
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Phill Ryu: Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. Or Aqua.
Phill discusses the (apparent) new direction for the visual design of OS X in Leopard — an outer space theme. Personally, I like the futuristic look in general, but I’m a bit dismayed by the outer space photography as backgrounds in time machine and on the desktop. It’s just too over-the-top for my tastes.
Then again, I usually roll with a solid color for my desktop background. So I guess I’m dull.
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Basement.org: Flash Bumptop
This, my friends, is why I keep trying to tell you all not to ignore Flash as a deployment platform. Sure, it’s not for everything, but it’s obviously the best tool for this job. don’t think anyone would want to try to do this with JavaScript. :)
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iPhone Typing Test - Test Your iPhone Typing Speed
I got 23WPM. Thanks for the link, [dotsara]http://flickr.com/photos/dotsara).
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Joe Hewitt: Introducing iUI
Joe’s clever JavaScript and other bits for quickly making iPhone-friendly web apps. When I get some spare time, I want to grab this and throw together an iPhone version of LOST-Theories.com. It would also make for a great tutorial on how to create a mobile (read: differently-templated) version of an existing Django site. It’s astonishingly simple!
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Microsoft Surface: Behind the Scenes with video
Gotta hand it to Microsoft on this one — thing looks incredible.
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Scrapblog: Create a world for your pictures
A beautiful personal expression site based around the idea of scrapbooking, with a gorgeous Flash-based UI and set of wonderfully feminine default templates by the likes of Veerle Pieters and Cindy Li (and others, too). Includes spport for pulling your photos from Flickr, and several other services.
This is what happens when people take decidedly geeky things (blogs, open APIs, wizzy Flash UIs, and so forth) and mash them up with things real (as in non-geeky) people want. Congrats to everyone involved with this — it looks like a really, really impressive web application.
Sidenote: between this and Picnik, the Flash developers are kind of kicking our ass on the web app front. Where are the web standards-based apps that work this well?
Sidenote #2: Anyone know what backend technologies are used in Scrapblog?
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How to beat Google, part 1
Rich Skrenta has some great ideas here. I only disagree with number five, which says, “forget interface innovation.” I disagree in large part because I agree with number six, seven, eight, and nine — which are all about interface innovation. But aside from that little inconsistency, these are great tips on not just how to beat Google in the search area, but how to approach your competition (i.e. how you should be similar and how you should be different) for any web product.
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Picnik: Edit your flickr photos online
Wow, this is one of the most impressive web apps I’ve ever seen. It lets you do iPhoto-like editing of your photos in the browser (works with Flickr and other photo sharing sites, as well as with images from your computer). Fix exposure, red eye, and so forth quickly and easily. If you’re not yet convinced that there is a place for “heavy” browser-based apps, think again.
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Garrett Dimon: Ambient Close Button
I’ve also always thought the unsaved-document close button was a pretty awesome little UI touch.
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Washington Post: onBeing
I’m a little late on this one, but I finally took a few minutes to really check out the first project Rob Curley’s team has done at The Post, and I found myself very into the stories. A very cool concept, some unique Flash UI work, and genuinely interesting and real people. I dig it. As with most Post projects, it’s Django-powered. Also see the related blog post from Curley.
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Andy Budd: Heuristics for Modern Web Application Development
Andy’s got an awesome post full of tips on using heuristic evaluations in the modern web app world.
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Sierra: iPhone and the Dog Ears User Experience Model
The scroll-ending bounce and the easing on some of the animations were also some of my personal favorite parts of the iPhone demo. These little details just make the whole UI feel more lively and fun. It might not seem like much, but little touches like this subconsciously make people happy.
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Stan on the iPhone: A Plea for the Fat-Fingered
Jason suggests a more spaced-out version o the virtual keyboard when you rotate the screen to landscape mode. Seems painfully obvious, and yet I didn’t think of it. Let’s hope Apple at least considers this.
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Cabel: Apple’s Next-Generation Themes
Cabel finds and analyzes Apple’s patent filing for a resolution-independent user interface, which includes screenshots of their internal theme creation tool. I stand by my prediction that we’ll see a whole new visual look for Leopard, probably tending more towards the darker look of Apple’s “Pro” apps like Aperture and Final Cut. And yes, it’ll be resolution-independent.
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Arno’s Blog: The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown Feature
Interesting account of the design process at Apple as it relates to the Shut Down Apple menu item.
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What Vista looked like in 2003
Wow. A few years ago, Vista looked entirely different. And guess what? It was actually pretty hot! Like Nathan said…what happened!? Watching this video makes me want a PC with Longhorn. Looking at the current screenshots makes me need Vista like a need a hole in the head.
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Rands In Repose: Bright, Patient Design
Rands on an interface design philosophy he calls “Bright, Patient Design.” TextMate is the BPD poster boy, and who am I to argue with anyone that says TextMate is the shit?
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Scrybe: online personal information management app
Some really brilliant UI stuff here. It’s not clear if this is Javascript-powere, Flash-powered, or powered by some other technology — but either way, it looks great. Looking forward to see it in live action. Via [Adrian](http://holovaty.com].
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The New Audi TT
Beautiful car, uniquely designed website. I dig it.
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Overflow for Mac OS X
I’m not sure I personally will use this, but it does look like an interesting solution to the full dock problem.
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Andy Budd interviewed by fadtastic
Andy says, “Take Flickr. I personally love the user experience of this site–despite a few usability issues–but other people can find it confusing. Conversely there are millions of teenagers who think MySpace is the best thing in the world, despite the fact that it looks like the back end of a bus and is about as usable as a chocolate teapot.” Sounds about right.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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