Showing posts with label ui design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ui design. Show all posts

The Columbia Guide to Online Style Review

The Columbia Guide to Online Style
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The Columbia Guide to Online Style ReviewCitation of materials from the (extremely) volatile web was a major problem. Creating a summary, and providing a hyperlink to the original content, proved a major issue since electronic content moves so frequently.. The Columbia Guide gives some assurance that proper citation can be given. Some of the citation style suggestions seem very redundant, and there is no clear table or quick summary to highlight the proper method for common usage. Still, as the first work of this type, it gives an excellent baseline for referencing, building, managing on-line content.The Columbia Guide to Online Style Overview

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Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps Review

Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
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Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps ReviewHere's why: it's not only a great guide to what makes iPhone apps successful, but what will increasingly be the way to make successful software for any platform. Josh does a fantastic job of getting the reader into the right mindset for creating successful apps.
This is an interface, big-idea, that's why that design works book, not a coding book. Nor is it a "how to market your iPhone app book". That said, the interviews alone with designers of big important iPhone apps about how they really designed those apps is worth the price many times over.
Warning: you will probably spend more on buying apps Josh uses as examples of what he is talking about than you will on the book itself - I guess the skills he developed writing his last book, "Best Iphone Apps: The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders", gave him five star ability for picking great to awesome apps.
Also, while I almost never buy anymore actual paper books, this one is worth it - the color, gloss stock, painstaking layout and content structure would not be done justice as a .pdf.
I could write a longer review, but I'd rather go back to reading, re-reading, mulling and thinking about the what Josh covered in this book. Can't wait for the iPad book!Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps Overview
So you've got an idea for an iPhone app -- along with everyone else on the planet. Set your app apart with elegant design, efficient usability, and a healthy dose of personality. This accessible, well-written guide shows you how to design exceptional user experiences for the iPhone and iPod Touch through practical principles and a rich collection of visual examples.

Whether you're a designer, programmer, manager, or marketer, Tapworthy teaches you to "think iPhone" and helps you ask the right questions -- and get the right answers -- throughout the design process. You'll explore how considerations of design, psychology, culture, ergonomics, and usability combine to create a tapworthy app. Along the way, you'll get behind-the-scenes insights from the designers of apps like Facebook, USA Today, Twitterrific, and many others.

Develop your ideas from initial concept to finished design
Build an effortless user experience that rewards every tap
Explore the secrets of designing for touch
Discover how and why people really use iPhone apps
Learn to use iPhone controls the Apple way
Create your own personality-packed visuals
Ten Tips for Crafting Your App's Visual Identity
Choose a personality. Don't let your app's personality emerge by accident. Before you start designing, choose a personality for your app. The right personality for the right audience and features makes an app irresistible and creates a bonafide emotional connection. Tapworthy designs have the power to charm and beguile.
Voices (left) has a Vaudeville personality appropriate to a funny-voices novelty app. iShots Irish Edition (right) creates a gritty dive-bar ambience for its collection of drink recipes.

Favor standard controls. Because they're commonplace, the standard set of controls is sometimes dismissed as visually dull. Not so fast: commonplace means familiarity and ease for your audience. Conventions are critical to instant and effortless communication. Before creating a brand new interface metaphor or inventing your own custom controls, ask whether it might be done better with the built-in gadgetry.
A coat of paint. Standard controls don't have to be dreary. Use custom colors and graphics to give them a fresh identity. This technique requires a light touch, however; don't distract from the content itself or drain the meaning from otherwise familiar controls.
Wine Steward uses standard lists (known as table views in iOS) but creates a vintage ambience by draping a backdrop image across the screen. The app adds a parchment graphic to the background of each table cell, making each entry appear to be written on an aged wine label. The burgundy-tinted navigation bar maintains the app's wine flavor.

' You stay classy. Luxurious textures applied with taste increase your app's perceived value.
' Keep it real. Realistic lighting effects and colors create elements that invite touch and create an emotional attachment. They also provide subtle guidance about what your audience can interact with.
' Borrow interface metaphors from the physical world. Lean on users' real-world experience to create intuitive experiences. People will try anything on a touchscreen, for example, that they'd logically try on a physical object or with a mouse-driven cursor. Besides these practical benefits, using an everyday object as an interface metaphor imbues an app with the same associations that folks might have with the real McCoy--a shelf of books, a retro alarm clock, a much-used chessboard, a toy robot.
' Don't be afraid to take risks. Make sure your interfaces are intuitive, sure, but don't be afraid to try something completely new and different. Designers and developers are hatching fresh iPhone magic every day, and there's still much to explore and invent. While you should look hard at whether you might accomplish what you need to do with standard controls, it's also worth asking, Am I going far enough?
The app icon is your business card. The icon carries disproportionate weight in the marketing of your app, and it's important to give it disproportionate design attention, too. Be descriptive more than artistic. Make your app icon a literal description of your app's function, interface, name, or brand.
Use a dull launch image. Disguise your app's launch image as the app background for a faster perceived launch. Always cultivate the illusion of suspended animation when switching in and out of your app.
Be kind to new users. Provide simple welcome-mat pointers for first-timers. Beware of more complex help screens; they're warning signs of an overcomplicated interface.

