Category: Design Principles

Design Principles / Foundational Thinking

A Truly Ambitious Product Idea: Making Stuff for People

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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, you could create buttons and tell them what to do – flip to another card, show or hide an object, and so forth. Down at

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Design Principles / Mobile UX

Let Them Pee: Avoiding the Sign-Up/Sign-In Mobile Antipattern

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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 is actually worth using. It’s a simple UX equation This antipattern seems to be going away more and more as companies are beginning to figure

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Design Principles

Conceptual Models in a Nutshell

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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 application, talking with other users, and reading the documentation, users build a model in their minds of how to use the application. Hopefully, the model

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Design Principles / Interfaces / Mobile UX

End User License Agreement (EULA) Presentation

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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 User License Agreements (EULAs). Like the overzealous zombie cross-breed between a lawyer and a customs agent, this antipattern requires multiple forms to be filled out

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Design Principles / Foundational Thinking / Interactivity

User Experience Go Away

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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 is using it to mean something specific, as in UX = IxD/IA/UI#, or to mean something overarching all design efforts. In current usage, unfortunately, it’s

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