xeophin

Michael Fretz Blog by an interaction designer at ZHdK. [...]

Your users are never stupid. Sure, there are many users who may not be experts in using your application (or web site, or remote control, or door knob) – in fact, most users of your interface won’t be experts at using your interface. Even if your product is Photoshop and your users spend half their [...]

Don’t you just love completely pointless knowledge? [found via fscklog]

LimerickDB: Latest Entries Ever been in the need of a limerick? Here is the database. (tags: limerick Culture lang:en Fun Satire) [...]

Sometimes, it is kinda sad to see how far interaction design goes to emulate real world obstructions – obstructions that wouldn’t exist in digital form to begin with.

Let’s have a look at the calendar to the right. This is taken from a blog, and basically, it should be used as a way to navigate the [...]

Quicksilver is probably my most used application on my Mac. Its developer, Nicholas Jitkoff1 gives a look behind the scenes at Google Tech Talks.

Found via habi.

He’s kinda cute on that vid, or as Merlin Mann puts it: “actually astonishingly good-looking”. Who says software developers have to be ugly grumpy nerds? I mean, there are even [...]

Wacky idea last evening:

A program that uses natural language colour names as an input. An internet agent then goes looking for representations of that colour in the wild, takes the average of all of them and returns the definition to the user.

It kinda works already: check out lindgrün (pastel green) or petrol green. Of course [...]

I wouldn’t want to see the count of slaughtered minions I need to have until I’m at level 70 – but then again, when I’m playing, I’m mostly interested in what I lack until I can complete the quest. It may just be two shades of gray, but it illustrates the job of every good information designer: weighting information by importance, and moving those information pieces accordingly into the fore-, respectively background – and by doing that, new meaning can evolve through the importance those pieces get.

I‘m new to the world of fancy coffee drinks. With the vast number of ordering options and new words with accented characters to pronounce; the coffee shop ordering experience can be intimidating. I’ve created a few small illustrations to help myself and others wrap their head around some of the small differences.

Lokesh Dhakar helps you [...]

Just wait long enough, and the thing I predicted gets real.

Most doors have handles. Handles on doors are usually used to pull or push in order to open the door. Not necessarily, though, in those train coaches used by the BLS.

infoscreen der sbb Originally uploaded by phpfreak…. Very informative, having Windows telling all travellers that it just screwed up, right?I would be so embarrassed if I were working in SBB’s IT department. This thing is failing as ungracefully as it can possibly get.Come on: let it run on something stable, far less chatty than Windows – and, most of all, program it to fail gracefully and invisibly to your customers.Can that be so hard to accomplish?

After usability, there comes flow: “Thanks for giving me something useable, well-designed, and useful…. Can you keep me so immersed that time and all the clutter of daily existence drops away? Where I’m under a spell that’s never broken by an intrusion from the software itself?

Shaun Inman: Com/post Originally uploaded by xeophin.

Shaun Inman’s designs are always breathtaking and beautifully executed.

I find the colour codes he has now introduced in his com/post especially intriguing: Depending on when an entry has been posted, it will receive a unique colour. This colour will [...]

According to a poll by the magazine Mobile, more than three quarters of Motorola mobile phone users would not buy another Motorola handset because they are too difficult to use.

Why does that not surprise me? Honestly, I love my RAZR for its sleek design, but the interface is both ugly and a pain to use. [...]