Subscribe to RSS feed

Archive for December, 2008

Increasing Complexity of Interfaces

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

sketch_complexity

Perhaps this is plain obvious, but interfaces are becoming more and more complex. Traditional physical interfaces of products (think lawn mowers and toothbrushes) do not change much as we interact with them. The toothbrush perhaps bends in and out due to pressure, and changes colour with time. Taking a step forward in the direction of screen based interfaces, the complexity of form begins to increase as the possibilities to interact with more and more pages widens. Now with the rise of state based interfaces (provided with AJAX and highly responsive rich internet applications) the complexity of form increases even more as individual elements begin to change around within pages. For me this raises one question. Namely, what is the effect of this rise in complexity on a design process.

Posted in Sketches | No Comments »

Wireframing with Adobe Catalyst

Friday, December 19th, 2008

A nice video on wireframing with Adobe Catalyst (previously called Thermo) just appeared and has some good insights into the upcoming application. Peter Flynn spends a full hour showing some of the things which are possible. Here is my take on it.

Some negative remarks:

  • Page scaling? What happens when you have 30 pages? The top bar seems a bit limited in displaying the pages in a horizontal scroll area. Each page takes up quite a bit of space.
  • The transitions between design and preview mode still feels very clunky just as in Flash, with the whole compilation procedure.
  • Event handling is a bit limited. At least three event handlers are visible: onclick, onrollover, and onrollout. What about onkeypress, onrightclick, on ondrag? AJAX and rich interactions have more power than what can be seen in this application.
  • Where are event conditions? As an example, nowadays interaction designers sometimes specify a 1-2 second delay onmouseout before menu is hidden, which can increase usability (protect an item from disappearing accidentaly). At least from the video I have not seen this visible.
  • The program is a bit ambitious in claiming to deliver eventual production ready code.
  • The interaction between Flash Catalyst with the importing and exporting seems a bit tricky.

Nice things:

  • Thorough effect / transition order control. It is possible to control the duration and order of effects or transitions between states on a mini time line, as well as stack multiple transitions together.
  • Shared objects are possible. Edit once, update everywhere.
  • Independent states. Users can define multiple states for each object which are independent across objects. (just like in fluidIA) :)

Posted in Nice Finds | No Comments »

Intended User Flows vs. Real Activity

Sunday, December 14th, 2008
Intended vs Real Activity

As interaction designers or information architects we often envision the right paths for users to take in the form of user flows. In these documents activity is so sterile and perfect. Often these flows are represented as straight lines with clear beginnings and endings, and a high degree of simplification. Perhaps even to some of us it gives a false sense that we are in control.

However in reality, use is very much unpredictable. The activities people take have different lengths, starting, and end points. Activities of people form unpredictable patterns invisible to us during ideation. For me this way of looking at activity raises a question: can we create tools to help us visualize rapidly more complex patterns of real (not intended) user activity?

Posted in Sketches | 1 Comment »

Immersive Gaming

Friday, December 12th, 2008

Immersive experiences of kids playing video games. Now how about getting adults as immersed while adding items to an online shopping cart?

YouTube Preview Image

Posted in Nice Finds | 2 Comments »

Cursor Affordances

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

exp_floatcursaffordance1

Advanced interactions such as double left clicks, right clicks, mouse scrolling, and dragging (not visible here) are increasingly useful for enabling richer ways of providing input. These interaction posibilities, as useful as they are, however are often invisible to the user. More so, often multiple interactions (such as a left click and right click) are possible at the same time in a particular place. That’s where traditional cursors break down. This simple experiment, with the help of some CSS and Javascript, aims to provide clearer visual indicators and combat the problems with floating multi layered cursor affordances.

>> http://linowski.ca/experiments/01_cursor_affordances/

Posted in Experiments | 7 Comments »

Here we go

Thursday, December 11th, 2008

First Post? Yup. So what is the whole reasoning behind this endeavour? Basically, I’m looking forward to write up and share my thoughts on interface and interaction design (more so on the former).  Perhaps these ideas will take the form of theoretical or philosophical write ups within the Thoughts category. Or perhaps I shall try to entertain you with occasional Javascript experiments, pushing the limits on my technical capabilities. Maybe on other days I will draw up a quick sketch to communicate more abstract design thoughts. Or, maybe I’ll just find something of interest out in the vast space of the Internet or someones backyard. Here we go …

Posted in Thoughts | No Comments »




divider

Powered by WordPress

 Subscribe to RSS.