#helloworld @delicatetigerjellyfish-blog - Tumblr Blog

Reminder App - Personal Feedback

Overall I feel okay with what was accomplished in that amount of time next to all the other classes. But I also think, that with less other stuff around, this project could have been worked out much better.

The main problems in the group was the organisation and the motivation. All in all - I think the group was too big and it was very difficult to organize meetings because we all had so different time tables.

From a professional view: you can see that there is no love in this app.

lisaarzberger-blog

Design for our Reminder App

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Design in a nutshell / Discover your design alter-ego

Short summary of the most important points:

Gothic revival: great buildings to impress god, more “meainingful” buildings = churches, repeating patterns, high roofes

Arts and Crafts: answer to industrial revolution, promoted economy and social reform, to care about how and why something is made

Bauhaus: new type of art school, combines many disciplines; good design = simplicity

Modernismn: Picasso, Escher, Dali; modernists beliefed that they could design a better society; less is more; function should dictate form

American Industrial Design: positivity in futuristic forms, if objects look great people would like them more; style becomes equaly important as function

Postmodernism: collages, repetition, wanted to challange audience to ask questions, a big variety of styles

I really liked the experience to refresh my design and art theory knowledge about the art movements. I have already known some of them from school, but really liked the way how they are presented in the videos.

It is also kind of funny, that the test says that I am a girl of modernism. It is true. I really love and want to change the world through my work. I love new things. And I think it is very important not to design things to just “look beautiful” but also with the focus on its function and users. That’s the reason why i am very interested in the topics user experience design and design thinking.

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Why storytelling is the ultimate weapon

Short summary of the most important points:

Humans simply aren’t moved to action by “data and dumps”. People are moved by emotion.

Researches repeatedly show that our attitudes, fears, hopes, and values are strongly influenced by story.

The more absorbed readers are in a story, the more the story changes them

The story as a Trojan Horse: The audience accepts the story because, for a human, a good story always seems like a gift. But the story is actually just a delivery system for the teller’s agenda. A story is a trick for sneaking a message into the fortified citadel of the human mind.

Takeaways:

First, storytelling is a uniquely powerful form of persuasive jujitsu. Second, in a world full of black belt storytellers, we had all better start training our defenses.

I really like the comparison with a Trojan Horse, because this comparision itself is a story. When i now think of storytelling, I will remember the Trojan Horse and the old legend.

Because of this, I can easily remember the content of this article.

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Design Collaboration in the Enterprise

Building the foundation for collaborative UX design

When we design, we feel clever and creative at the same time. But Ego prevents you from creating a great product, because it will emotionally isolate you from the team. The stronger your personal connection to the product (“this is mine”), the weaker your connection to the team (“this is ours”).

How to control your Ego

Accept that design serves business needs not the whimsy of the creator: Great UX designers understand that it’s not about the best idea, but about the right idea.

Rely on user data for a clearer truth: User research and testing is so powerful because it counteracts opinion with science

Focus on empathetic design: Empathetic design balances user needs with stakeholder needs

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Principles of Design

The 80/20 Rule

A high percentage of effects in any large system are caused by a low percentage of variables. – known as Pareto’s Principle.

What does the 80/20 Rule say?

Approximately 80 percent of the effects generated by any large system are caused by 20 percent of the variables in that system.

Some examples:

80 percent of a product’s usage involves 20 percent of its features

80 percent of innovation comes from 20 percent of the people

80 percent of progress comes from 20 percent of the effort

What does this mean to me as a designer?

Useful for focusing resources and, in turn, realizing greater efficiencies in design

When redesigning systems to make them more efficient, focusing on aspects of the system beyond the critical 20 percent quickly yields diminishing returns

Use the 80/20 rule to assess the value of elements, target areas for redesign and optimization, and focus resources efficiently

Noncritical functions that are part of the less-important 80 percent should be minimized or even removed altogether from the design

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Principles of Design - Attractiveness Bias

What is attractive bias?

A tendency to see attractive people as more intelligent competent, moral, and sociable than unattractive people.

The attractiveness bias is a function of both biological and environmental factors:

Biologically speaking, people are attractive when they exude health and fertility. Good biological measures for health and fertility are average and symmetrical facial features, and a waist-to-hip ratio in the ideal range (0.70 for women, 0.90 for men).

Environmentally speaking, men are attracted to women when they exaggerate socially acknowledged features of sexuality (e.g., lipstick to exaggerate lips); and women are attracted to men when they appear to possess wealth and power (e.g., expensive automobiles).

Why should I care as a designer?

