From a design perspective, I sort of knew what route I was going to go down with this application. I wanted to draw attention to interface components using colour and push back the rest of the interface using grey tones. Adobe’s new CS6 suite and Ableton Live are classic examples of this.
I downloaded the Apple Human Interface Guidelines today – which is a hefty 300-odd page document that can be downloaded as a pdf. This is very worth having and made a great resource for the designing of my Cyclo audio application.
Continuing on from my previous post, this is another great site that contains a very extensive list of UX tools used in the industry. I must admit, I hadn’t heard of a lot of these.
I found a great Touch Gesture Reference Guide by Luke Wroblewski today. It’s available over at lukew.com. It is a fantastic resource that also includes Omnigraffle, Visio and EPS stencils.
This app has gained a lot of positive feedback over the last 2 years – particularly with the UI crowd. I went ahead & purchased this today & I have to say it has some very useful features – multiple artboards / canvases is incredibly potent for mocking up different states of an interface.
For the IDM22 Interface & Information Design project I wanted to adopt a lean, quick approach all round. After reading Jeff Gothelf’s excellent “Lean UX” book I realised that my product needed trimming down. It was very large, possibly cumbersome and from a prototype point of view, what was I actually testing? The main aim of Cyclo is to create a fun interactive audio environment with drag and drop behaviour so this is what I have decided to focus on.
I found a great article (and explanation) on quick and cheap usability testing. This was particularly useful for a website I am evaluating for a client.
Personally, I tend to gel with these relaxed approaches more than formal lab settings. Maybe its just me but I really don’t think people use the web like this (i.e., a focused lab setting) . In my opinion, modern browsing is often performed on the bus / train etc (via mobile), cafe’s / bar or in the lounge whilst watching TV – or something similar. The obvious benefit to these kind of techniques is they are cheap and quick to perform.
Interesting read here by Aaron Legaspi and Amit Jakhu. Beautifully presented too, with nice transitions & responsive design.
I’m a sucker for electronic drone / ambient music so I thought I’d post this little beauty that I have been listening to today. I listen to a lot of this kind of thing & often drone can sound flat, boring & way too cold. This is cold but also warm. It glistens and sparkles as it oozes into your eardrums with elegance and control – give it a spin!
I was reading some interesting articles today on LinkedIn. Is their a difference between “user” and “customer”? Is “customer” experience outside of the scope of “user” experience?