Something about pictures and buttons
Welcome Andries.
User Experience is indeed highly underrated, I heard a lot people who think that they don't require a good user experience and seen projects where the budget for user experience was blown away completely (sadly).
I do think that a good user interface helps customers adopt programs. An interface must be intuitive and self-explaining to customers.
I hope you can show alot information on this topic! Good luck!
Harold
Nice article, thanks.
Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout
In the Business Workflow, can you further illustrate the user type of the Prototype Tester?
How should this process work in terms of functional testing? Do you just drop out a few Views and say, "Perform action ..."... to see if their control response is trivial?
Or, do should we actually build a mock-application with the views that actually work together (with a controller stub)?
@Todd
Very good point Todd. When it comes to prototyping, or functionality testing, you must try to keep it simple. Make it too complicated and you lose too much time. Also test per usecase. So if you have 13 of them, you probably will run 13 tests per user.
The best way for a prototype is a visual wireframe with static dummy data, where the navigation part only works for the functionality that's tested. So when testing, the user can walk through the different screens that belongs to the case.
Before testing you write down the target that the user achieve. Like “start the batch processing”, or “verify the balance change”. Say nothing during the test, but let the user talk about what he/she thinks. Write down their thoughts, compare them with other results and make a conclusion.
If you (like we) build the prototype in the language you’re probably going to use when in development (Like WPF of HTML) you can re-use parts of the prototype for the application wireframe. This will speed-up development for a bit.
Maybe I will make a specific post about prototyping. There is absolutely more to it.
When it comes to “good” and “bad” in User Experience Design, it’s all about making compromises. There
Ah...
Too bad you just got a iPhone...
I have the HTC Diamond II for two weeks now and HTC has really done a GREAT job with ther Manilla Interface.
I never see the old wm interface anymore.
The stylus can stay in for days at a time. Only very special applications (like registry editors) are better with a stylus.
I have had several WM devices and this one is by far the best I have ever seen.
Pro...
- Device feels (and is) very fast
- Incredible good screen
- Good (finger) keyboard everywhere
- Low Learning curve (TouchFlo manilla is really great)
- This one is intended to use with your fingers. (Touchflor really really does a great job)
- Keybards type very well with your fingers. You dont have to be that precise..
And there is more..
- Incredible good camera
- HUGE developer community who make it possible to rotate apps (g-sensor) that are not designed for it.
- Everything is tweakable
- You are not stuck to 1 interface.
Just my two cents
Willy-Peter Schaub on Is Visual Studio 2010 Really as Evolutionary As We Think? The Developer Support
Since my shift of job, I’m “living” on a multi-platform environment (in fact, I am part of the minority
Last Friday I was at the SDN Event in Houten , where I followed several UX tracks, and spoke with the
I think Blend *is* a design tool. For example for designing UIs, interactions and animations. It is not suitable for creating graphics. Those are better created with other tools and then imported into Blend.
Surely UI designers will need training to become effective in Blend, just like developers need training to become effective in using WPF or Silverlight.
If you want to introduce an additional specialized role called Integrator for working with Blend, I think you better make sure that that person is also a good designer.
Probably the problem is with the definition of a "Designer". The way I see it, a designer is not technically and thinks about the application pure visually. From that point of view Blend is a hard tool to learn.
If you see "Designers" as front-end Developers, then yes, Blend will work for those people. Web-Designers who also build site's may also be able to work with it.
It's like I said, what is the definition, and what may you expect of them in terms of technically implementation of a interface.
An Integrator is someone who knows a lot of both the technically and the design side. So he'd probably is also a good designer. Though it may not be as good as someone who's primarily a Designer.
Blend is intended to let Designers design and create a user interface including animations and user interactions. The same person or another Designer may use tools like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop to create graphical elements that are included in the design.
I agree that Blend will probably take a more technically inclined Designer to take full advantage of this and it takes effort to learn. But when you find this type of person, you have the must productive and full fidelity workflow in creating graphical WPF/Silverlight applications.
No more of the Designer drawing stuff that cannot be turned into reality or has to be changed significantly because of inherent platform limitations.
But isn't learning tools always part of the equation? I also cannot image someone being productive in the other "pure" Design tools right off the bat without education and gradually building up experience.
When a Designer works with Photoshop you have to "get" the concept of layers and how they "shine through" one another. If you just have the final 2D result in mind, you will have a pretty hard time getting there.
I do agree with you more or less, that tools must be learned. Tough I still believe that Blend is not a Design tool. I know you can create your interactions & animations inside it. And this can be done by Designers which have learned the tool.
