Stuck on Amber

Random thoughts on design, aesthetics and simplicity.

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Efficient travel visualisation

Via https://shikoku-tourism.com/en/

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Saturday notch fever – Fabrice Dubois – Medium

The iPhone X notch. No shortage of criticism so here’s a more positive take.

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The Sentinel is an extraordinary game (revisiting my 2010 post)

https://medium.com/@fab.dubois/the-sentinel-an-extraordinary-computer-game-1986-677a40a7ea0d

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Homeless iPhone – Fabrice Dubois – Medium

So, apparently the next iPhone won’t have a physical Home button. There’s been much speculation already about what that means for the user…

Drawing inspiration from iOS 11 on the iPad, I experimented with this new powerful swipe up gesture that it has and found it could work in interesting ways if it ran on the upcoming, Home button-less iPhone. 

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What is interaction design?

Great 2-minute explanation and illustration by Bill Verplank.

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A motion tweak for iOS 11’s Cover Sheet

What is the Cover Sheet?

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Preventing page scroll versus map pan conflicts

Scrolling a web page on mobile and suddenly getting stuck just because the touch event got caught by an embedded map is reasonably painful. The Google Maps API makes it possible to prevent this ‘greedy’ behaviour – that’s how they call it – by setting the map as ‘cooperative’.

In cooperative mode, if the user drags from the map (often accidentally), the map does NOT freeze the page and start to pan. Instead, it simply dims and explains how to pan. Example below, from a Philips website.

I didn’t know about that option, and I wonder why it’s not used more universally.

Kathy Sierra (via Creating Passionate Users) :

Life is abrupt enough as it is.

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Nice feature: seat preview at Berlin concert house

Nice booking experience on the Berlin Konzerthaus website. Select a seat on the map and get an instant 3D preview of what exactly you’ll see from that seat. I’m not going to concerts so often so I’m not sure how common or old the feature is, but I found it really useful. Looking forward to my Tchaikovsky evening.

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Design should never say, ‘Look at me.’ It should always say, ‘Look at this.’

David Craib

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Good design is economic

A wood board plus a manually adjusted arrow is a good enough solution for this basic need: to indicate fire danger once a day at a tourist information centre. The arrow is secured at the back with a simple padlock, just to ensure people don’t play tricks. Good enough, cheap, enduring, well integrated in the environment.

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Shoebox as a drawer

Just realised the genius of the packaging designers at Reebok. So ridiculously simple. The problem of stacks is that they don’t provide direct access to the lower items. Well, now they do. 

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What the critics find boring and stale, the masses find familiar and iconic.

John Gruber in http://daringfireball.net/2016/09/design_as_branding

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About time: 2 tips for UI design

Maybe stating the obvious, maybe not.

1/ Animations WILL slow down your UI

2/ Supporting double click WILL slow down the single click

That’s math, so use wisely.

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Book size

I like the way Amazon.com tells you how large a book is. Friendlier than just a number of inches.

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Saving 4-inch iPhone

MacRumours:

Apple is reportedly planning to expand its 2015 iPhone lineup to include a new 4-inch model, according to Asian sources [Google Translate] cited by G for Games. The smaller form factor would bring back the ease of one-hand usage that was lost when Apple introduced its larger iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus handsets.

Please please please. Make this happen! 

Yes, there is the double-tap-on-home trick, but it's not solving everything. For me accessing the Home button is the painful bit. 

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Trusted places for Android

What an interesting idea. With Android 5, your phone never locks when it's located in one of your trusted places, like home. This is great design: solving problems that you don't even or clearly realise you have. Well done.

(via The Verge)

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On clear semantics (or how to prevent stupid questions)

Spotted in a form, this question:

Do you: – Smoke more than 10 cigarettes a day – Drink more than 2 glasses of wine a day

[YES]  [NO]

So if I don't smoke, but drink more than 2 glasses, how shall I answer?

Semantics is essential in communication. It means ensuring a statement has a meaning, can be interpreted. A massive amount of time and energy could be saved daily if everyone could pay a little attention to clear semantics, when designing a message.

Simple fix for the above case:

Do you smoke more than 10 cigarettes – or drink more than 2 glasses of wine – a day?  

[OH YES!]  [NO]

Well, provided I understand well what they mean of course.