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“UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reigns. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse, and rope your cattle.”
(Dain Miller a.k.a. @_dain ~ Webdesigner Depot)
“In the mind of today’s technological entrepreneur, the ideal user (and employee) is semi-skilled – or unskilled entirely. The ideal user interface for such a person never rewards learning or experience when doing so would come at the cost of immediate accessibility to the neophyte. This design philosophy is a mistake – a catastrophic, civilization-level mistake. There is a place in the world for the violin as well as the kazoo. Modern computer engineering is kazoo-only, and keyboards are only the most banal example of this fact. Far more serious – though less obvious – problems of this kind tie our hands and wastefully burn our ‘brain cycles’. Professional equipment, whose mastery requires dedication and mental flexibility, may not be appropriate for casual users. But surely it is appropriate – in fact, necessary – for professionals? Just why is this idea confined to crackpots shouting in the wilderness? I hope to learn a definitive answer to this conundrum some day.”
“It contains a list of 20 or so design principles that I refer to all the time. This was a good way to get them down into one spot.. so I can point people there in the future.”
(Joshua Porter a.k.a. @bokardo)
“Design an experience. Make it as beautiful – and as emotionally resonant – as it can possibly be. Then adorn the core experience and content with only as much functionality as is absolutely necessary. Functionality – and software-based thinking in general – is like seasoning. A little is an enhancement; any more destroys the flavour, subsumes the artistry of the chef, and may well be bad for you. These new classes of devices, so immediately personal and portable and tactile, aren’t desktop-era shrines demanding incantation and prostration. They’re empowering extensions to our real, actual lives – and that’s a profound thing. They take what was once prosaic or mundane, and give us just a taste of superpowers. They’re augmentations, and they should be beautiful.”
(Matt Gemmell a.k.a. @mattgemmell)
“Over the last decade there has been a significant growth in interest in aspects of people’s experience with technologies under headings such as user experience, aesthetics, affect, fun, reflection, and enjoyment. In more recent years critical theory has begun to make a small but important impact at CHI conferences and other HCI publications. It is arguable that a relationship between critical theory and experience would benefit HCI research and practice as it has benefited other areas of research in the humanities and social sciences. However, in the history of ideas experience and critical theory have not always made good bedfellows, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes resisting each other. This workshop will explore the ways in which HCI might benefit from a constructive dialogue between critical theory and experience in questions of design and evaluation.”
(Workshop on April 10 2010, in association with ACM CHI 2010 in Atlanta, Georgia USA)
“Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into tiny screens: they make way for fingers and thumbs, accommodating the wayward taps of our clumsy digits. The physicality of handheld interfaces take designers beyond the conventions of visual and information design‚ and into the territory of industrial design. With touchscreens there are real ergonomics at stake. It’s not just how your pixels look, but how they feel in the hand.”
(Josh Clark a.k.a. @globalmoxie ~ .net magazine) courtesy of puttingpeoplefirst
“If you were talking to a person who did this you would assume they either weren’t listening or were slightly unhinged. When a computer does it you’re likely to assume that using the site isn’t going to be a pleasant experience, or worse, you may leave.”
(Hana Schank a.k.a. @hanaschank ~ UX Magazine)
“To scholars and practitioners in the field of HCI at the early 1990’s, the idea that aesthetics matter in information technology sounded heretic. Two decades later, in the early 2010s, this thought has conquered a solid place in both academia and industry.”
(Noam Tractinsky a.k.a. ~ interaction-design.org)
“The end user doesn’t care how your company is structured. Customers view brands as a unified entity, and they expect that brand’s value to be delivered across all channels with an equal degree of integrity. The good news is that the digital landscape is forcing all of us to re-think how we work. The bad news is that we’re trying to crawl out of a work style that was better designed for Ford’s assembly line than for digital ecosystem consistency.”
