User Experience Design - All Comments

2009.02.25

The .NET Aficionado — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:05:51 GMT

2009.02.25

poker en francais

Amy M. Weber — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 20:34:01 GMT

Thanks about this information. Torrent is a big help to us in downloading some applications. It is very useful to me! Thanks.

re: Home Server µTorrent IIS Web Access Client

Matthijs Krempel — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:31:54 GMT

Very phat!

re: Working Through Screen - Now in print on demand

Jacob Burghardt — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 22:41:13 GMT

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

re: From Windows Mobile to iPhone

Andries van der Meulen — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:12:21 GMT

@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.

re: From Windows Mobile to iPhone

RICH LOFTON — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:57:20 GMT

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.

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

grrd — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:05:12 GMT

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.

re: Why is User Experience Design important

Lindsey — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 02:41:47 GMT

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!

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Erwyn van der Meer — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:25:31 GMT

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.

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Andries van der Meulen — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:41:09 GMT

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.

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Erwyn van der Meer — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:00:14 GMT

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.

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Andries van der Meulen — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:57:51 GMT

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.

re: Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

Erwyn van der Meer — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:25:57 GMT

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.

Expression Blend not for Designers, but for Integrators

User Experience Design — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:26:48 GMT

Last Friday I was at the SDN Event in Houten , where I followed several UX tracks, and spoke with the

Windows Mobile and iPhone thoughts

Kartones Blog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 21:55:27 GMT

Since my shift of job, I’m “living” on a multi-platform environment (in fact, I am part of the minority