In a lot of scenarios I’ve experienced, most applications (specially LOB apps) are not be able to "connect" with the code. Because of the setup of the application, the way pages are loaded, validation, events, asynchronous, etc.
It happened to me more than once that when a designer builds a interface in XAML, there were still lots of changes and split-ups necessary to connect it with the data model and the navigation. (for example transition animations aren’t able to fit in the way the navigation of the application works. Breakouts or help panels became pop-outs.)
So yes, Blend is indeed able to be used by Designers, but when you connect it to your Developers, you still have a challenge. Off course you can make “contracts” and default setups for your interface that connect well with the code, but somehow I think this will limit the creativity of your Designers.
On the other hand, the tool lends itself perfectly for the “make-it-pretty” technique, where basic interface is already made so the logic will work with that, and the designer has to “fluffen” the interface.
But I really despise this way of working, because the User Experience part will fail. Because your application was actually designed by the Developer.
Thanks for the explanation about the disconnect that might still happen between Designer and Developer when using Blend. This better explains the need for an Integrator role to bridge this.
It would be ideal if this role doesn't have to be performed by an extra person, and the Developer can fulfil this role.
You always need some kind of specialization. I think a UI Developer specializing in WPF should become able to fix up the XAML produced by the Designer. A developer specializing in realizing complex business logic or data/service access might not have those skills.
I definitely agree with your points on here, particularly on conversion rates. If I can't figure out how to checkout, how am I going to buy!
i am an experienced Graphic Designer.
and i am struggling so much to learn Blend. To me it seems that Blend requires a special kind of mathematical-logical thinking... which i don't really have. It seems to have been totally built around developers' needs/built around the code. From a design perspective it seems totally counter-intuitive.
Have been at this for 6 months now and i feel like i am totally stuck.
i would be lost with our "integrator".
not sure how long i can handle this anymore.
p.s. this comes from a person who had zero problem slearning Flash (including ActionScript)
thanks for listening.
Your full of poppycock. You must be a Macintosh employee or technically challenged because this is what you conveniently forgot to mention.
1. you can't save attachments from website or emails other than pic's or pdf's which are all thrown into your photo file
2. there is no removable storage
3. there is no bluetooth sync
4. the battery is horrible and you can't swap batteries or add an extended life battery
5. safari doesn't support flash so you can't stream anything without an approved app, ie you tube
6. you can't edit or attach word or excel documents
7. you can't attach mulitple pic's or pdf's to an email
8. you can't run multiple applications at the same time - i'm sure dos from 91' even supports that
9. you can't access storage space on local drive
10. you have to go to app store for apps of websites that are just mobile versions of a website
11. you have to use iTunes
12. you can bareley have a conversation with someone since the speaker and micorophone suck
13. you can't customize your sync and all your folders with outlook
14. you can't customize your phone by placing different apps in different folders - so you have pages upon pages of apps to sort through
15. you can't edit how the phone uses onboard resources
I could go on and on but I think you get the point. The iPhone does have a nice touchscreen and it is sleek and great for technically challenged hipsters but it is not a phone that an everday technical businessman will embrace. I've even jailbreaked my iPhone to help with customizing and still wasn't able to accomplish what I could with my tiny screened Motorola Q9h. The iPhone reminds me of what AOL users thought the internet was back in the 90's.
@Rich Lofton
For someone refering to iPhonesucks.com it's obvious you don't like this device. Well, that's just to bad.
My post is a comparison with the Windows Mobile device I used before. For me it was (and is) a huge improvement. Everything you've mentioned is absolutly true, but then again, I don't bother, because apparently I don't use/need this features. (Allright, iTunes suck, I agree on that!)
For the record, I'm not a Macintosh employee. I actually work as a User Experience Specialist in our Microsoft devision.
Update - "Working through Screens" is now available as a 400 page print on demand book at minimum third party printing costs:
www.flashbulbinteraction.com/WTS.html
Thank you for your interest!
Jacob Burghardt
Very phat!
Thanks about this information. Torrent is a big help to us in downloading some applications. It is very useful to me! Thanks.
2009.02.25
Glad you liked the talk and slides.
Very nice. I've been hunting for a DockPanelSplitter or a DockSplitter for a while now, your ResizeDragBehavior fits the bill perfectly. Thanks Andries!
Thanks great infos as always !
Someone referenced this post to answer question "(WINDOWS 7) what function does ctrl+alt+A (Alt Gr+A) have?"...