HTML5, How to rethink your web strategy

HTML5, How to rethink your web strategy from faberNovel. This study will give mobile app editors the insights they need to fathom the performance of HTML5 - quoted as the new standard of the web - and adjust their multi-platform strategy accordingly.

29 Things I, as a designer, wish more tech startups knew:

Article: Source

1. Learn the difference between a UX Designer and a Visual Designer. They are not the same. And while there is (and should be) a lot of overlap in skills—it’s good to know what the designer you’re hiring thinks is priority.
2. Recognizing these differences, know that a pretty coat of paint will not make your very real usability problems magically disappear. I’ve said as much in conversations: “So, to be clear, you’re just looking for a shiny coat of paint right now, and you’re not interested in fixing the problems that are going to stop people in their tracks…?!”
3. Form labels, microcopy, instructional text—this is core to an application. In fact, the best UIs often start as written conversations between the user and the system. Be wary of designers who layer copy into their lovely layouts, or worse, use “lorem ipsum” as a stand-in for functional copy; these are signs you’ve hired a stylist and not a designer. (The same is true of visualizations—good designers start with the data, not the pretty pictures!)
4. Don’t look at a design or prototype as an approximation for what should be implemented. A good designer will sweat every detail. A 20px size difference, a change in the typeface, the timing of an animation—these kinds of things make the difference between confusion and delight.
5. 1. Bring in the UX designer before you’ve attempted any UI work. I can’t tell you how many times my clients have said “I wish I’d brought you in earlier!” The UI changes are often enough to necessitate technical re-architecture. Starting with a good designer from day one will save you a lot of headaches later on…
   2. Of course, starting with an existing alpha version means requirements have been defined. In these cases a good designer can spend her time redefining how things get done in the UI (however, be wary of “functional fixedness;” I spend a lot of my time just getting everyone on the team—designers included—to see the problem in a different way, not the way it has been implemented).
6. Listen for what your customer needs, not what they ask for. Good design (or UX) isn’t about giving customers everything they request—it’s about listening to these needs and then showing the thing they can’t articulate (unless they also have a good design sense!).
7. Iterate on a weekly or bi-weekly basis with real customers and users. Do not skip or marginalize this critical feedback loop. If you do, you risk building a product that no one else really cares about using.
8. Iterate with 5–7 different customers who have very different needs. If you design for a homogenous group of folks, you’ll end up with the perfect system for a small minority; your system likely won’t scale to accommodate the needs of a market. By testing with a diverse group of customers, you rise above specifics to see the patterns and common challenges. You create a product that addresses a market need.
9. Make sure your problem space is well researched and that you’re beginning with customer input, not waiting for it later on (when it’s too late to make significant changes).
10. Hire a dedicated front-end developer. Don’t let your UI be the afterthought of back-end programming. There’s too much going on in the UI to rely on libraries and frameworks. If you’re doing anything at all unconventional, you’ll need a good front-end dev to build these out. Better yet, pair this front-end dev with the designer so they can create and iterate together on functional prototypes. Then, once these designs have been vetted with customers, there’s no documentation needed for styles or behaviors, or miscommunication in the dreaded “handoff”—that stuff is already taken care of. The UI is ready to be hooked up to the back-end systems.
11. Good designers will care about your technology stack, to the extent that it affects the UI.
12. Design from the “bottom up” (vs “top down”). What do I mean by this? In web apps, the structure of your app (IA) will emerge over time—don’t start with structure or navigation. Think about flows, scenarios, and activities. The structure of the site will emerge from specific page level designs. Start with a laser focus on a specific activity, then follow that thread into other areas of the app. Starting with a top down focus on structure and consistent UI elements often glosses over the details and minutiae that set apart a stellar product. And don’t get hung up on inconsistent interaction and visual details that come about from this bottom up focus—these details will be ironed out as time goes on. That said, if you start with a comprehensive UI framework such as Bootstrap or Foundation, this will help a designer be intentional about introducing inconsistencies. Not that I’m admitting a personal flaw of mine or anything.
13. Don’t force web site patterns on a web app. For example, don’t waste your time thinking about “what should go in a home page?” (of the app!) or what goes into the tabbed navigation. If you’re designing around a defined flow or set of common functions, your app will more closely resemble a mobile app than a web site, with a focus on content and functionality over chrome and navigation.
14. Design for mobile first (even if a mobile app is not in your roadmap). The constraints of a mobile context will force you to focus on what’s essential, and help you cut what’s not needed. The question “How would I design this as a mobile app?” always clears my head and helps me find the simpler, elegant solution.
15. Don’t over design. Less is better in the early stages. Launch with too much going on and you won’t know which pieces are broken and which are working.
16. 1. Focus on the experience, not the product. Assume people won’t want to use your product—in fact, they don’t! Except for the early adopter/beta-junkie, most people have existing habits; you’re competing against the inertia of existing behaviors.
    2. Design for the existing ecosystem. People already have apps they know and use. Rather than try to displace those, can you work with these other systems?
17. Reject any design candidate who is overly focused on process. UXers accustomed to corporate environments may want to “do it the right way” (there is no right way). Aside from initial research, most startups can’t afford (or shouldn’t be spending money on) too many deliverables or things that don’t directly translate into product improvements. Iterate early and often. Don’t focus too much on documentation.
18. 1. You get what you pay for. I charge a lot. But, I guarantee you’ll save money in the long run. Most visual designers at 1/4 my rate will take much longer and still not get you where a seasoned veteran will. Note: veteran doesn’t necessarily mean years experience—2 years at a dot com startup taught me more than most people learn in 5–7 years at a big company.
    2. As a corollary to the above comment: experience and naïveté are good things. You get a fresh perspective not indoctrinated with jargon or groupthink.
19. Designs are never handed off. Design isn’t a stage—it’s always happening with every new release. Think long term.
20. Hire “experts” initially. Transition to mid or jr. level folks over time, as the problems get more defined. Keep the expert around to offer guidance and mentor these less experienced folks. This, by the way, is the approach I use with my startup clients.
21. Work together! Don’t think about handoffs, think about collaboration. Where there are too many meetings or an abundance of documentation, I’ve also seen a proportionate lack of communication and lack of clear alignment amongst the team.
22. Frame the problems to be to be solved, then evaluate accordingly. Set aside your subjective opinions. Evaluate the design based on how well is satisfies (or delights) the end user.
23. Good designers will question assumptions—and will very likely ask you to undo stuff that’s already been done. This is a good thing. Mostly.
24. Good design doesn’t happen magically: there needs to be: (1) a well articulated–and shared–vision, and (2) autonomy. Making sense of a really, really hard problem requires uninterrupted time where you can “go deep” with a problem (8 1-hour blocks of time do not equal 1 8-hour block of time!).
25. If possible, build your API, then build your app on top of this. This leaves room for a lot more flexibility, both in terms of what you can do in the UI and portability to other devices.
26. Please, please, please spend time hanging out in the latest and greatest apps, regardless of their personal relevance or interest to you. If you do, your expectations of a “good experience” will be raised. Archaic team communication tools are often a good indication of what the decision makers believe qualifies as “good.” (Hint: it’s often a very low bar relative to what’s possible!)
27. Unless you’re doing something entirely new or different, think about the Minimum Viable Experience. MVP tends to focus on features and functionality. In a crowded, mature space, HOW you implement something is equally—or more—important than WHAT you implement.
28. What should you look for most of all in a designer? Curiosity, Empathy, and Grit. I’d care far more about these traits than any artifacts or prior “design” experience.
29. Get to know each other outside of the work environment—as friends. It’ll make the day-to-day collaboration so much easier!

