Previously, I introduced my coworkers to web standards and usability design. My new goal is to make sure they incorporate that into every project.
Recently went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art where Modern European Design is featured in a special exhibit (no photography allowed). Works from people like Phillipe Starck, Marcel Wonders, Ron Arad, and Marc Newsman.
This lead me to research some of the art I saw.
Which lead me to this cool bag found on designboom:
GOOD Magazine has an easy to understand graphic describing why we’re in a recession.
GOOD.is Transparency: Making Sense of the Financial Mess Submission from Liam Johnstone.
Seems to me that getting into statistics and visualizations of data is a smart career move. There’s so much information available these days. We need to package it in a way people understand. Maybe that will help avoid recessions like this in the future.
I’m starting to learn some open source statistic packages, including R and GGobi.
A short follow-up to the To Do list article.
Cooper (an interaction design firm) has some interesting ideas on email in-boxes.
Word is the standard word processor. The Office 2007 ribbon makes it even easier. Check out the ribbon story.
Is there a better way to create your documents? Maybe…or maybe just a different way.
Check out LaTeX and Lyx, two interesting alternative (and free) word processors that let you build your documents the way you build your webpages: separating logical structure from formatting.
New and Interesting Online Interactions
280 Slides. It’s beautiful, free, and very useful. An amazing online slideshow maker.
Swype. Take a look at an interesting new way to type on touch screens.
Five Second Test. For UI designers, understanding a users first impression is important. A 5 second test is a usability exercise where you show your interface design for just five seconds and then ask the viewer to describe what they saw. This website makes getting first impression very easy. Make it a part of your design toolbox if you make software or webpages.
Adobe CS4 Product Info. An interesting feature from Adobe’s CS4 product page. Roll over a product name in any of the 4 software bundles, and the same product is highlighted in the other 3 bundles. Makes it easier to compare bundles and decide which is right for you.
Did you know?
Pressing the Alt key in MS Office 2007 software will superimpose the hotkeys used with Alt onto the interface. Now it’s easy even for novices to speed up their workflow and stop using the mouse.
Other Interesting Things
DaPino Colada. Beautiful, free vector images from some talented designers in the Neatherlands.
Konica Minolta: Museum of Beauty. I found this presentation compelling. A virtual tour of the Venus de Milo, one of the world’s most famous sculptures, with insights about how it was made and what it may have looked like if the missing pieces were put in place.
Edit — Link was down last time I checked.
Short post today! Firefox 3 is now official. Go download it! There are some nice new features that I’m sure you’ll learn on your own.
Read on for my favorite change.
In Firefox 2, after you typed your username and password into a site, a Firefox pop-up dialogue box appears asking if you’d like to save the password for next time. You can choose “Yes”, “Never for this site”, or “Not Now”. The web page won’t load unless you respond to the pop-up. Since I am hardly ever sure if I used the right password, I usually choose “Not Now”, so that I won’t accidentally save the wrong password.
Firefox 3 asks you the same question, except instead of an obtrusive pop-up, it uses an attractive drop-down dialogue bar right under the menu bar. The page continues to load even if you don’t respond Why is this so great? Now I can wait to see if the site accepted my password. Once I see that I used the right password, I click “Yes”. Firefox will no longer save an accidentally mistyped password!
A small change, but much more usable!
P.S. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been helping shoot a movie (!), have been trying to reorganize my office at work, just got a tablet PC (it’s used, but it’s awesome!), been moving a lot of furniture into my apartment, and I’ve adopted a new exercise regimen.)
IxD is an art, not a science. Trying to make it a science can get you bad data.
Jakob Nielson’s article on Quantitative Analysis explains why sometimes numbers are misleading.
Chris Fahey alerts you to not get caught up in looking for science in the art of user research. He explains how some companies require statistics to prove something works. You can make numbers say anything you want.
I’m not saying statistics are useless and user research doesn’t give data. But user research is about finding patterns in a specific set of users: patterns that should translate into product behavior.
I finally picked up a Nintendo Wii (new and LESS than MSRP!) and got started surfing the internet through my TV. Being on a low-rez TV, it’s hard to read text unless you zoom in, and with zooming, you sometimes you have to scroll horizontally. The help with that, the browser developers (Opera) created a mode that displays pages in a single column fitting nicely on your screen with text the perfect size. It looks a bit like a page with the CSS removed, except for colors. I haven’t looked at a table-based layout with it yet.
Sites designed for accessibility (including this one) look just fine in it and are very readable. Unfortunately, many of the sites on the web still haven’t discovered how to make sites accessible. Maybe with the proliferation of more web-enabled devices like the Wii, people will realize that not everyone views the web the way they usually do. The benefit for most people is that they can view the web on non-standard devices. Another more important (my opinion) benefit is that people with disabilities will have access to the same content that everyone else takes for granted.
I previously wrote about how taking the time to learn your software can save you loads of time.
Another thing to be aware of is all the great freebies lots of programs throw in. Specifically, I’m talking about templates. Tons of software have template, but it’s not often that we really look to see what those templates have to offer.
Microsoft Word has hundreds of useful template, including legal documents, calendars, agendas, brochures, time management reminders for your team, etc… Really, there’s so much good stuff here, it’s worth it to take a few hours and figure out which ones are useful for your business. Just make sure make a note of it. After all, it’ll do you no good to flip through the templates if you forget to ever use them. I’ve got a word document on my desktop that has a list of templates useful for my team to use on projects. Whenever we get a new project, I’ve already got a huge resource of materials to help us organize, manage, and develop.
The same goes for most products from Adobe, especially InDesign.
Packaged templates are another oft overlooked feature, along with shortcut keys, that can drastically improve your productivity. The trick is taking the time to know what’s there and remember to use them.