Post(s) tagged with "ui"

A Heart Is Different From A Star

How Airbnb Evolved To Focus On Social Rather Than Searches - Cliff Kuang via Co.Design

For a couple years, registered Airbnb users have been able to star the properties they browse, and save them to a list. But Gebbia’s team wondered whether just a few tweaks here and there could change engagement, so they changed that star to a heart. To their surprise, engagement went up by a whopping 30%. The star, they realized, was a generic web shorthand and a utilitarian symbol that didn’t carry much weight. The heart, by contrast, was aspirational. “It showed us the potential for something bigger,” Gebbia tells Co.Design. And in particular, it made them think about the subtle limitations of having a search-based service. “You have to have search,” Gebbia says. “But what if you don’t know where you want to go?”

It’s the little things, people.

Source: fastcodesign.com

9 October 2012 30 Permalink
stars and heartsairbnbuiuxdesign

A fascinating UI concept for getting stuff from device to device.

(via Co.Design)

3 May 2012 52 Permalink
designuifile transferux

jonathanmoore:

Basecamp UI Preview

37signals have come up with some very unique although simple user experience patterns that should make using Basecamp easier than ever.  Jump into the video at 3 minutes to see a demonstration of how they are allowing for you to easily navigate into a project.

via aparticularpath, 37signals 

Clever sort of ‘stack’ UX, where content in basecamp is treated as an outline, and clicking on an item — like a to do in a project — creates a new ‘sheet’ for the to do that hovers over the project sheet. Closing the to do exposes the project, and so on.

Need to get access to the beta and find out if 37signals have finally fixed the federated identity bug. I bet they have.

Source: vimeo.com

17 February 2012 11 jonathanmoore Permalink
basecampuxuinew basecamp37signals
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

Bret Victor, A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

Source: worrydream.com

9 November 2011 27 Permalink
uiuxinteraction designgestural interfacestech

Reader is a product built to consume information, quickly. We designed it to be very good at that one thing. G+ is an experience built around browsing (similar to Facebook) and socializing. Taking the UI paradigm for G+ and mashing it onto Reader without any apparent regard for the underlying function is awful and it shows.

The second and more obvious change, is that someone took the magic color-removing wand and drenched the whole page in grey. It’s so unbelievably stark, it’s hard to imagine a more desolate experience. Even G+ has blue links for post titles. Blue titles are good enough for Google search. Reader, which is built entirely around posts with titles, does away with this in the name of the almighty grey god.

The only thing left with any color of consequence it the obscenely red subscribe button in the top left, which in keeping with the spirit of prioritizing the exactly wrong thing — you don’t even need to use very often.

There plenty of other areas to nitpick like the fact that there’s no separation between the reading pane and the subscriptions panel, that the active post you’re reading no longer pops out as much as before, and the extra padding crammed into the subscriptions list — but the old interface wasn’t perfect either, though it was designed around satisfying the primary use case of reading. In any case, I only have so much time, and need to save my rage for the next section of even more egregious changes.

- Brian Shih, Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision?

I think that Google reader now looks like the back of an organic cereal box. Go read all of Brian’s comments.

The UI decisions just don’t seem to make sense. And the integration with Google+ seems to break privacy:

Keep in mind that on top of requiring 3-4 times as many clicks, you also now must +1 a post publicly to share it, even if it’s shared to a private circle. That bears repeating. The next time you want to share some sexy halloween costumes with your private set of friends, you first must publicly +1 the post, which means it shows up on your profile, plus wherever the hell G+ decides to use +1 data. So much for building a network around privacy controls.

The frustrating thing is that these pitfalls could have been avoided through a more thought out integration. As Kevin Fox has already pointed out, Google could have easily made it so that sharing was pushed through G+ (therefore giving providing content on G+, and gaining all the benefits of an integration), but also replaced shared items from People You Follow with a Reader-specific Circle.

But no - instead, they’ve ripped out the ability to consume shared items wholesale from the product. The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.

It’s almost as if Google wants to demonstrate that, yes, they don’t really get platforms. Instead of improving the G+ API to support Reader as a fully functional 3rd party client (a la Twitter), they’ve instead crippled the product under the guise of improvements.

Source: brianshih.com

2 November 2011 9 Permalink
brian shihgoogle readerredesignuiuxsharinggoogle+
I say that flat is the new black; that 2D is the new avant-garde; that a surface doesn’t have to be ashamed of being a surface. Technology users of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your bas-relief buttons. Let us march forwards together, spurning chrome, into a cleaner, lighter future.

Steven Poole, Against Chrome: A Manifesto

11 February 2011 1 kirklove Permalink
UIdesign

The Difference Between UI and UX

via Quora

How can you argue with fly-in-urinal research?

9 October 2010 3 Permalink
uxuixianhang zhang

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