When I was eleven, my parents bought a Mac Plus. It had a tiny monochrome screen, a floppy drive, and 1MB of memory. And it came with something called HyperCard. HyperCard let you make stuff. It had documents called stacks, each a series of cards – similar to PowerPoint today. In addition to graphics and text,…
Design Principles
This is an excerpt from the upcoming Android Design Patterns: Interaction Design Solutions for Developers (Wiley, 2013) by Greg Nudelman Anything that slows down customers or gets in their way after they download your app is a bad thing. That includes sign-up/sign-in forms that show up even before potential customers can figure out if the app…
Let Them Pee: Avoiding the Sign-Up/Sign-In Mobile Antipattern
This article explains what conceptual models are and describes the value of developing a conceptual model of a software application before designing its user interface. Conceptual Model: a Model for Users’ Mental Model A conceptual model of an application is the model of the application that the designers want users to understand. By using the…
Conceptual Models in a Nutshell
This is an excerpt from the upcoming “Android Design Patterns: Interaction Design Solutions for Developers” (Wiley, 2013) by Greg Nudelman The first thing your customers see when they download and open your app is the welcome mat you roll out for them. Unfortunately, this welcome mat commonly contains unfriendly impediments to progress and engagement: End…
End User License Agreement (EULA) Presentation
Mobile Welcome Experience Antipattern
There is no UX for us That’s right! I said it. For us (designers, information architects, interaction designers, usability professionals, HCI researchers, visual designers, architects, content strategists, writers, industrial designers, interactive designers, etc.) the term user experience design (UX) is useless. It is such an over generalized term that you can never tell if someone…
User Experience Go Away
As the web design community explores using game design principles in our work, we must be aware of how and when they are appropriate.
Christina Wodtke takes a closer look at two key principles, mastery and flow, and explains how we might use them in application design.
Flow, Mastery and Ease-of-Use
Leonardo, the genius. Yet, even the great Leonardo faltered from time to time. Brian Sullivan shares the tale of Leonardo’s kitchen nightmare and teases out the lessons we can all learn from failure.
Leonardo’s Kitchen Nightmare
Jon Bolt explores how changing the discussion from “functionality” to “complexity” helps product owners and designers better evaluate the real impact new features have on a product.
Complexity and User Experience
Understanding features in terms of complexity instead of functionality
Stephen Turbek highlights the various, subtle pressures on a user that reduce a user’s “effective intelligence”, or what they actually use when using an interface.
Are your users S.T.U.P.I.D?
How good design can make users effective