Designers are usually the most aware of the problems in their work, and I can imagine a bunch of them in Cupertino reading Twitter during the keynote saying, “I told you we had to fix that before we shipped!” Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong.

Frank Chimero’s thoughts on the new iOS7 beta release - which seems to have shipped in, well, a beta state. There’s all kinds of great about that actually. There is little sense in thinking that the talented guys at Apple don’t realize what they have shipped. Kudos to them for being so brave.

via Dodge

(don’t think too much about it though, you’ll ruin it)

These are the slides from my talk:

Summary:
In Frank Chimero’s “The Shape of Design”, he gives a great analogy to the creative process of a painter:

Imagine an artist working on a painting in his studio. You probably see him at his easel, maulstick in hand, beret on head, diligently mixing colors on his palette or gingerly applying paint to the canvas, working from dark to light to recreate what is before him. You may see him judging the light, or speaking to his model, or loading his brush with a slated green to block in the leaves in his muse’s hair.

…

But, if you have ever painted, you know that this image is not a full picture of the process. There is a second part where the artist steps back from the easel to gain a new perspective on the work. Painting is equal parts near and far: when near, the artist works to make his mark; when far, he assesses the work in order to analyze its qualities.

…

Painting’s near and far states are akin to How and Why: the artist, when close to the canvas, is asking How questions related to craft; when he steps back, he raises Why questions concerned with the whole of the work and its purpose.

If the development (coding) is the “how”, I see wire framing phase as being the “why”. It’s important to think of your product from a holistic perspective. It’s easy to get lost into achieving technical wins, but it’s equally important to think about why those are necessary at the same time.

Wire framing should be treated as a process where you explore all the possibilities – of a product, as well as an interface. Thinking of the “how” (be it coding or the specifics of interface design) can sometimes be too restrictive.

This is close to the thoughts I had in mind when I designed Sketchkit – a wire framing tool meant to help you create quick wireframes (so you have more time to iterate and explore) in Keynote. Right now it’s only available for wire framing iPhone apps.

Of course there are quite a few “keynote based” wire framing tools out there, but they all try too hard to look like the actual UI. This distracts you as a UX researcher and misleads the client.

My slides also contained wireframes to an app that I had been working on last year with a few other friends from Singapore – these were available for anyone who needed an “idea” to start their hacking with.

It’s essential to step back and think about the “why”, it can reveal quite a few insights and uncover startling surprises – as made evident in the last few slides

Fun fact: the slides are based on a grid inspired by the Marber Grid (designed in 1961) which is used as the base grid for the covers of all Pengiun Books.

When I make website mockups, I’ve been putting a browser chrome (taken from safari) around them. It sometimes helps me visualize things better. I’m sharing the psd so it might be of use to someone else as well. The psd includes:

• A view port of 1280px by 1024px
• Guides for a 960px grid based on the http://960.gs
• Edittable URL and page title
• The chrome (and the background behind the browser) sits on top of the mockup, so it acts as a mask for your content

You can download it here

Follow me on twitter.com/isnav for updates

Leap motion-control

I’m really looking forward to more “XBOX kinect like” products coming our way in the next few years.

I’m also curious about interactions with no sensory feedback. I learnt to type on a physical (desktop/mobile) keyboard and it always felt very easy and comfortable. When I moved to typing on a sheet of glass, it felt a bit weird but I quickly got used to it. Now, it feels almost as easy as a physical keyboard. Would we learn typing on air with similar ease?

It was developed as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, the Imperial system and the Metric system.
Wikipedia

I even remember seeing the Modular Man in some painting at the art museum back home, but I didn’t realize it’s significance till now.

Companies like Apple are making design impossible for startups to ignore. Startups like Path, Airbnb, Square, and Massive Health have design at the core of their business, and they’re doing phenomenal work. But what is ‘design’ actually? Is it a logo? A WordPress theme? An innovative UI?

If you work in a/with a startup, read this and send it out to everyone. I just did.

If there was ever a wireless speaker I wanted to own, this is it.

I was excited to check out how the new Clear app team have implemented the navigation between views — especially the “back button”. In Clear app you have to pinch two elements together to go to the previous/higher view. This means you have to use two hands though — I had to wait to get off the train to be able to move to the lists view from the item view in Clear app. It’s hard to think of intuitive and easy to use alternatives to the back button — I think even Clear app hasn’t nailed it.

Update: Just realized Clear app also implements a pull down to navigate “up”. (I know I know, very ironical)

I’d been trying to think of alternatives to the “back button” — an action that takes you back to the previous view. Some “back button” alternatives that came to my mind:

• Shake the phone to communicate “no, take me back”
• Tilt the phone to the right to slide the current screen out of view

These are prone to accidental navigation if made too sensitive. Also, the metaphors might not work well in all cases.

• Swipe screen towards the right to go back to the previous view

This could be a viable option but it limits what you can do with the opposite action of swiping the screen to the left

• Draw a "<" on the screen

Maybe this could work, I tried drawing the shape on my iPhone — it’s surprisingly not the easiest to draw. A slight variation, a narrower arrow is easier, so maybe that’s a better option.

The implementation in iOS & Android of a software or hardware back button seem to work fine, but is there an even better way?