iPhone GUI elements from 320480:
This Photoshop document is full of iPhone user interface elements that can be pieced together to storyboard an idea for a new app. Handy for those that don’t want to fire up XCode just to play with a concept.
Jeff Siarto is a user experience designer, open courseware evangelist and aspiring author living in Chicago. He builds simple web interfaces and teaches others to do the same.
Test your designs with Browsershots
Designing web pages that look consistent across different browsers and platforms can be tricky if not downright impossible. Browsershots.org makes this process a little easier by hitting your site from different browser/platform combinations and then showing you the screenshots. You can select the combinations to view and also change screen size, color depth and even Javascript support. When it’s finished, download the archived file of your screenshots and get working on that CSS file.
Open Education on the irrelevancy of higher ed
The idea that America’s colleges and universities are effectively educating the next generation has become suspect. And unless these institutions of higher learning overcome their prevalent inertia, irrelevance appears to be a certainty.
ALA discusses deafness and the user experience
A fantastic article on a much-overlooked topic in web usability. Lisa Herrod looks at deafness from a cultural and linguistic perspective and not simply the inverse of hearing. She also reiterates some great tips on writing for the web that go beyond usability for the deaf and hard-of-hearing.
5 legendary keyboards and the songs they made famous
MJ and the Synclav can’t be beat…
On Demand Publishing with MagCloud
August 1, 2008In a world where more magazines end up in landfills than on the desks of readers, on demand publishing may start to play a more important role. With this in mind HP has launched MagCloud, a new service that allows anyone to publish their own magazine. All you need to do is upload a PDF and they take care of the printing, subscription management and distribution. Best of all, you can set the price of the publication and any proceeds above the base cost (about 20 cents per page plus shipping) are profits for your hard work.
MagCloud also addresses the fact that most magazines end up in the trash. They only print what you need, when you need it and there is hardly any waste. The service is currently in beta (no surprise there) and you must request a publishing account, but you can still browse and subscribe to the current selection of titles on the site. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and make that family newsletter a bit more polished and maybe you’ll make some money in the process.
Visualization of Walmart growth across America
A great animated timeline from FlowingData showing the rapid expansion of the Walmart empire.
ALA’s 2008 Survey for People Who Make Websites
A great look in to the world of web design and the people and jobs that make up our industry. Last year’s survey was full of interesting information, I imagine this year will be no different.
Stanford couple launch Cuil new search engine
From Saul Hansell of Bits:
I’m trying to figure out why so many of the very smart people I meet who are trying to start search engines are building products I just have no interest in using.
Clearleft launches Silverback usability testing app for Mac
This has the potential to be a great tool for web designers. Now all we need to do it get more people testing their designs.
Teaching Web Standards
July 24, 2008Schools are misleading students when it comes to web design. With the exception of a few, most colleges and universities teach students how to move boxes around a graphical editor with little or no fundamental instruction on core web design principles. These students leave school thinking that knowing Dreamweaver makes them web designers, proudly proclaiming this skill on their resumes.
Some will soon find out that what they were taught was not actually web design, but a shortcut to publishing HTML files. Others will move on to companies that don’t know any better and use their new skills to publish bloated, unusable websites (which their bosses will love) that stain the web with bad markup and code.
So what should schools be teaching? This is a difficult question to answer. Some would argue that not all programs require heavy course work in web design—Dreamweaver and other graphical programs allow students to “get their feet wet” and enable programs that don’t have specialized faculty to offer web design classes. While this is true, it still gives students a false-sense of what it actually takes to put together a well thought-out, user-focused website. Whether the classes are taught through Journalism schools or specialized web and graphic design programs, web standards need to be at the forefront of the curriculum. Students should be taught the ins and outs of semantic HTML and how to write that code without the aid of a graphical editor. They should learn about page layout, color theory, typography, usability and information architecture. These are the skills of real web designers—people that understand how the web works and how to build pages that make information easy to find.
So how does your school teach web design? If they are still teaching with Dreamweaver or (god forbid) Frontpage, then a review of the curriculum is long overdue. There are plenty of resources out there on standards-based web design, here are a few to get you started.
The end of software patents
From Patently-O:
The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.
This is big news from the Patent and Trademark Office and a welcome change in my opinion.
Wordpress announces iPhone application
Now you can write and edit blog posts, upload photos and manage your Wordpress site all from your iPhone. Very cool.
Designing Great Customer Service
July 20, 2008ING Direct, a bank which exists solely online, has found a way to do customer service right. Recently I had to close a checking account—one of the few actions that can’t be completed online—and was not looking forward to the phone call, dreading the half hour I’d have to spend speaking to a robot and entering account numbers. To my surprise, when I dialed the customer service number a person actually answered the phone. Shocked, I fumbled for words not expecting to have to actually speak with a human. After I managed to tell the lady that I need to close an account, she quickly moved any extra funds in to my savings account and told me I was all set. No “please don’t close your account” pitch, and no lengthy scripted monologue to try and get me to signup for another service. She just closed my account, and asked me if there was anything else she could do for me.
In an age where more and more services are being performed in the web realm, a great offline customer experience is vital. If users are met with endless automated robots and “press 4 to hear these options again”, they are going to run for the hills—straight to a company that understands great customer service.
Holger Struppek talks about the redesign of Wells Fargo’s ATM user interface
The design team learned that the single-most used feature of an ATM is the cash withdrawal. The objective for the new UI was to continue to offer quick and easy cash withdrawals, while making the other services more visible and accessible.
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