Consider the attractiveness bias in design contexts involving images of people, such as marketing and advertising. When the presentation of attractive women is a key element of a design, use renderings or images of women with waist-to-hip ratios of approximately 0.70, accented by culturally appropriate augmentations of sexual features. When the presentation of attractive men is a key element of a design, use renderings or images of men with waist-to-hip ratios of approximately 0.90, and visible indicators of wealth or status (e.g., expensive clothing).

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Principles of Design

Color

Color can make designs more visually interesting and aesthetic, and can reinforce the organization and meaning of elements in a design.

Numbers of Colors

Limit the palette to what the eye can process at one glance, around 5 colors

Do not use color as the only means to impart information, because of color-blindness

Color Combinations

Achieve aesthetic color combinations by using color variations as analogous, complementary, triadic and quadratic

Colors for foreground elements, cooler colors for background elements

Light gray is a safe color to group elements, no competition with other colors

Saturation

Use saturated colors (pure hues) when attracting attention is the priority. Saturated colors are perceived as more exciting and dynamic

Use desaturated colors when performance and efficiency are the priority.

desaturated, bright colors are perceived as friendly and professional

desaturated, dark colors are perceived as serious and professionl

Exercise caution when combining, can increase eye fatigue

Symbolism

verify the meaning of colors and color combinations for a particular target audience prior to use

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Principles of Design

Forgiveness

Designs should help people avoid errors and minimize the negative consequences of errors when they do occur.

Strategies for incorporating forgiveness in designs include

Good Affordances- physical characteristics of the design that influence its correct use (e.g., uniquely shaped plug that can only be inserted into the appropriate receptacle).

Reversibility of Actions- one or more actions can be reversed if an error occurs or the intent of the person changes (e.g., undo function in software).

Safety Nets - device or process that minimizes the negative consequences of a catastrophic error or failure (e.g., pilot ejection seat in aircraft).

Confirmation- verification of intent that is required before critical actions are allowed (e.g., lock that must be opened before equipment can be activated).

Warnings- signs, prompts, or alarms used to warn of imminent danger (e.g., road signs warning of a sharp turn ahead).

Help- information that assists in basic operations, troubleshooting, and errorrecovery (e .g., documentation or help line).

crazyspookymeerkat-blog

Design is a job - Managing Feedback

The problem / the situation:

Clients have no idea of design and of your work. So they do not know how to give you feedback. So it is your challenge as a designer to teach them how to give you good feedback.

The solution

Prepare feedback guidelines for the client before presentations.

Tell them what’s helpful to talk about and what’s not.

Example for feedback guidelines for a visual concept

Focus on

Overall tone (Does this site feels like your company?)

Voice (Is it using language the right way? Is it friendly? Authoritative? Trustworthy?)

Structure (Too dense? Not dese enough?)

Ignore

specific labels and body copy (Why is everything in Latin?)

Missing elements (Where’s my newsletter signup?)

Things we did not show you (I have comments about the company history page.)

The Pros and Cons of Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Website vs. Native App

Source: http://designmodo.com/responsive-design-vs-mobile-website-vs-app/

Summary of the most important points:

Responsive Web Design

Pros:

A single website. It’s easier to administer just one website for all devices.

A single URL. This makes sure your users will find you on mobile devices without having to wait for redirects, especially helpful on slower connections.

Easy SEO. There is no need to create specific content for mobile devices, while you still enjoy the benefits of your desktop website SEO on mobile devices.

Easy marketing. No extra work for the marketing department is required to promote your website on mobile.

Low cost. Simple math — one website is cheaper than two.

Cons:

A single website. Having just one website for all devices may be easy for you, but not always for your users. You will often need to put different emphasis on the same page in order to maximize conversions using the advantages of the platform.

Technical. As responsive web design is a relatively new technology, there are still some outdated devices with old browsers that will load the website too slowly or even not fully.

User Experience. Mobile is a completely different experience than desktop, so having a single, even responsive website, may harm your overall UX on both platforms. If you try to satisfy both mobile and desktop users with the same user interface, you may end up satisfying no one.

Mobile Website

Pros:

User experience. Congratulations! You have a website that is specifically optimized for mobile devices, considering all benefits and limitations of the platform, so you have a good ground to create a beautiful and usable UX.

Speed. Your website will load fast and easily on mobile platforms.

Cost. Building a mobile website is not a cheap option as compared to responsive web design, but still you can get a very reasonable price for the value.

Benefit from local search. Search engines tend to provide good UX nearly as much as you do, so in local search results mobile optimized websites have better chances to rank.

Immediately accessible. Though not an extra advantage over responsive websites, but it still plays its role compared to native apps, where users have to pass through download and installation processes.

