May 2013
16 posts
3 tags
Midwest UX 13: Call for Speakers
The Midwest UX 13 conference just went live with their new website and announced their call for speakers. While in past years, themes were left to organically emerge from the submitted talks, the organizers have decided to prepend a theme to this year’s event: Place.
We identify with the places in our lives because they have meaning to us personally and collectively. A place is often more than...
3 tags
The Top Reporter
There were three project teams by the end of the semester, each working on its own game. I was purely coincidence, but I was pleased that they three games are completely different. The Top Reporter is a party game in the vein of Cranium and Pictionary.
Make sure your teeth are whitened, and your hair is brushed because the National News Network Association (The NNNA) has opened up a primetime...
6 tags
In the Details: Make up your rewind
I’ll occasionally use the frame animation palette in Photoshop to create an animated GIFF, but most of the time I use it to save different states of a screen mockup in one file. Adobe is blatantly inconsistent with the iconography used for the controls in the palette.
There are four arrows controlling playback. The single, right-pointing arrow starts playing the animation. This is appropriate,...
2 tags
7 tags
Lazy Genericism
Bootstrap is a beautiful piece of work, no doubt. It makes flexible and responsive grid-based layout a piece of cake. It provides transitions and dynamic behaviors without a sweat. It even provides clean, contemporary aesthetics in pre-made components. Add Glyphicons or Font Awesome and you have a web app that will satisfy the CEO built in no time flat.
Of course, you used an accordion panel...
2 tags
Race Conditioning
My Nissan Cube has a peculiarity that has conditioned me to behave in a certain way. When I have passengers in the car and we reach our destination, as soon as I have put on the brake to stop the car in my parking space, I go into race mode. I try to put the car in park, set the parking break, turn off the ignition, and remove the key from the steering column before anyone attempts to open their...
3 tags
Carnival Murder Mystery
My Game Design class wrapped up last Tuesday. I’m declaring it a success. I’m very pleased with the work that was done, and my students claim to see a lot of value in what they learned this semester. On top of that, it was an awful lot of fun to teach.
One of the three teams was working on Carnival Murder Mystery: a board game for 2–4 players.
Step right up to the Carnival Murder Mystery! Be...
4 tags
Microinteractions
Dan Saffer’s new book, Microinteractions, is now available. I received mine from Amazon on Friday. This is not a book review, though I’ll likely write one later. Between Mother’s Day activities and getting my grades submitted, I haven’t had time to read the book. I just wanted to take the opportunity to give the book what little publicity DesignAday can offer. If you enjoy my In the Details posts,...
2 tags
6 tags
In the Details: Tabs
I’m still acclimating to Adobe’s CS6. I think I like Photoshop’s new, dark gray color scheme, but there are some quirks that have been tripping me up. For one, I keep clicking on the wrong document tab. Realizing that I was doing this repeatedly, I analyzed the UI to figure out why.
In this screenshot, I have two documents open. One tab represents the document with focus. The other tab is the...
1 tag
The Power of 10
2003 saw the humble beginnings of what would eventually become the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) in a Yahoo! mailing list. I don’t remember for certain how I first learned of it, but IxDA.org has me pegged as a member since January 4, 2005, but I’m sure I was already participating in discussions in 2004. I was several years out of grad school and hungry for interaction with other...
3 tags
A Storm’s a Brewin’!
There are dark clouds on the horizon—Adobe’s Creative Cloud, to be specific. Many seem shocked at the news, but I saw it coming. Given Adobe’s behavior in recent years, it was a forgone conclusion that they would eventually move to a subscription-only model. I’ve been dreading it. They just dropped the bomb.
Shantanu Narayen can try to legitimize the move all he wants, but he will have a hard...
10 tags
IxDA Pittsburgh Workshop Open for Resgistration
My workshop, Sitting in the Driver’s Seat: creating production-ready CSS, which I led at Interaction 13 in Toronto, is getting a second run in Pittsburgh. All proceeds, beyond the rental of the space, are going to IxDA Pittsburgh for use in future programming. Since this is the first event to which we are charging admission, we’re keeping it very accessible. It’s only $100 for professionals and...
2 tags
1 tag
I returned from Japan on Sunday. It was kind of funny leaving Tokyo at 11:05 Sunday morning and arriving in Washington D.C. at 10:35—30 minutes earlier than I left. I’m almost over the jet lag.
I regret to say that I didn’t get to see much outside of my hotel and the aircraft carrier. Between standing and talking all day and dealing with the time difference, I was exhausted by the evenings. I...
4 tags
Do Something Smart
A couple of weeks ago I spent a fair chunk of time opening old Freehand files in Illustrator CS4 and saving them as Illustrator files, since Illustrator CS6 can’t read them. I used Freehand to create a lot of user interface specification documents and diagrams back in the day, so the files I was opening had a lot of linked images. A large percentage of these links were broken, and I had to relink...
4 tags
Select What?
