October 15th, 2009
Well this is my first blog post to Lushai and I’m happy to be on the team! Instead of writing about me I thought i would share something a friend forwarded onto me recently.
So there is a guy who is writing a book on Interaction Design and he’s breaking the mold a little on this one by asking the user to fund the end result (that’s the book). Usually this sort of stuff annoys me a little but after having read the intro I think I am starting to understand why he already has a fair few people backing him.
The book is called Cadence and Slang. Have a read of the ‘outline of the book’ (scroll a little down the homepage to the link to it) and see what you think. I am relatively impressed with the few snippets that stood out to me such as:
“An interface should be understood at a minimal cognitive cost, which vanishes after enough practice.”
And
“Expectations are always multifaceted, and they are usually moving targets. It takes a sensitive, continually adaptive understanding of what those expectations are to make a good interface.”
It seems like it might be worth throwing him a dollar or two his way so he complete the thing. See what you think yourself.
October 15th, 2009
I’m back and I’m bad. It’s been like weeks and weeks since my last one. All due to large projects mixed with the small bread n butter plus all the usual distractions that come along.
Our current major project is for a large educational institute so it has brought up a host of challenges around all the facets of user experience (UX) design – visual design, information architecture, interaction design and all the smaller interactive components. The design needs to break the conventional mode for the sector (we wanted this one to pop). The UX has to be fun, easy and exceptional. Finally the interactive parts such as a course finder needs to be solid yet flexible, media galleries and landing pages all need to flow with ease as I like to say. The whole site needs to be quick, intuitive and fun.
Anyway we’ve swum through a large pool of research to help us get this far and here are some of the highlights.
And when you have to present it all: Make Yourself Presentable