Cons:

Multiple URLs. Your customer has to remember at least two URLs, or otherwise be redirected to the mobile website, which takes several seconds. The mobile website will need additional SEO work as well.

Maintenance. You will have to maintain two websites.

Not Universally Compatible. You have to consider that there are two different types of mobile devices: touchscreen and keyboard navigation. A single mobile website won’t look and work the same way across all device types.

Native App:

Pros:

User experience. Native apps can have better UX than any other mobile optimization solution.

Accessibility and speed. Applications can operate even without internet connection making all your information available at any time. And if you are lucky enough to have an experienced and virtuous coder, your app will also load fast and smoothly!

Everything you can imagine. Here’s where you can and should think out of the box and get creative. Mobile platform, especially with touch screen navigation, gives you mass of features to work with in order to provide excellent UX.

Visibility. Once a user has installed your app on a mobile device, it stays there, showing up with its unique icon in apps menu.

Cons:

Not accessible on all devices. Your app is built only for a particular operating system and this means it will not operate on devices with different OS.

Goodbye flexibility. All application updates will have to be submitted and approved by the app store every time, which can take up to a few weeks. Not every user will be happy with frequent updates and some will stay with the older version anyway.

It’s quite costly. Native mobile app development is clearly the most expensive solution.

Marketing and SEO. A completely different marketing strategy must be applied for your mobile app promotion and you may need help from a mobile marketing professional.

My opinion:

I think, in general, you can’t say that a responsive website, a mobile website or a native app is always better than the other solutions. As I understand myself as a UX Designer, and not as a visual designer, I look at the problems and needs of my clients and their users in a first step. Then, in a second step, I think about which technology I should use to help solving theses problems. I think that is a general thing, not just a mobile thing. If a clients comes to you and you are good in designing websites, that doesn’t mean that this fits to your costumer or its users. Maybe a print campaign would help him more. So always: costumers & users first! The technology is not the solutions - it is just a tool to come to a solution. The human is the medium, not the technology.

#responsivewebsite #mobilewebsite #nativeapp #humansfirst

Brave NUI World - Chapter 4: Less is more

“Forget past interaction styles. Don’t simply transcribe an application rendered in a traditional medium (web or GUI) as a NUI.

Choose a promising niche for developing a family of NUI apps. Thus far, the NUI has shown the most success in social and entertainment contexts. Its application to other domains requires an analysis of the way in which the interaction would support and teach the rules of the interaction domain.

When developing a single NUI application, start with the most fundamental interactions. Perfect them through careful design and testing. Then extrapolate those designs to more complex regions in an interaction domain.”*

*Source: Daniel Wigdor, Dennis Wixon - Brave NUI World

This results of the fourth chapter of Brave NUI World really reminds me of the 80/20-rule. The 80/20 rule says that you only 20% of your application features will bring you 80% of the sucess. Therefore you should focus on the core features and bring them to a high level.

10 Ways Mobile Sites Are Different from Desktop Web Sites

Source: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2011/03/10-ways-mobile-sites-are-different-from-desktop-web-sites.php

Short summary of the most important points:

- Content Prioritization: “Mobile site designs should give priority to the features and content users are most likely to need when viewing a site using a mobile device."

- Vertical Instead of Horizontal Navigation: “However, vertical navigation has replaced horizontal navigation on more than 90% of the mobile sites I analyzed”

- Bars, Tabs, and Hypertext: “Bigger objects such as bars, tabs, or buttons allow users to tap with more precision”.

- Text and Graphics: “Other reasons include the small screen sizes of mobile devices and the limited available screen real estate in which to display content, as well as the slow download speeds on mobile devices.”

- Contextual and Global Navigation: “The main reason for the reduction of global and contextual navigation on mobile sites is the limited screen real estate on mobile devices."

- Footers: “Mobile sites employ footers that provide access to content users often look for on a home page, keeping its links to a minimum"

- Breadcrumbs: “But the main factor is that the design of mobile sites prevents users from having to go too deep into a hierarchy to find what they are looking for. Again, users should be able to achieve what they want to accomplish on a site before they start feeling lost."

- Progress Indicator: “For example, instead of using buttons with implicit actions such as Next or Continue, use buttons with explicit labels that inform users exactly what the next step is—for example, Proceed to Checkout or Specify Shipping & Payment."

- Integration with Phone Functions: “While mobile platforms place many limitations on design and content, they also open up new opportunities that traditional Web sites cannot provide."

My opinion:

I think the article really showed out what are some main differences between desktop and mobile websites. The most important point for me is the content strategy / content prioritization. On the one hand it is very hard to handle with the small screen sizes but on the other hand it is a chance to really focus on the most important content.

#mobilesites