Human machine interface - Vehicle UX

Microsoft Design

Microsoft has been producing some excellent visualizations into the thinking behind their software lately. I love this new Microsoft because the message and principles behind the work they are doing are clear to the consumer of their software. They still lack the level of detail that Apple communicates consistently, but these are significant steps in the right direction for there business.

More can be seen at https://vimeo.com/microsoftdesign

Future Interface Experiences

Experimentation and education are a continual fascination for me especially when it comes to future interfaces. Here is some FUI inspiration and a vision into what our near future interactions will look like.

@ https://vimeo.com/nawaz

@ https://vimeo.com/erodygin

@ https://vimeo.com/robynhaddow

@ https://vimeo.com/user68893781

@ https://vimeo.com/cantinacreative

@ https://vimeo.com/romeady

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@ http://www.gordonspurs.com/pacific-rim-uprising

A few more for inspiration come from the amazing Territory Studio - https://vimeo.com/territorystudio

App Design Paradigms

Article: Source

Have you ever wondered what it is about an application that makes the user experience familiar and intuitive to us? There are many underlying factors which affect how we use an app, as well as the way we connect with it. A large portion of the apps we use have a basic framework which we seem to connect and interact more intuitively with, otherwise we wouldn’t be using them. These app design paradigms come into play with the way we navigate apps, create content in applications, and organize assets we have within those apps.

Navigation

Within the apps that have the most wide-spread use, there seems to be a consistency in how the navigation is implemented into the UI; and not only on hand-held devices either. The consistency (or lack thereof) goes unnoticed for the most part. As designers though, it’s our job to figure out what conditions us as humans to interact with the various devices and interfaces that we come across each day, so that we may better our future designs, products, and apps.

Left-Oriented Navigation

Facebook, Google+, Path, Mail.app, and dozens of other services and apps have left-oriented navigation systems. While there could be many factors for this design choice, there’s one reason that makes the most sense, at least in my opinion.

Since the conception of paper, (most) humans have been writing their languages from left-to-right. This was originally intended to protect the ink from being smeared across the pages as it was being written onto the papyrus. While an iPhone display isn’t exactly a piece of Indo-European papyrus, it’s in our culture to teach and be taught to read and organize from left to right.

From an early age this has been instilled in us and through that, our brains have learned to comprehend much, if not all of what we do in the left-to-right manner. By placing the organization system within an application on the left-hand side, we naturally view it as part of the interaction process. There are exceptions to this, as not all apps are designed in the examples I discussed above. However this does present a valid argument for left-oriented navigation within apps.

Bottom-Oriented Navigation

Bottom-oriented navigation is yet another possibility that seems to shine within certain mobile apps. Apps such asTweetbot, Dropbox, and Instagram all have predominately bottom-oriented navigation. The best argument for bottom-oriented navigation is that when using our mobile devices, the placement of our hands allows our thumb to easily glide along the bottom screen.

This is a welcomed concept to our subconscious, as it is the quickest solution to a problem. This placement also helps being that such movement of our thumbs prevents us from blocking any other content that is on the screen. It’s a logical solution to the development of the mobile platform.

Top-Oriented Navigation

Top-oriented navigation exists, although it seems to be a bit more prominent in desktop apps. I’m yet to come up with a valid argument for that paradigm, with the exception of productivity apps such as Numbers and Pages, where, for organizational sake you start at the top. Though Pocket is one exception. By having the navigation keys up top on a slightly darker background color, it puts more emphasis on the saved content. If you have any argument for this paradigm, I’d love to hear feedback in the comments below.

Publishing/Creation

When going to share, publish, reply, or create something within a mobile application, there is a recurring theme in the vast amount of designs. While the y-axis of this particular paradigm shifts from app to app, the x-axis seems to stay consistent. In a variety of mobile app genres, the button to add, create, or publish content is right-oriented.

Tumblr, Apple’s Clock app, and Trip Cubby all share this UI choice. To make a new Tumblr post, select the button in the lower-right-hand corner; to create a new alarm in the Clock app, select the ‘+’ button in the upper-right-hand corner; the same can be said for creating a new log in Trip Buddy. I believe the reason for this is the same as mentioned above; the fact that a majority of individuals are right-handed and our thumbs naturally fall along the right side of the x-axis.

As with the paradigms mentioned above, there are exceptions. Facebook, both native mobile apps and browser-based versions, have the button for a new post located across the top of the display. Path also takes the complete opposite approach with the post button being located in the lower-left-hand corner. If there are any apps that use a different method, I’d love to see how they implement it into the design.

Overview

With designers and developers coming up with new apps each day, there will always be a variety of UIs within their respectable platform. It’s interesting to look at, however, that a large portion of the most downloaded and used apps share the paradigm of designing with the human subconscious in mind. Many developers may not even consciously know themselves, the reason for which they implement these UI choices, but that only goes to show that this paradigm may simply be a product of that which is unseen. The subliminal, if you will.

What design paradigms have you noticed within various UIs? Share them, below!

What are the most important emerging user experience themes right now?

Article: Source

Skeuomorphism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ske…)
More interfaces are starting to integrate seemingly useless visual cues that we’re accustomed to seeing in real life. The iPhone, for example, is full of them. The “slide-to-unlock” behavior or “on/off switches” in iOS are examples of skeuomorphism.

Media-aware
More applications are being designed for use across different platforms and resolutions. Even staples like the 960 grid system are falling out of use as fluid width and browser-specific styling become more popular.

Shorter web forms
Thankfully, we’re finally graduating past forms with 20 required items. Designers are now picking up that asking for a lot of information up front is terrible for conversion rates and wastes a lot of time. We’re moving toward asking the bare minimum now (email) and slowly asking for more as the relationship grows stronger. Profile-completion sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are leading the charge here.