(Peyton Lindley ~ Fast Company Co.Design)
“At present, finger input on touch screens is handled very simplistically – essentially boiled down to an X/Y coordinate. However, human fingers are remarkably sophisticated, both in their anatomy and motor capabilities. TapSense is an enhancement to touch interaction that allows conventional screens to identify how the finger is being used for input. This is achieved by segmenting and classifying sounds resulting from a finger’s impact. Our system can recognize different finger locations – including the tip, pad, nail and knuckle – without the user having to wear any electronics. This opens several new and powerful interaction opportunities for touch input, especially in mobile devices, where input bandwidth is limited due to small screens and fat fingers. For example, a knuckle tap could serve as a ‘right click’ for mobile device touch interaction, effectively doubling input bandwidth. Our system can also be used to identify different sets of passive tools. We conclude with a comprehensive investigation of classification accuracy and training implications. Results show our proof-of-concept system can support sets with four input types at around 95% accuracy. Small, but useful input sets of two (e.g., pen and finger discrimination) can operate in excess of 99% accuracy.”
(Chris Harrison) courtesy of dansaffer
“When most designers design websites, they don’t pay much attention to links. As long as the link works and takes users to the right page, everything is fine. However, a great user experience goes further than that. There are certain links that should open in new browser tabs, and ones that should open in the same browser tab. It’s important for designers to know the difference.”
(UX Movement) courtesy of rolandnagtegaal
“Sparked by the introduction of Siri, as well as products such as iPad and Skype, there have been many recent posts and articles tracing the technologies back to a 1987 Apple video called Knowledge Navigator. The video simulated an intelligent personal agent, video chat, linked databases and shared simulations, a digital network of university libraries, networked collaboration, and integrated multimedia and hypertext, in most case decades before they were commercially available. Having been involved in making Knowledge Navigator with some enormously talented Apple colleagues, I thought I would correct the record once and for all about what really happened.”
(Bud Colligan a.k.a. @collbud ~ Dubberly Design Office)
“Chrome is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.”
“User interface details matter to the overall user experience. Many users may not consciously notice these details on your site yet they do have an impact on the overall user experience. When everything feels just right the perception of your site and brand is improved. In this article, we’ll look at 5 different types of UI details you should pay attention to.”
(Jamie Appleseed a.k.a. @jamieappleseed ~ Baymard Institute)
“In this article, we give you some personal perspective on the changing role of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers practicing in industry over the last 25 years and look to the future. We identify long-lasting themes and emerging trends and add some insight from our experiences working in IT research and development. These experiences include collaborating as team members on a series of HCI research projects during 15 of over 20 years at IBM Research. We also describe what it has been like having a two-person HCI household over the years.”
(Clare-Marie Karat and John Karat ~ Journal of Usability Studies Vol. 7, Issue 1, November 2011, pp. 1-8)
“Get the knowledge and guidance needed to build an app for an intuitive, powerful touch experience. Understand how touch design principles are firmly grounded in customer needs of comfort and utility. Discover how your app can use Windows 8 touch language and patterns, capabilities like smart targeting and semantic zoom, and new interactions like ‘slide to select’ and ‘hold to learn’ to engage your customers.”
(Jan-Kristian Markiewicz & Kay Hofmeester a.k.a. @kayhof ~ BUILD 2011)
“UX Designers focus on the structure and layout of content, navigation and how users interact with them. (…) UI Developers focus on the way the functionality is displayed and the fine detail of how users interact with the interface.”
(Ben Melbourne a.k.a. @benmelb ~ as in the city)
This is a verbatim transcript of a public lecture given on October 28, 1997. ~ “We got clearance, thankfully, from the Apple lawyers, which came about two – three weeks ago, so we could give it here, just in time to announce it. We’re grateful to Apple to release this for public disclosure, because we think it’s of general interest.”
(Larry Tesler a.k.a. @nomodes and Chris Espinosa a.k.a. @cdespinosa)
“We might not like to admit it but deception is deeply entwined with life on this planet. Insects evolved to use it, animals employ it in their behavior, and of course, we humans use it to manipulate, control, and profit from each other. With this in mind, it’s no surprise that deception appears in various guises in user interfaces on the web today. What is surprising, though, is that up until recently it was something web designers never talked about. There was no terminology, no design patterns, and no real recognition of it as a phenomenon at all. If it wasn’t a taboo it certainly felt like one.”
(Harry Brignull a.k.a. @harrybr ~ A List Apart)
“Microsoft Research Redmond researchers Hrvoje Benko and Scott Saponas have been investigating the use of touch interaction in computing devices since the mid-’00s. Now, two sharply different yet related projects demonstrate novel approaches to the world of touch and gestures.”
(Janie Chang ~ Microsoft Research)
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