The New USA Today. Solid video which also makes the interaction look great. Source

http://beta.usatoday.com/

The New MySpace. Solid video which also makes the interaction look great. Source

https://new.myspace.com/

Source. KRAFT Macaroni & Cheese, delivers an iPad app that stops the wastage (at the hands of Kids) of tonnes of pasta pieces the world over, and creates a new, super cool way for those same kids to create all the best Macaroni Art they can possibly imagine.

This Grolsch multi-screen campaign is an interesting example of extending a TVC into interactive an online video and mobile experience, that in turn drives retail foot traffic. Starting with a TVC introducing a bold character, the ad then challenges you to go online to continue the conversation.

Users are then introduced to the character more personally over a beer and are asked to text him their name in real-time as the online video plays… For users who’s name the character recognises, he sends them back a text message, literally buying them a beer in real life, with the text linking straight to a coupon code and store finder to claim. Created by the BMB Agency.

What Comes After The Touchscreen?

Article: Source

The next great gadget might be one you don’t even touch. Here are five experts’ thoughts on what it means, and what the future might look like.

Much of the current crop of gadgetry runs on touchscreens, but it won’t always be that way. We’re already seeing a generation of gadgets that do away with screens entirely, starting with the early success of the Kinect. A more precise gesture-tracking module, the Leap Motion controller, is shipping out to nearly 30,000 developers this fall, planting seeds for a post-touch takeover in the next few years. In an interview this summer, Valve’s Gabe Newell put it this way:

You have to look at what’s going to happen post-tablet. If you look at the mouse and keyboard, it was stable for about 25 years. I think touch will be stable for about 10 years. I think post-touch, and we’ll be stable for a really long time — for another 25 years.

But one big question still hasn’t been answered: what is it good for? Post-touch hasn’t found the killer use case that the mouse found with GUIs and the touchscreen found with mobile web browsing and apps — but it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve had a flood of prototypes, demos and art projects, any one of which could flourish into an industry — that is, once every laptop comes with a near-field depth camera. As for which will take off…it’s anyone’s guess. But some guesses are better than others:

Post-Touch Means Smaller Gestures

Michael Buckwald, CEO of Leap Motion

This technology is a fundamental transformation akin to the mouse because, if done correctly, it can be just an unambiguously better way of doing a large number of things. It’s everything from the way people interact with their social graph and see their Facebook connections, to the way surgeons interact with things in the operating room, to how engineers build and interact with 3D models. We expect all those things to change.