Everything is a link
I think we’re starting to see an increase in clickable content. On more developed websites, you can click on nearly everything to gain more information on that object. On Quora, for example, you can click on nearly any image or blue text to learn more about that underlying object. On news websites, you can double-click on a word to look up the definition. Information about nearly anything on the page will be readily available when you want it.

Guided tours
Seemingly complicated applications now come with sequential tooltips that serve as a step-by-step walkthrough. This, in my opinion, is the live, interactive version of the “setup wizard.” Rather than showing you a set of diagrams with some text, applications are now giving you the real application, annotated with overlays, tooltips and buttons to help you move through it. The new ux overhaul by Google has done a great job of this.

Psychology: Many of the themes that we have mentioned above rely on in-depth knowledge of user behavior, user motivations and what influences users. We can see the psychology and behavioral studies are popping up in blogs and books across UX, and that is because UX, as Ronnie mentioned, is at a critical point in our existence. We are looking to be more than just usability experts and are instead needing to be the user behavior experts. Understanding more about Psychology and how we can apply it to UX will help us get there. It is also involved in gamification (what motivates people to act), Data Visualization (how does the brain take in an view information) and many other points mentioned above.

Better. Faster. UXier. — AToMIC Design - Jen Gergen

We believe in making incremental changes based on user testing. But there are some parts of the process we’re just not very good at yet. It’s usually still hard to achieve dramatic, site-wide style changes in an incremental and agile way, and most of us still run into “redesign” projects eventually. It’s sometimes hard to collaborate on the nitty-gritty style details with developers because we group and name things differently, and we store and share our work differently. Even though we want to make and test prototypes, we often don’t get around to it because they either takes a lot of effort, or produce highly questionable results, and it shouldn’t have to be so hard. AToMIC Design is an organizing principle, a workflow, and a library that aim to address these three birds with one stone.

Design Agility for Startups - Neil Wehrle
The relationship of design to the world of startups has recently shifted from a question of necessity to a position of criticality. To succeed in this new environment, designers need to adapt their strengths. In several case studies, Neil Wehrle provides insight into how designers innovate in an early-stage startup environment. Specifically, he shows how the Product Experience group at betaworks works to transform ideas into products then companies.

Sprinkle Some Pixie Dust: User Experience

Article Source: Click Here

The secret to winning fans and pleasing customers might just be simplicity of design. We talked to a trio of user-experience pros about how they create intuitive (and highly successful) products.

Remember back in the day when MP3 players had features like voice recorders, cell phones touted GPS, and no one really thought much about whether their laptop was pretty? In many industries things have changed, insists Jason Putorti, former lead designer at the successful personal finance software company Mint.com and current co-founder of Votizen.

Thanks in large part to the influence of Apple, “what you’re seeing now is a whole class of companies that is emerging that their core differentiator is not about an algorithm or some particular feat of engineering,” he explained to Inc.com. Instead, what sets companies such as Airbnb or Pinterest apart is their intuitive and user-friendly design.

"If you’re looking at a marketplace where just making it possible is a big deal then people will use [a product] regardless of the user experience," he says, but "when you get into more mature markets—eCommerce is obviously a good example—all the innovations have been around design, around experience, around how can we make users more excited." Need another example? Just look at Mint, which created $170 million in value in about two years. "A lot of people believed that Mint was by and large just a good looking skin on top of Yodlee, which was the aggregation software running in the back end," says Putorti, who calls user-friendly design the "magic pixie dust that made Mint so successful."

This shift towards an experience market and the dominance of design, Putorti insists, is something entrepreneurs in many sectors need to get their heads around. “A lot of CEOs out there, they have an idea in the shower and then they go in the office and are like, ‘yeah, let’s build that!’ That’s wrong on so many levels to a designer,” says Putorti.

Bryan Jowers, co-founder of Giftiki agrees, elaborating on a famous comment by VC David McClure:

"There are three roles that need to be filled within the startup: the hustler, the designer and the engineer. A decade ago, five years ago you only really had the engineer. Then you started to get the hustler because you had to have the guy that was willing to execute everything down the road," he said. "Now you’re seeing the designer have a seat at the table because, in order for consumer Internet plays really to be successful today, the user experience has to be baked into the product. It can’t just be added on top."

"You can’t make a really technical, amazing product and then try to figure out how the design and the entire UX fits it. I think that’s really important for founders starting out," he said. "They have to realize that design is just as important if not more than the technology that makes it actually happen."

So if you’re convinced, as Putorti puts it, that these days “design is not putting a coat of paint onto an interface” and that empathy with the customer trumps an entrepreneur’s eureka moment, but you yourself don’t have any design training, how do you proceed?

"Any founder can really learn about this stuff. Design is about understanding human needs, having empathy with their problems, starting from that perspective and believing that’s the right way to build products. That’s something that anybody can learn," says Putorti, suggesting a number of books for entrepreneurs looking to brush up on the basics of design.

But, be warned, hiring someone to design your product may not be as simple. “Someone who handles the full stack of design—they’re often called unicorns—they’re scarce and usually employed and busy, so it takes being pitched like an investor and seeing something that captivates them to get their attention,” says Putorti. What sort of pitch will nab you the best design talent? Shaun Lind, visual designer at Giftiki and founder of design firm Public School, explains:

"We want to have a seat at the table. Especially with these interactive companies and these new products, design is something that really takes a creative mind to dig into and figure out how the user is going to use it, how you can make it unique and something that’s beautiful but also effective and just fun for people," he says. "Things like that gets designers really pumped up."