Archive for May, 2008

[Screens Around Town] Nivea, Newsweek, and “Yes to All” - (37signals)

dialog
I saw the enclosed dialogue box on a colleague’s PC and thought that you might find it amusing.

[Screens Around Town] Nivea, Newsweek, and “Yes to All” - (37signals)

Outdoor pictogram headlines // Designing The News


The idea would be that a simple application would pull headlines from the BBC News website, or any website, and seperate the headline into individual words. It would then check a database to see if there is a pictogram associated with that word and display it. This would loop for all words until the headline is complete. If there is no pictogram for the word available, then it will just display the word and update an online list that symbols for word ‘X’ are needed.

Outdoor pictogram headlines // Designing The News

Song of the Day

Stella Chiweshe - “Kasawha” [MP3]

Ajaxian » A new spin on the datepicker control


Just when you thought that datepickers had been played out, along comes Filament Group and puts a whole new spin on it. Working from Mark Grabanski’s jQuery UI DatePicker control, the team substantially enhanced the UI with a host of new features…

Ajaxian » A new spin on the datepicker control

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces - ReadWriteWeb


It is ironic that it took web UIs so long to discover the elegance and simplicity of context. Since its dawn, HTML lacked the sophisticated widgets that are present on the desktop and web UIs were always considered more primitive and slow. Contextual, AJAX-based UIs actually seem faster because they do not reveal all possible choices to the user. Instead they focus on surfacing just the bits that are necessary and then surfacing more based on user gestures.A good example of context-based UIs can be found in modern video players. The controls in these apps are hidden until the user moves the mouse over the player. Depicted below is the player from Vimeo.

The Rise of Contextual User Interfaces - ReadWriteWeb

Song of the Day

Charanga 76: No Nos Pararan [MP3]
Taken from the 12″ on TR Records (1979)

Compete on Usability: Simplicity is not the ultimate goal

Phone_blank
I saw a hotel telephone last week that perfectly illustrates one of my favorite themes: simple is not always more usable. Here’s a phone without any buttons. It doesn’t get much simpler than that! Yet most people wouldn’t even consider it a real telephone, because essential features are missing. How do you choose who you want to call?

Compete on Usability: Simplicity is not the ultimate goal

IA Summit ‘08 Slidecast: “How to be a UX Team of One”

Song of the Day

Crystal Castles - Good Times (FITFORUSE Edit)

blink design library: Filter controls with keyword search

12istockphoto_2
We’ve tested a number of search interfaces and in general we’ve found that people often neglect refinement options. It could be that people are conditioned to the web search experience (particularly Google) and therefore are less inclined to take refinement steps as part of entering their search.The search function at iStockphoto encourages visitors to refine by displaying the controls dynamically when the cursor is in the keyword search field:12istockphoto_2

blink design library: Filter controls with keyword search

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