A sample text widget
Etiam pulvinar consectetur dolor sed malesuada. Ut convallis
euismod dolor nec pretium. Nunc ut tristique massa.
Nam sodales mi vitae dolor ullamcorper et vulputate enim accumsan.
Morbi orci magna, tincidunt vitae molestie nec, molestie at mi. Nulla nulla lorem,
suscipit in posuere in, interdum non magna.
|
As a user experience designer, one is always looking at things from a user point of view. That is well accepted in the industry and elsewhere now. Of late there has been a plethora of devices coming into the scene and majority of them have being driven by touch capabilities. This has resulted in a lot of designers starting to design for the device than design for the user. A few market leaders have also gone to the extent of saying (or atleast have been made to believe) that they do not rely on User Research anymore and just do things with conviction.
With the mobile phone becoming what the PC was a few years ago, the possibilities have increased n fold. There are applications being built everyday. The ease of putting things out there in the market place, open for a wide customer base to use it, has resulted in millions of stuff being built and often for users on whom the designers have not done any primary research. Moreover, the question arises that there are all of these being designed by designers or by anyone who has an access to the SDKs.
With User experience being adopted by many companies in early stages of their product development, I reckon that there are a lot of people doing a bunch of stuff in the name of Design and User Experience Design in particular.
The only question I have is whether we are dying up on the user and relying more on the device. I hope not.
Today Came across a really interesting slide-share presentation today that was a part of a workshop on mobiles. They discuss about the spread of mobiles and how we are becoming more device dependent, in both our actions and the things we create. I . . . → Read More: Design for Device or Design for User
One of the classic principles in User Experience is that in no condition you should confuse the user. I am sure every practising User Experience Designer would tell you that in the very first meeting. As a designer one has to ensure that you do not end up giving instructions that are contradictory in nature.
Check out this popup message that I got on a Microsoft site, when I was trying to signup for the Microsoft 360 tool.
Go, confuse your user!
Now most users, would not even read the text, and straightaway click on the “Hide this window” button. Yes, I did check it with a few other people around me too. They said they clicked or would click the button without reading the text. After all a button has a higher affordance, and is more likely to be clicked, when it appears on a pop-up (as that’s the thing you are supposed to do)
So an example, like this, you are just reducing the user experience but providing such options. My point, is why would you do that?
I kept clicking on the “Hide this window” and the window refused to hide!
Sometimes, I really think who does the UX at MS. I know a few friends who work there, and I should check with them. Even if the excuse is that it is a survey by a third party, I still believe that there should be a UX quality check, in an organization that is impacting atleast a billion people worldwide!
The way I see it, I think this is a blessing for us designers to work on more startup ideas. It gives a lot of confidence that quite a few successful startups like Youtube, Flickr were founded by designers.
I am hopeful that there would be more of such activities in the near future, and also in India in particular.
I am often fascinated by TED talks, and this one is another one of those. Have a special interest in education, so I keep looking out for videos related to it. This is one that I had seen quite some time back, but re-saw it again today.
About the video (from Youtube) : Clifford Stoll could talk about the atmosphere of Jupiter. Or hunting KGB hackers. Or Klein bottles, computers in classrooms, the future. But he’s not going to. Which is fine, because it would be criminal to confine a man with interests as multifarious as Stoll’s to give a talk on any one topic. Instead, he simply captivates his audience with a wildly energetic sprinkling of anecdotes, observations, asides — and even a science experiment. After all, by his own definition, he’s a scientist: “Once I do something, I want to do something else.”
Just love the energy with which the entire talk it delivered.
Interesting Video that I came across this morning.
Excerpts from the talk- “The best designs come from not one, but hundreds of well-made decisions. The worst designs arise out of hundreds of poorly-made decisions. All that stands between you and a great design is the quality of your decisions. Where do they come from?”
Jared Spool – Anatomy of a Design Decision from User Interface Engineering on Vimeo.
Chrome Installer
So it seems to be a season of change in branding and shifting to newer logos. We have been seeing a lot of them and Google joins the bandwagon too, with the change in the Google Chrome logo.
I did not like the logo in the first place, for the sheer reason that it was difficult to replicate and was not flexible to be used across different mediums.
On that front I do like the new logo, that it is easy to replicate and reproduce across different mediums.When you are thinking of a
I like it for its simplicity, but find it lacking in personality. It does not do justice to the brand that we have come to think of Google as.
So I as such, have mixed opinions on the logo. I do appreciate the fact that there is this effort on making all logos of all it’s products using the same set of colors, so that it represents as a part of the whole Google family.
The transformation
Reminds me of this earlier comic strip that was in the social media when the first version of Chrome was launched.
Would be really interesting to know about the design thought process behind the logo. Wonder if its available anywhere as a case study.
So, Nokia has decided to let go of its iconic font the Nokia Sans that adorned its handsets and website and other materials for quite sometime, and replace it with Nokia Pure.
Nokia Pure (image courtesy – http://brandbook.nokia.com/)
Here the entire suit of fonts to see.
Nokia Pure-all in family (image courtesy – http://brandbook.nokia.com/)
I love the fact that they are really putting the word usability at the core of things.
The move could also be seen as a step to to align its branding with the decision to move to Windows Phone platform, where they use the Segoe WP font.
Also got to see this video from the Font Designer’s workshop where the font was created! Super video this one!
PureReversal from Build on Vimeo.
Here’s an video of IDEO CEO, Tim Brown and his thougts on Design Thinking and in particular on its potential in India.
Interview – Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO – WEF 2011 – Davos, Switzerland from Aabhira Aditya on Vimeo.
There are multiple interesting points that he talks about.
Timeline cue: Design thinking and India (1:00) Design,innovation and entrepreneurship driving India’s inclusive growth (1:58) Transdisciplinary design education (3:43) Design thinking and designers (5:18) The scalability of design thinking (7:13)
Of late there has been an increased focus on the word Design in India. There are lot of discussions on the DesignIndia forums and also a lot of designers making their voices heard. There are a couple new design magazines that have been launched and that just shows that the market is definitely opening up to it more.
Signs of good times ahead. I hope.
That is what happens at any event that I attend and give a talk. At the TEDxMANIT Bhopal, I had a good time. I felt inspired by the other speakers and performers and also I hope I was able to inspire a few with my talk.
At TEDxMANIT Bhopal
Just love the amount of positive energy that each of these events bring along with itself.
Seen here along with Nakul Shenoy and Pradeep Ghosh, who were the other speakers at the event.
We live in exciting times. There is Information all around us. So much so that we often feel overwhelmed by it and would drown in it. There’s Information that is presented upfront to us. Information that is waiting to be tapped into and hidden beneath a layer of uncertainty waiting to be uncovered. Information that is meant to be circulated and shared. Information that is useful, and Information that is futile.
The medium of information gathering and sharing has change drastically over the past few years. With the introduction of newer devices to consume information, the spectrum gets wider day by day.
Information sharing is happening at a pace that is unprecedented. Before you know it, the information is reached to a an audience that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. With a lot more people consuming information on their personal devices like the cell phones and the other personal gadgets, information is ready to go at all times. Just to give an insight, when the
The seamless blend between the network and the product in hand and the ease of reaching to the social network adds an extra dimension to the whole information dissemination and information consumption life-cycle. Information is also not only being sent out, but also being re-worked upon and shared across networks again and again.
One of the most interesting videos that we came across was this Ignite Talk Flash Mob Gone Wrong by Tom Scott. The event in the video did not happen all in the same sequence, but it give a great illustration of whats possible in the times that we are living it. Go watch it Now!
|
|
Comments are closed 