Touch gestures

“That’s the fundamental gesture in this technology. Sliding a finger along a flat surface. There is almost nothing in the natural world that we manipulate in this way.”

Bret Victor: A brief rant on The Future of Interaction Design

What is a tool?

“A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities. That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.”

Bret Victor: A brief rant on The Future of Interaction Design

Responsive Web Design

Responsive Web design is a combination of fluid grids and images with media queries to change layout based on the size of a device viewport. It uses feature detection (mostly on the client) to determine available device capabilities and adapt accordingly. With responsive Web design one code-base, deployment, and URL provides you with access to many devices including future ones you haven’t encountered yet. But optimizing images, video, third party widgets and more using client-only solutions can be challenging.

Luke Wroblewski

Mobile usability

Mobile sites have higher measured usability than desktop sites when used on a phone, but mobile apps score even higher.

Jakob Nielsen

UI conventions are social constructions.

UI conventions are social constructions. We can’t give machines perfect intelligence about user expectations, but we can at least give them good manners.

Josh Clark: Buttons are a hack (PDF)

Facebook’s ‘reasonable’ users

When you speak with grown-ups and young adults who used to be Facebook enthusiasts, you hear the following:

• Facebook’s interface and features have become overly complicated. The result is it takes more time to do the same old things.
• Managing friends leaves you with two choices: spending a lot of time delicately pruning lists, circles and groups, or being swamped.
• Constant and insidious changes in Facebook’s privacy features keep taking people off-guard: all of a sudden, you find many things about your digital life, mostly mundane stuff such as what you read and listen, being broadly available outside your initial circle. Quasi-paranoid caution has become a must. And again, since “open” is the default setting on Facebook, recovering your own privacy gets increasingly complicated.
• A rise in the advertising presence, which reinforces the impression of being tracked down: users don’t have the slightest idea of the breadth and depth of Facebook’s mining of their personal activities.

It now seems Facebook’s usage is undergoing a split. Active Facebookers become increasingly engaged, spend more time doing more stuff, while “reasonable” users (over 25) become more reluctant and careful.

Frédéric Filloux: Does Twitter have more influence than Facebook?

The mobile content ‘paradox’

How can people simultaneously want to kill time and get angry when their time is wasted? A conundrum to be teased apart. The solution to the puzzle lies in recognizing that even relaxation is purposeful behavior: according to information foraging theory, users seek to maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead.

(…)

Two solutions:

• Cut the fluff. In particular, ditch the blah-blah verbiage.
• Defer background material to secondary screens that are shown only to users who explicitly ask for more info. Such additional content supports people who have extra time on their hands or an exceptional interest in the topic.

From Jakob Nielsen: Mobile Content: If in Doubt, Leave It Out

Storyboarding in UX Design

In user experience design we’re familiar with user research techniques like workshops, contextual inquiry, and interviews. We synthesise our research into audience archetypes, user stories and process flows. We communicate our thinking and solutions to our teams and clients with artefacts like personas, flow diagrams, and wireframes. And if we’re feeling really fancy we can even shell out experience prototypes and service blueprints. Somewhere in all of this lies the people for whom we’re designing, what’s going on in their worlds, and how we’re making their lives better. As practitioners in the science and craft of UX, we innately get it, we see the narrative that threads all of these artefacts together – the spirit of the solution breathing through it all, that we want our clients to be captured by.

But clients tend not to be conceptual thinkers like us; they need us to connect the dots. And that’s where storyboards come in. Storyboards – indeed all forms of conceptual illustration – work well because of two truths: firstly that the act of drawing (and even seeing others draw) can help us think, and secondly that images can speak more powerfully than just words by adding extra layers of meaning.

Johnny Holland: Storyboarding & UX – part 1: an introduction

Simplicity of sign-up forms

But for signup forms, it is possible to know that sweet spot: the acceptable level of complexity is zero. There should be no complexity in a signup form because it provides no functionality and value that the user actually wants; all the value is for the website owner.

EDUARD MARTINI: WEB FORMS HOW-TO PART 1: SIMPLICITY

Wizard or form?

Wizards are good in the following scenarios:

• presenting a fixed workflow in a prescribed sequence—This can be particularly beneficial if you need to verify or validate prerequisite conditions before asking a user to commit to a lot of data input.
• breaking up a long or complex workflow into manageable tasks—
  Wizards are effective in reducing the seeming complexity of a task or providing a sense of progress—for example, when filling in a tax form or performing a large number of setups during an initial system configuration.
• where later information is contingent upon what data a user has already provided—Wizards can keep user interfaces from sounding like the logic portion of an SAT test. If you answered Yes to question 7, provide your OS version here; otherwise skip to question 9.

Forms are good in the following scenarios:

• presenting a comprehensive list of what information a user must provide—Forms are effective in communicating to users what questions you’re going to ask, letting users gather whatever information they lack before starting a task. A wizard that asks for information on the very last screen that sends a user off on a scavenger hunt can be an awkward and frustrating user experience. It can also add to code complexity by requiring the system to track incomplete states.
• making it easy to navigate among data-entry fields by pressing Tab—
  Power users can provide information efficiently and navigate to fields of interest without removing their fingers from the home position on their keyboard. This can be a significant consideration if users fill in a given form many times during the day.
• reducing the number of hits on a server—that is, serving up an entire form after only one call—Performance is often a challenge for Web-based applications. Users can quickly lose patience when there are performance lags while a wizard makes background trips to the application server or database.

From Mike Hughes: Wizards Versus Forms