Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.
“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that [...]
“Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what [...]
Peter Odum has written about design principles for converged devices. Here’s a summary of the principles he outlines:
Our devices are an ecosystem.
Design for reasonable consistency.
For users, content drives convergence.
Intelligent discovery encourages adoption.
Don’t burden users with content formats, formatting and packaging of content.
Context, not just content, is king.
Redundancy is useful.
Link: Convergent Experiences, Diverse Devices [...]
A nice little vignette.
“In recent years, the challenge in designing interfaces for mobile devices has shifted from finding ways around technological limitations to finding ways around technological overload. Consequently, more so today than ever before, it is important for designers and handset manufacturers to place more effort into first identifying the core purpose of any [...]
Published by Gabriel White.