Before I left for Japan, I added AT&T’s international roaming to my mobile plan. After selecting the services that I wanted to add (voice, SMS, and data), I was presented with this screen.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why the instructions are to select an “Effective/Expiration Date”, rather than just an effective date. This step is to pick the date that the service starts. You...
April 2013
16 posts
5 tags
Education + Design + Crowdsourcing = ?
I have a question for you. What will happen when design is taught in K-12 grades, not as its own subject—not as Design, but simply as the process by which problems are solved and new things invented? It’s not so far-fetched. I’ve been perturbed by the whole STEM movement in education because of its apparent exclusion, or at least oversight of, the importance of training in creativity through...
2 tags
2 tags
Scale
I’ll be taking another week-long hiatus from DesignAday, I’m afraid. I’ve trained the crews of eight submarines in the past year, gathering invaluable feedback and observations at the same time. Next week, we kick things up a notch. My team is traveling to Japan where we’ll be training our first aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington. For a sub, we train between 40 and 50 crewmembers. For a...
3 tags
In the Details: Parallax
Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.
In simpler words, parallax is a visual effect you experience when moving. Objects closer to you appear to move past more quickly than objects that are farther away. For example, when riding...
2 tags
Adobe Alert
Here’s a warning to my fellow former Freehand users. I just discovered last week that Illustrator CS6 has dropped support for Freehand files. It can no longer open them. Luckily, I had not yet deleted CS4 from any of the machines on which I had it installed. I have Freehand files dating back to 1992, and I would be extremely upset to lose the ability to read them. I spent several hours at work...
1 tag
DesignAyear 6
As of today, DesignAday is 6 years old. In the past year, I had 12,070 page views from 6,827 unique visitors. 54% of those visits were classified as search traffic. The most popular keywords were “designaday design landscape”, “designaday code”, and “design a day”, so I know that a lot of the searchers were specifically searching for this blog. Of course, the...
3 tags
6 tags
Sitting in the Driver’s Seat… in Pittsburgh
Some weeks ago I mentioned that I would be holding my workshop, Sitting in the Driver’s Seat: creating production-ready CSS, for IxDA Pittsburgh. Plans are firming up. The workshop will be held in East Liberty Carnegie Library on Thursday, May 30th, from 5:00 to 8:30 pm. There will be 15 seats at $100 and 10 student seats at $50. Mark your calendar now. I’ll let you know when we have...
5 tags
Oh no they didn’t!
I assumed the headline was tongue-in-cheek link bait. Wired would know better than to publish something so mind-numbingly stupid. “Car Tech Isn’t Failing. Owners and Infotainment Interfaces Are”. That has to be a joke, right? What’s the date on this article? No, it’s not an April Fool’s Day joke, and it’s not from 1996.
The gist of the article is that computer systems in cars have become very...
6 tags
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Scrubby...
Photoshop CS5 changed the default behavior of the zoom tool, which of course I am now experiencing for the first time in CS6. It was quite a surprise the first time I tried to drag out a marquee around the area to which I wanted to zoom in. Instead, the image dynamically zoomed in on the spot I first clicked as I dragged the cursor across the screen. When you have been using a tool as long as I...
2 tags
3 tags
Cursing the Cursor
I mentioned yesterday that I’ve upgraded to Adobe CS6. As I start using it, I’m sure there will be quite a few posts about changes to it here. I should also point out that I upgraded from version 4, so I may be pointing out details that are old news to many of you.
The first thing I do after installing a new version of an application is run through its preferences. This is especially important...
4 tags
In the Details: I’s & l’s
Because I do a lot of work for the military, I have two computers at my desk. One is a MacBook Pro, which is my primary machine and connects to the internet. The other is a Mac Mini that is connected to our secure network, which doesn’t touch the internet. I have copies of all of my software tools installed on both machines. Having just upgraded to Adobe CS6, today I took the time to jump through...
4 tags
Why, this car is Automatic…
Cars are slowly but surely transforming into consumer devices, and it’s about time. I’m tired of buying cars and having their onboard technology obsolesce in a year or two without a practical upgrade method. My Cube is a great little car, but it can’t charge my iPhone 4S, as it still has the Firewire-based cable. I jealously read about the new features in Fords and other brands that are taking...
3 tags
Bento So-So
I’m the drummer in a worship band, and I participate in the planning of our services. We select five songs every week to support a theme or scriptures that the service will be based on. Our repertoire is well over 100 songs, and it continues to grow. To make it easier to select songs, I want to create a database that I can easily search. I should be able to find a song based on its key, tempo,...
March 2013
13 posts
4 tags
In the Details: Tap
Yesterday, I used the Pro Metronome app as an example of skeuomorphism. Today, I want to point out my favorite feature of the application: the TAP button. I’ve never owned a fancy, digital metronome, so I had never seen this feature before. I imagined it was an inventive addition taking advantage of the touch capability of the device, but no, it is a feature translated from existing devices. You...
