Category: Theoretical Issues

Rich UX Crib Sheet

This posting is meant to serve as a practical follow-up to the more reflective, academic article I recently published on boxesandarrows about designing for a rich user experience.

This is a “crib sheet” summarizes the main points of that article, with links to resources to help the dedicated UI designer who strives to craft a richer quality of engagement with digital media (web, mobile, desktop apps). Of course, richness transcends the digital, towards immersive games, environments, and performances; yet this set of tips is focused on pixel-based encounters for brevity. More later on non-digital rich encounters…

High-Level Issues

+ Re-perceive the design as a talk or presentation to an audience, persuading them this product is best for meeting their goals, as demonstrated in the navigation, functionality, content, and style.

+ Consider how to enhance that communication at the level of structure, behavior, and/or style by using a) good visual and interaction design and b) emerging technologies like Flash, CSS, AJAX, etc.

+ Make sure such enhancements improve the user’s efficiency, confidence, desire or other stated goals and not for the sake of technical hype or coolness.

Detail Design Tips

+ Use in-place editing of labels, names, and other data, whether inside a form or table grid

+ Present immediate feedback and error validation with in-place visual cues, rather than a dialog box or separately loaded page

+ Use desktop-inspired interactions like drag-and-drop, floating palettes, keyboarding shortcuts, as the web and desktop become blurred

+ Use collapsible panels and panes of information; through usability ascertain the default states

+ Apply visual embellishments to emphasize key pieces of information and functionality, like tabs or buttons or messages, or to add stylistic flair inmoderation

+ Remember to sustain the underlying grid layout and visual balance of elements

References
+ Designing Visual Interfaces by Mullet/Sano
+ Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell
+ Tufte’s books, particularly Envisioning Information
+ About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper
+ Designing for Interactionby Dan Saffer
+ Thoughts on Interaction Design by Jon Kolko

Happiness or Meaning?

I know this blog is supposed to be about lessons from my day job at a design firm in Silicon Valley, but this little tete-a-tete between two characters from the breakaway hit show Heroes is rather profound and worth citing here:

Linderman: ”There come a time when a man has to ask himself whether he wants a life of happiness or a life of meaning.”

Nathan: ”I’d like to have both.”

Linderman: ”Can’t be done. Two very different paths. To be truly happy, a man must live absolutely in the present, no thought of what’s gone before and no thought of what lies ahead. But a life with meaning, a man is condemned to wallow in the past and obsess about the future.”

Wow. There’s gotta be a connection to pushing pixels and creating good user experience and all that in there somewhere.

Blogged with Flock

What is a pixel anyway?

An abbreviation of “picture element” but so much more! Basically it’s a mathematical abstraction, not simply a “dot on the screen”, as one may mistakenly presume. Nor does it have a physically determinate size, since it’s size is dependent upon many factors, including screen resolution of the display device. This can become very metaphysical very quickly, but essentially as an abstraction that is processed electrically via “computer parts” (extreme layman’s terms) and represented on the display via RGB color values, pixels are in effect not “real” but simulations/representations of mathematically defined logical structures/units. Sounds like the matrix, doesn’t it???

More to it than this…trying to find papers/books that refer to this deeper view of pixels and will update shortly.