What’s bad about touch is that it has to be one-to-one to make sense, so if I want to move something from the top right corner to the bottom left corner, I have to move my finger that distance. Even on a tablet that starts to feel a little inefficient, and when you get to a giant touchscreen like a 22-inch monitor or a touch-TV, it’s radically inefficient and extremely tiring. What we’re able to do because the user is back from the screen and not physically touching it, is have that same feeling of connectedness. We envision people moving their fingers just a couple of millimeters really, and moving the cursor across the entire screen based on those movements.

Post-Touch Cameras Will Come With Every Laptop

Source: thecreatorsproject.com

Doug Carmean, Researcher-at-Large for Intel Labs

As soon as next year, you’ll be able to see Logitech near-field depth cameras integrated everywhere there’s a standard webcam in laptops. And they’ll have the capabilities to do fine-motor control detection. Think about what you could do with that. You can use them for feature recognition. You can start doing emotion detection. Those are all things that I’ve seen that are in R&D today, that you could project forward.

Another aspect of that is that with Kinect, people are going beyond skeletal tracking and doing full-on 3D maps of bodies and they’re projecting them into space. And the 3D mapping stuff allows you to create much more compelling systems for both augmented reality and virtual reality than we’ve seen in the past.

Post-Touch Is Better At 3D

James Alliban, interaction designer

I think post-touch will be best for creative software – like 3D packages and Photoshop. Navigating around a 3D environment and tweaking vertices and polygons makes far more sense in a gesture enabled space over the standard 2D-only input devices. I suspect it will also make sense for casual web browsing. I’ve been banging on about Augmented Reality eyewear and HUDs for a couple of years now so I’m fascinated to see how Google gets on with Project Glass. I’m fairly certain the first iteration will be disappointing (at least for what I have in mind), but I’m looking forward to 5-10 years down the line, when we have embedded depth-sensing tech that allows for gesture controlled interfaces, when the digital layer is seamlessly integrated into your surroundings and the high resolution image and wide field of vision allows for a fully immersive experience.

Whenever we see gesture enabled interface demos they tend to be computer science guys moving and zooming stock photos, waving frantically at a large screen. This isn’t a great look for the future of the interface. There’s a term for the physical effects that long term exposure to gestural input can have on a person — Gorilla Arm. Tom Cruise apparently suffered terribly from this while filming Minority Report. The argument against most gesture-enabled computing is that it looks exhausting. Great for blasting zombies but complete overkill for updating a spreadsheet.

Post-Touch Could Use Your Voice, Or Your Eyes

Pigeon Sim

Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director of the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Post-touch has the potential for instant information retrieval based on eye tracking, voice recognition and augmented reality display technologies. By simply ‘looking’ at an object for a set amount of time — say three seconds — information can be retrieved and displayed. You could compare prices in supermarkets by “eye-scanning” objects, for instance.

Post-Touch Can Capture The Whole Body

Myron Krueger’s Videoplace, 1989

Casey Reas, co-creator of Processing

The history of human-computer interaction moves toward interfaces that respond to our complete bodies. The new class of touch screens are an extraordinary step after decades of the keyboard and mouse as the primary interfaces, but they only utilized a narrow part of what hands can do.

The Videoplace installation (1985) by Myron Krueger set us on this new path decades ago, controlled by the full silhouette of a body in motion. I have no idea where full-body and gestural interfaces will lead us, but I do know that artists using Processing, Cinder, OpenFrameworks and other related frameworks are discovering what it will be.

Where does that leave us? Well, depth cameras are available, but whether you’ll be training them on your fingertips, your eyeballs or your whole body is up for debate, just like the question of whether you’ll be using it to make art, play games or retouch photos.

The only thing they need is momentum, the kind of inevitability touchscreens got after the first iPhone launch. It could come from Microsoft, Leap, or somewhere we haven’t even heard of — but however it happens, it’s going to take some getting used to.

The Most Popular Colors Used In Logo Designs

Article: Source - [via Emblemetric] 

 

Color is an important aspect of logo designs today. 

US-based logo design-trends reporter Emblemetic looks at how color has been used in US logo designs over the past decades, in three different graphs. 

In the graph, titled ‘Use of Color in US Logos’, it shows the relative share of colors used in US logos. 

According to the graph, in the 1990s, red was the most popular color used in logos, but blue caught up; now, both red and blue colors are used about equally. 

“Green has seen a modest rise in use, most likely due to increased environmental consciousness in American society. And orange has enjoyed a slight increase in popularity,” Emblemetic added in its blog post. 

In the graph ‘“Trendiness” of Color Use in US Logos’, measures the trendiness of the color, by combining color data from new logos with color data from dying logos. 

It shows that violet was a trendy color in US logos in the 1990s. 

“Orange, brown and green have been hot in recent years, while red has languished somewhat,” Emblemetic wrote. “Over the last three years, the lines on the graph converge around the middle, suggesting that no color is particularly hot or cold.” 

The color used in logos can also depend on the industry. 

In the graph ‘Use of Color in US Logos by Industry’, it shows the eight colors used in seven industries. 

Red is used most often in logos of beverages and hospitality industries, and least often in insurance and medical services; blue is used most often in telecom and insurance; and green is used most often in chemicals, and least used in telecommuications.