Cool stuff.
“I wanted to try to take advantage of spatial reasoning and spatial memory to make it easier to find and navigate stuff. Let the user see the scope of information available. Start by showing the big picture. When it makes sense, let it behave more like real-world objects. You can normally pick up [...]
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Posted 06 May 2008
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Also tagged: concept, design, interactiondesign, ixd, mobile, music, nextgen, phone, player, spatial, ui, userinterface, zooming
Sender 11 has published some stats on device screen sizes. Interesting stuff, though it’s important to note that the study doesn’t cover the user prevalence of particular screen sizes.
“Over the years the relative screen size difference has increased. The difference between the smallest (128×128) and the largest (800×480) is now a factor of 23. That [...]
Nothing new content-wise, but it’s notable that Jan Chipchase has hit the New York Times Magazine.
“This is when I voiced a careless thought about whether there might be something negative about the lightning spread of technology, whether its convenience was somehow supplanting traditional values or practices. Chipchase raised his eyebrows and laid down his spoon. [...]
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Posted 13 April 2008
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Also tagged: anthropology, design, developing, developingworld, emergingmarkets, janchipchase, mobile, newyorktimes, nokia, phones, poverty
“Reuse, we are told, is as green a virtue as recycling. But with e-waste all the old ecological dogmas start to become ambiguous. Cellphones represent only a part of the world’s e-waste problem. But they are a key to understanding how complicated it is. They also embody the kind of high-tech products that we will [...]
Marek Pawlowski reviews the HTC Touch, an attempt at a touch-screen that’s slightly out of the ordinary, and finds it slightly lacking.
“For starters, the TouchFlo sensor doesn’t work very well. The screen itself had an almost ’sticky’ feel to it when I first took the product out of the box and it was actually physically [...]
Flipper the Dolphin takes some of the current smartphones through their paces and finds them sorely lacking.
“So far, not so good. But how does it work underwater? Terrible. The Treo 680 fizzled and died as soon as I dove down three feet. I didn’t even get a chance to test its web-browsing capabilities before it [...]
I linked to this article only because it has a fantastic title. Enjoy.
“The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off [...]
A design for texting with the device orientation inverted. This is just a patent application, and not a real product. It’s an interesting idea, though, because it doesn’t ask people to learn new input systems but rather just change the orientation of the device.
“Typing text messages in this manner is awkward, as the mobile is [...]
Luke Wroblewski recently published a useful list of books that address the topic of design for mobile devices.
Link: Mobile Design Books (lukew.com)
Little Springs Design has started publishing design patterns for mobile devices (primarily targetting mobile phones for both web and native applications). So far, six twelve have been published.
“Keypresses should be kept to a minimum for common actions. Unlike a desktop, a keypress is not simply a mouse click, but the number of times the cursor [...]
Two interesting articles about mobile phones from the always-must-read Economist. The first, interestingly, predicts divergence rather than convergence and uses cars as the developmental analogue. I’m not convinced by the divergence argument here – unlike cars, mobile phones are general computing platforms than can adapt (or be adapted) to user habits in a way that [...]
A couple of videos demonstrating new user interface design concepts from Nokia.
Link: Video 1 and Video 2 (youtube.com, via)
Design Sojourn talks about the advantages and disadvantages of non-mechanical buttons.
““Static” buttons on the other hand have issues with feedback. Nothing moves, so there is no action and thus no reaction. Therefore designers that use “static” buttons need to employ a host of other feedback elements, like beeping sounds or lights. This is a very [...]
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Posted 28 October 2006
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Also tagged: buttons, cellphone, design, haptic, industrialdesign, interactiondesign, ixd, mobile, technology, trends, userexperience, ux
Published by Gabriel White.