Apr 14, 2010

iPad design inspiration

Because not everyone has an iPad yet. This gallery is… nice!

Apr 13, 2010

What’s in a name?

When you call yourself EverydayUI, you’ll have to write daily. (I’m sorry, my bad).

But hey. What’s in a name?

Apr 5, 2010
All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho,” 1983. Read the article about The importance of Failure.
Apr 4, 2010

The new ForeUI 2: Balsamiq combined with Axure.

I always liked Axure for prototyping. It’s simple to use, it has advanced ‘event handling’ and it can export to HTML, which means everyone can see it everywhere. Also, the priority, assign and note features are awesome when working in a team.

On the other hand, I also like programs like Balsamiq and ForeUI, which are more like dynamic sketches. Because of this, the prototype looks more unfinished and is easier to understand for clients. In most cases I start out with Balsamiq for the first rough sketches and then progress on Axure. But… my feeling is that this process can be steamlined more.

ForeUI 2 has made some good progress on closing in to Axure. It now has really advanced event handling (like onKeyUp).

While I still prefer Axure because of it’s stability and better user interface, I find ForeUI a very good alternative. Check out the demo of ForeUI 2.

Apr 2, 2010
There is much we do not recognise and there is so much we ignore from our immature days of play, learning and discovery. The relevance of some lessons and understanding may not seem immediately apparent, but I believe they are all mightily important to understanding how we all interact socially, with the physical world around us, and with the many many interfaces we come into contact with on a daily basis.
Johny Holland: Learning from Our Childhood
Mar 31, 2010
Back in the 1980s, if you didn’t get to the phone in time, you’d hear the caller starting to leave a message. No big deal, you could just pick up the phone and cut in. It was so straightforward and obvious, you didn’t even think of it as a feature.
Via Why today’s voicemail systems are worse than 1980
Mar 29, 2010

Never use flags for language selection

I never thought of it before, but Karl Gilis made an excellent point about flags in language selection screens on his website (dutch). Flags are linked to countries, not to languages. One country can have more than one language. So, linking flags to a language doesn’t make sense!

This screenshots illustrates a Belgium website which uses flags for language selection. (link: usability-blog.be)

Mar 27, 2010

Some notes on ‘contact pages’

Contact pages are underrated, while they’re often the ultimate ‘goal’ of a website. Here are some quick notes on contact pages!

Track your goals

Google Analytics offers a simple way of tracking ‘goals’ on a website. Assuming contacting you is one of your goals, it might be a good idea to define this as goal in your tracking software, so you can measure the ways people get there.

The contact form

Websites which are selling something, often tend to ‘narrow down’ the contact form, by asking questions like ‘what’s the budget?’, or ‘project type’. I don’t think that’s a good thing. You might scare the potential clients and also, what if he/she likes to know some other stuff before getting started?

The contact form should be used for initial contact. After that, follow up e-mails can refer to project type, or budget questions.

The contact form often should be as simple as a compose mail screen in Outlook, Hotmail or Gmail. Give the user the opportunity of writing something he wants.

Add an address

Your office address might never be used on this page, but it has another purpose. If you want to look professional, you want your visitors to trust you. Adding an address, phone number, e-mail address is a good way to gain trust.

Some contact pages

Fajne Chlopaki has a nice contact page

Speak Humans links their ‘Contact’ link to an mailto address. Very annoying!

Mar 24, 2010
When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power. The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They’re already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers.
http://johnnyholland.org/2010/03/24/an-interview-with-jesse-james-garrett/
Mar 23, 2010

What if all users got a voice?

One of the major differences between a good website three years ago and a good website nowadays is the information density on a webpage. For some reason we wanted to create the perfect dashboard a few years ago.

Why was that? And what has changed?

Dashboards have the ability to communicate information fast. When we’re driving a car, we want to be able to see how fast we’re driving within 0.1 second. Also, we don’t want to get distracted by other information. That’s what makes dashboard design so difficult; the ability to send the right information on the right time.

It’s not that strange that we wanted to create the same effect on the web as well. Communication strong messages, in a short amount of time, can be very powerful. Especially for commercial websites, such as webshops. A few years ago, it seems, the marketingman ruled the web. 

But. Today it’s not the marketingman, not the content manager, not the webmasters, nor the designer who’s ruling the web. It’s you. It’s the user. And the beauty of the internet: the user has a voice.

So we are focussing on the user today. User Interface. User Experience. User-ability. Those are hot topics on the internet. The user doesn’t want all information on the webpage to scream for attention. He wants to able to find what he seeks.

What we’re doing right now is designing for the user as we never did before. We never got this much instant feedback. We never got to measure as specific as we can now.

I’m wondering.. if the driver of a car had a voice, what would dashboards look like?

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Michel Kuik posts and discusses a new UI pattern and article every day. You can subscribe via RSS.