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User Interface Design for Programmers Review

User Interface Design for Programmers
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User Interface Design for Programmers ReviewJoel is a good writer who happens to be a programmer. That alone is enough to reccommend this one-of-a-kind book. His website contains tons of insightful, opinionated essays, and most of the time he's right, whether his topic is design, business stragegy, HR, or coding techniques. He's an ex-Microsoft employee who's saavy enough to know what MS does right and what they don't.
In this book, much of which is available at his site, he's taking an approach that I don't think anyone else has: why UI design matters to programmers. He's not talking to experienced visual desingers, or HCI people, or interaction desingers or what have you. He's talking to programmers, the folks who will actually write lines of code. This book, in a quick 150 pages, shows programmers why interaction designers will spend, say, two days worrying about a couple of words or the placement of two buttons.
Like Steve Krug's book "Don't Make Me Think", it's a somewhat lightweight treatment of the topic for an experienced UI desinger, but you'd be foolish to pass it up for that reason. This, along with Krug would be a great book for Project Managers or senior staff wondering what all the fuss about "usability" really means. Where Jakob Nielsen's preachy fussiness can bore you to tears, Joel and Krug will make you eager to put their ideas into practice.
Any company that can get its programmers, managers, and designers on the same page about the still under-appreciated value of UI design (and the analysis that goes into it) will find they can make better products faster.User Interface Design for Programmers Overview
Most programmers' fear of user interface (UI) programming comes from their fear of doing UI design. They think that UI design is like graphic design-the mysterious process by which creative, latte-drinking, all-black-wearing people produce cool-looking, artistic pieces. Most programmers see themselves as analytic, logical thinkers instead-strong at reasoning, weak on artistic judgment, and incapable of doing UI design.

In this brilliantly readable book, author Joel Spolsky proposes simple, logical rules that can be applied without any artistic talent to improve any user interface, from traditional GUI applications to websites to consumer electronics. Spolsky's primary axiom, the importance of bringing the program model in line with the user model, is both rational and simple.

In a fun and entertaining way, Spolky makesuser interfacedesign easy for programmers to grasp. After reading User Interface Design for Programmers, you'll know how to design interfaces with the user in mind. You'll learn the important principles that underlie all good UI design, and you'll learn how to perform usability testing that works.


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Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design Review

Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design
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Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design ReviewGood book. List coherently the do's and don'ts of interface design. The kind of stuff you think you know but don't practice. Actually give reasons why you should do it 'her' way but undeniably well-founded. I have used it for teaching HCI for several years now though not as a text book. One fault is that the lists of guidelines are endless. This is always the way with guidelines since they are so easy to give but difficult to follow or to interpret how one should implement the guideline. Still, I commend her section on mental models and screen layout. In particular the latter topic is still relevant despite the progress since publication.Principles and Guidelines in Software User Interface Design OverviewHere's a comprehensive sourcebook, filled with concrete designguidelines for developing clear software interfaces. In it, readerswill find practical guidelines including the high level conceptualmodel, dialog styles, organization of functionality to support usertasks, and effective error handling. Suitable for novice andexperienced software development professionals. Based on extensiveresearch in human computer interaction. Provides guidance for boththe design of traditional interfaces, such as menus and fill-informs implemented on character-based screens, and for the design ofstate-of-the-art user interfaces such as direct manipulationinterfaces including graphics, color, windows, and pointing devices.e

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GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (Interactive Technologies) Review

GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (Interactive Technologies)
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GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (Interactive Technologies) ReviewPerhaps this is beside the point, but I was hoping that this book would contain some element of lighthearted humor while discussing such a dry topic. It does not.
The introduction states explicitly that the book is not intending to discuss either UI examples that are the most flagrantly hilarious, or examples that are the worst. Rather, the book critiques UI examples that are some of the most common. The examples are good, and described in depth, with specific reasons given for their classification as mistakes. There are also suggestions in some cases for how the designers could have avoided the blooper.
As a visual designer working primarily on the Web, I found this book as a good place to start learning more about the basics of an analytical approach to User Interface design. Even though the book focusses mostly on stand-alone application design, the principles can still be applied to UI issues on the Web, certainly in Web design using forms or heavy information structure. Some examples are hard to apply to the Web, for instance, the bloopers dealing with application menubar design issues are not widely applicable to Web pages. However, this book provides a great overview of the philosophy and process of UI design.
The worst thing I can say about this book, is that it isn't any fun to read, despite the impression given by the title. Since I come from a less analytical perspective on the topic, it definitely takes some determination to read this, although it is written in a straightforward and accessible manner. The most annoying aspect of the writing is that Jeff Johnson has apparently developed some bitterness towards everyone who is not a UI professional, and he rants constantly about developers, designers, marketing, and management. While his reasoning is usually valid, many entries read like the author is venting his issues to his psychiatrist after a hard week of consulting. With all the jaded complaining about developers (who seem to be his favorite target), I can't believe any of them can tolerate reading this book.
If you can get past Jeff Johnson's fanatical personality then there is much good insight to be gained from this book, for all User Interface novices.GUI Bloopers: Don'ts and Do's for Software Developers and Web Designers (Interactive Technologies) Overview

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