Last Saturday I visitied decoded, a conference dedicated to the beautiful things one can do with code. Topics ranged from art projects over open source hardware to more serious topics like visualization of data.
All talks were awesome (and I totally want an arduino for Christmas), but the one that kept me researching and having new ideas was the one of Moritz Stefaner about visualizing information. He has some really inspiring websites (here and here). I especially liked his contribution to the book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search” – it’s about search, visualization and it even has formulas. What more could one want? >> more…
I admit it. I had to get it and I did.
Now I have this shiny (more on that later), magical and revolutionary device sitting on my desk.
And here is the answer to the most asked question of the last week “how do you like it?”
I like it a lot, but I am still searching for a proper place for it in my life.I have my laptops (yes, two: one MacBook Air for iPhone coding and one Lenovo X60 for real work – I couldn’t function without Office 2007), one of them typically is within easy reach. On the road I have my iPhone which does pretty much all I want to do on the road. >> more…
Recently out interaction designers Maria and Franzi told us about paper prototypes and how to use them when finding out what customers will like and what they won’t understand. The idea behind it is, that customers (or whoever gives you feedback) are more willing to criticize when they can guess that not too much work already went into development. On top of that, it saves the time to create “real” prototypes.
I already liked the paper prototypes very much, because there’s always one in the team acting as the computer (that means, he scrolls the paper when you tell him, lays a new “screen” in front of you when you pretend to click somewhere etc.). I actually never saw it, but I imagine it to be pretty amusing. >> more…
A lot of our interaction with end-users goes through project administrators on the client’s side. That makes it hard to collect good feedback. A while ago I wrote about making the product interact with users. Truth is, we got very little useful feedback. People in the middle of a process apparently rarely take time out to give feedback. At least not in a B2B scenario.
We received very useful and valuable feedback the two times we made changes that took something away from users, that they had come to value. Each time we received immediate, articulate, not always friendly but very helpful feedback. Each time we learned something about how people actually use the product and as a consequence were able to make it even better. >> more…
Recently I’ve read an article with the title „Real Developers Don’t Need Designers“. Here some guys express the opinion that for a desktop application there is no need for designers – real developers could do that job on their own. I think that even if some things are established like „OK“ and „Cancel“ are mostly arranged on the bottom… the user will recognize if a coder has tried to be a designer.
Interaction design it is a lot more than just about selecting colors and designing icons. We deal intensively with the target group and their tasks. Based on that we create the concept for the interaction with the application. The screen layout and how users can continue working in a flow is how your costumers will experience your application. >> more…
Not everybody understands English and anyway for native speakers it’s much easier. conjectPM is available in 18 languages, however it wasn’t that easy to administer them, which resulted in our users not being fully satisfied:
- In some places we had a mix of native language and English
- Some translations didn’t match the context anymore
- Wrong country-specific mail addresses and telephone numbers showed up
- Special characters were displayed incorrectly
- New functionalities weren’t translated until weeks later… >> more…
Designing great applications really is about putting yourself in the shoes of your users.
Here is another neat example of a team going the extra mile. What happens if I lose my mobile phone connection in the middle of a call (e.g. while passing through a tunnel)? With my Palm Treo I would just end up on the home screen, having to got to recent calls to dial the number. >> more…
… there are interaction designers!
We are engaged with the design of interfaces between human and computer. Our goal is to design a interface with that users could achieve their tasks in their environment in the best possible way.
We are developing new/improved designs for the conjectPM interface. Therefor we create concepts based on the needs from the user tasks, e.g. “I want to deliver quickly my drawings to the constructor”. We want to know how users are working, that’s because we run consistently interviews with our users – also for specific questions.
In close collaboration with developers the concept is implemented and tested. After the new functionality is released, we optimize it based on user feedbacks and statistic of use.
Ryan over at 37signals did a great post recently about why they included certain features in a sprint.
“The best part of building ‘as little as possible’ comes after launch. Every feature you skipped or held off on is free open space in the app for later development. Instead of a lot of baggage and maintenance, a bare-minimum release means new possibilities for feedback.”
>> more…
I know, it looks a bit obsessive. But here is another great example of a not pointing friendly user interface. We found this on a coffee maker outside our meeting room in the most excellent and recomendable ”Schlosshotel Mondsee” in… yes, Mondsee, Austria. >> more…
