Hot answers tagged design
97
Here's my 2 cents (just my own assumption).
I'm guessing they viewed the button on the right hand side as the primary action button as it's closer to the users thumb, with the button on the left for secondary/less-used action, as it's slightly further away from the thumb (more of a physical exertion on the user).
They then may have wanted to label them ...
51
I think the process of producing software is much more efficient if the designers (or those that contribute to the design) have a strong technical understanding of the medium. For instance, in designing a website it helps to understand what can be achieved via CSS because if you design things that can't be expressed with CSS and require images instead (or ...
32
To answer your questions very directly:
Is it acceptable to have a 4.0-like layout on older versions of Android (e.g. 2.1)?
Yes. It's fine, in general, to use Holo styling on earlier versions of the platform. There are certainly elements of the Android 4.0 interaction palette that may be a bit jarring to users at first (for example the contextual ...
29
For anyone mathematically inclined, the answer is to use a log scale.
For non-mathematical people, you may be better off showing a break in the chart and then the extreme value.
21
From a historical viewpoint, I suspect the reason is simply "because someone thought it would be a good idea".
In fact, I did a little bit of digging. The padlock icon for HTTPS links was first introduced to MediaWiki in 2004 as part of the then-new MonoBook skin by Gabriel Wicke. Specifically, it first appears (along with a generic link icon and special ...
16
You could use logarithmic axes. This allows you to compactly visualize wide ranging variables.
To illustrate, here is a very simple logarithmic visualization:
6 942 535 341
23 598
419 203
8 201
3
The length of each datum represented as a number is (roughly) log_10 of that number. So just printing the numbers in a ...
14
User Experience is not devoted to suppress revolutionary ideas nor innovation. In fact User Experience is the opposite: making sure new ideas and innovation works the way users expect. User Experience has nothing to do with the business plan of Foursquare, but rather how to make the check-in User Experience as simple, easy to understand and joyful as ...
14
Of course we have to!
Well, maybe not technically understanding or knowing the actual syntax of the implementation of a feature, but we should understand and be aware of how much effort goes into implementing certain features, ie. how expensive they are. Good UX doesn't come cheap all the time concerning the time it takes to realize the design.
UX people ...
14
1990's design is a symptom of a poor design aesthetic driven by the fact that computers were at the time constrained by what the end user could handle. This led to design with three main flaws:
loud color choices designed to be "web-safe"
poor font choices often involving Comic Sans, Papyrus, or Viner Hand ITC, as these were three of the "fanciest" fonts ...
12
For a definitive answer, I guess you're going to have to track down the original developers of the product.
I would like to make a guess as why this layout was chosen though. I think it is deliberate. I think of the order of the A and B buttons as actions, A being the primary action and the secondary. When holding the controller, you'd want the primary ...
10
In addition to the HEART metrics (Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task Success) we also measure 1) new user adoption by whether or not training costs decreased and 2) existing user adoption by whether help calls decreased.
I'll try to answer your follow up question and to do so you must first understand the personality of the user's you're ...
10
A conversation happens in time.
Person 1 (P1) starts a conversation, the second person (P2) replies to what the first said (in the past) and then asks a third person (P3) what they think (in the future):
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
When Person 2 replies, they are replying to something that was said in ...
9
Goals and vision are the question. User experience is the answer.
User experience is not just about what users need. It's about meeting the product owner's goals or vision, while taking user needs into consideration. These goals or vision might be revolutionary or conservative. In addition, if you research both the owner requirements and the users' needs ...
9
An anecdotal perspective ...
On a couple of occasions, I've worked with supposed 'UX Experts' that know nothing of the implementation. In those cases my role was primarily as Creative Director but I found myself progressively taking on the UX role. The reason being, the expert didn't have the breadth of knowledge to push the experience beyond copy cat ...
8
The Right Answer is Responsive Design as mentioned earlier. Take a look at some.
http://framelessgrid.com/
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
http://www.getskeleton.com/
Responsive design works because it scales with the available screen size. So, when designing a website or web app you can be sure it will display appropriately when using phones, ...
8
UX - User Experience is the field of design enlighting and useable software.