5 tags
Skeuomorphism: the good, the bad, and the ugly
I’m really getting tired of hearing people complain about skeuomorphic user interfaces, especially tech journalists that don’t understand what they’re discussing. Podcasts on the TWiT network (yes, I’m looking at you, Leo) have been especially annoying. So, here’s an example. The next time you hear somebody complain about Apple’s skeuomorphic leather stitching, please send them here.
The Ugly...
4 tags
Adobe Kenobi
I recently upgraded to Adobe Creative Suite 6. I was filling out the registration and encountered the typical Job Type menu. Seeing as how Adobe’s products are intended for creatives, one would expect to find better defined titles than you would in registration forms from other companies. While there are five different designer roles listed, I was disappointed in the selection. How long has it...
4 tags
Backing Design for Good
Lindsey Estep is one of my graduate students. She came to the program with not only a degree in Graphic Design, but business as well. It should be no surprise, then, that she is exploring design entrepreneurship. She has been focusing this semester on self-publishing through Kickstarter.
Rather than me telling the whole story, I invite you to view her video. Perhaps you may even feel moved to...
2 tags
6 tags
In the Details: Two-Step Scrubber
A few weeks back, I reviewed the new mobile app from Audible. One detail I left out was the microinteraction involving the scrubber. A scrubber is a control for moving forward or backward through a segment of audio. In most audio playback applications, it takes the form of a slider. The length of the slider represents the length of the audio clip, and the thumb, or handle, indicates the current...
10 tags
Unforeseen Benefits
It seems obvious now, but when I was working on my conference workshop of Interaction 13, I really wasn’t thinking about it being of particular benefit inside my company. I’ve been the sole interaction designer for so long, I don’t give as much thought to knowledge sharing as I probably should. Since the acquisition, however, we’ve had an influx of work, and due to a number of mostly unrelated...
4 tags
Amnesia Fortnight
Every year, Double Fine Productions takes two weeks to prototype a handful of game concepts, throws them at the wall, and sees what sticks. They call the event Amnesia Fortnight.
This normally-secretive process is named “Amnesia” because the entire team at Double Fine forgets what they’re working on, and “Fortnight” because it lasts for two weeks. During this time the company is divided into...
5 tags
Designer’s Toolbelt: iMac
I’ve now had my new 27” iMac for a couple months, so I think it’s time to give a short review. The screen is absolutely gorgeous. It is, bar none, the best computer display I’ve eve seen. It’s bright, sharp, and the colors are brilliant. It makes the two older Apple LCDs that straddle it seem dim and muddy, and I’ve always considered them to be good displays. Of course, it’s huge, which is...
2 tags
2 tags
Practicing What I Teach
Regular readers of DesignAday know that I’m currently teaching a class on Game Design. As I was planning the course, I decided to gamify the grading system. So far, it seems to be working rather well.
Every week, there is a Main Quest that is worth a certain number of points. The amount varies from week to week but works out to be 5 points per week. Along with that, I provide a list of Side...
3 tags
In the Details: Grayed Out
Since very early in the history of user interface design, an object that is “grayed out” has been understood to be disabled. Clicking on it won’t do anything. “Grayed out” means that the object is a lighter or less saturated color. This may be accomplished by making the object translucent, allowing the background to show through. Contrast is reduced.
This is a screenshot from Pinterest,...
4 tags
Pinterrogation
I signed up for a Pinterest account the other day. There’s a reason for that, but it will be a subject for a future post. Luke Wroblewski explains the concept of gradual engagement thusly:
Gradual engagement is an alternative to the all too common sign-up form. I’m sure you’ve encountered your fair share. You come across a new Web service and the first thing you need to do is fill out a...
February 2013
16 posts
3 tags
Jack of All Trades, Master of Some
In Jeroen van Geel’s article for Core77, Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Danger for Interaction Design, he expresses his concern that Interaction Designers are overreaching their bounds, trying to assimilate too many other areas of expertise.
There is a growing understanding of human behavior, but currently our weakness (and chances) lie in developing more knowledge around the business side....
5 tags
Fold
As a college senior, Sean Dooley has some issues with laundry. He set himself the task of designing a laundry bin that would be more space efficient for purposes of storage and travel. After a lot of research into existing products, he was most influenced by paper grocery bags. After initial brainstorming and sketching, he produced a tiny prototype from cardboard, paper, and masking tape.
It...
2 tags
8 tags
Laudable Audible
Another of my favorite sessions from Interaction 13 was Trip ODell’s If UX Can Kill it Probably Will: Designing for the 70 MPH Interface. And what interface might that be? I had the fortune of making Trip’s acquaintance a couple days before his talk and learned that he has worked for both Microsoft and Adobe, but he wasn’t speaking of work he did at either company. He is currently at Audible, a...
3 tags
Games in the Making
We’re well into the semester now, and my students have divided into six teams, each team designing a different game. There is quite a variety, and I’m pleased with the ideas so far.
Monster Morph is a card game inspired by Pokémon and Gloom. There will be battles between creatures with special powers, but it will incorporate Gloom’s transparent modifier card mechanic to morph the attributes of...
