Your customers experience it that way around
Concorde’s engineers made crude prototypes out of paper and tested them outside their workshops during their lunch hours, reports the Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey. Thanks to Andrew Harder for the pointer. As we design interactive user experiences today, this tried and trusted design technique still applies: make prototypes to help you explore and fine tune design …
Continue reading “Ground-breaking Concorde started with crude paper prototypes”
I had the experience: 20 minutes with an iphone. Thanks to Gary Marsden for the opportunity. People have said “oh yeah the iphone is really good.” Some have said “It’s really REALLY good.” But I thought they were just Apple groupies. They didn’t convey just how good it is. It’s astonishing. My jaw dropped. And …
Continue reading “iPhone: A whole new chapter in user experience”
Recently, Joel Spolsky pointed out the brilliantly obvious: the groovy new boxes for Microsoft’s next generation of software offer a poor user experience. As Joel points out, A box that many people can’t figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design. For those of you who want …
Continue reading “A balanced user experience starts with the box”
Thanks to Darryl Hebbes for pointing me towards this one: Humanized Inc. In the eighties, one of the original Apple Mac gurus, Jeff Raskin, came up with some crazy ideas about human computer interaction. Most of his ideas were just too radical. Now his son is taking those ideas forward with a new business venture. …
Continue reading “Son forms software company to resurrect dad’s genius ideas”
As well as designing the operating system to match the users and the context of use, the OLPC folks have focussed on the hardware needs of children in developing countries. The XO-1 laptop is bash-proof, sand-proof, splash-proof. You can charge it up in the sun or by winding it up. It’s got no moving parts, …
After 5 years of work, OLPC are ready to start rolling out the XO-1 laptop to children in developing countries. Those are the children who live in villages without water, electricity, and sometimes even decent medical care. It sounds like insanity. And opinion is divided about whether it is in fact insanity or not. Is …
Continue reading “XO-1 laptop: A success in one form or another”
Thanks to Andrew Harder for pointing me to this stunning photo piece from the New York times. It’s about 3D avatars from online worlds, and what their real owners look like. Here’s picture number 1. Now see the rest of the New York Times slideshow…
My stats show that you everyday user experience stories have the greatest mass appeal. You seemed to like the posting about Delta airlines. So here’s another quick one. I went on a BA flight from Capetown to London recently and was astonished to find the food was very good. They seemed to have thought hard …
Continue reading “Airline meals: beautiful presentation improves the user experience”
Does anyone know of any research about this: Theory: people sometimes (often?) choose web activities by medium, rather than by content type. So as well as saying “I want news” people sometimes say “I want photos” or “I want video” or ” I want blogs”. So aggregating lots of examples of the same medium can …
I went to 27dinner last night in Cape Town, set up by Dave Duarte. They had cakes with amusing, web-related icing on top. Just like Stormhoek, the idea is that if you give a blogger a freebie to blog about, you’ll go far. Works for me! Well done Charly’s Bakery and well done 27 Dinner. …