UCD - User Centered Design is a process of how to achieve this.
So, UX can't be about hygiene factors by definition, because it is no process like agile, waterfall or UCD is. It's not about how to reach your goal, it's an area where you work.
User Centered Design
You said there ...
8
User Experience and the design there of should consider all possible situations that the user may run into. This includes changes in the behavior of things, digital or not.
As an example I would like to mention the design of cars. A car changes behavior according to external factors, such as weather and of course aging. If the designer of the car didn’t ...
8
It's also worth considering that Japanese gamers read from right to left. So in Japan, the buttons would be in alphabetical order.
What would happen if Nintendo elected to switch the button order for the US market? It seems like that inconsistency would cause way more drama than dealing with buttons that look reversed!
CORRECTION: See Plutor's comment ...
7
There is research, but not much on specific aesthetic quibbles. Evidence does suggests that aesthetics are relevant - that users will perceive similar interfaces with differing visual designs differently. However, I've never read a paper that identifies which kinds of visual degradation are most harmful.
On the importance of aesthetics, some papers to read ...
7
The short answer is no, having no knowledge of code won't prevent you from making a career out of UX.
But...
Having a good working knowledge of how things can be implemented, what is possible, what isn't, will always help. Understanding the technical processes on a basic level can prove tremendously beneficial when it comes to conveying your ideas to the ...
7
Create a website for your portfolio. It is in essence the same as what you would need for a photography portfolio, so you have many templates to choose from in many content management systems (such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, etc).
Display it on dedicated portfolio sites. I have hired people directly off such sites based primarily on their portfolio, ...
6
User interfaces are usable when they behave in the same way that a user would predict they behave.
Skeuomorphism can be used to teach a user how a user interface will behave, for example, by making buttons pop out visually so it appears as if the right thing to do is to press on them. This is what Don Norman called affordances -- a pop-out button affords ...
6
It depends on your slant. I've know UX people who focus on research or IA and don't get involvted with UI or prototyping, but I also know some (like me) that are 100% fluent in HTML and CSS (or Less, compass, sass, etc etc) and a bit of jQuery and coffeescript that helps prototype and provide things to developers to help get the message across. But I also ...
6
The short answer: Design can be one of the responsibilities that fall under the larger category of UX.
According the A Project Guide to UX Design, a UX designer generally fulfills the rolls of three other categories of job, which may have separate people to perform them in extraordinarily large companies:
Information Architect
Interaction Designer
User ...
5
I wouldn't use sub-tabs. Why not use an ExpandableListView for busses/trains/trams instead?
Anyway I think your premise is wrong. No one is interested in all departures at a place. That's the way it is done on train stations and at airports because many people want to see departure information and the system must provide an answer to all viewers.
But you ...
5
I feel an ambiguous design is a bad design.
Make it clear to the user what will happen. Perhaps an 'add' link in the row you're modifying. Or use ajax like functionality to add it on the fly (this becomes harder when you require data for certain fields).
Or color the row a different color when it's unsaved. Or fade from green to the normal color after ...
5
Simple Solution
Make the menu expand on click so it's mobile-friendly. Then add "All Posts" to the dropdown. That will make it clear and usable for everyone.
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
In this example, I also simplify your dropdown options; consider leaving out "Add Category" from this list, since it doesn't ...
5
These are the general recommendations I could find. This is what is done in Apple products (Mac OS X, and I believe iOS too) but also partly on Android:
Scrollbars appear for a brief moment when the scrollable panel is first made visible and then they disappear.
When the user touches the scrollable content, the scrollbars appear until the user removes his ...
5
A good designer knows the rules. A great designer knows when the rules can or should be broken. And if you can justify it, then go for it.
UX certainly allows for more mysterious paths and interfaces. It's the exception, rather than the norm, but if you can justify the exception, go for it.
A mini-critique of your sample: The ampersand should be removed. ...
5
I think it is very difficult to tell if a visual design is good or bad but you can measure if your design communicates the tone you intend. What we use at work is something similar to what the BBC used for their Glass Wall project and, I guess, it could be to what @DaveSenden refers to.
With the help of this grid you can measure the emotional response, ...
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