Viewing all posts in: Interface

Thursday March 5, 2009

Stream of consciousness on Microsoft Surface

This is floated through my mind while walking down the hall to get a drink:

“The future of interaction design is so circular – dials, ripples… water is a good analogy for Surface interactions. It’s organic – people understand how water reacts to the touch. Ripples. Ripples are so automatic. They just do stuff. What if the Surface was actually water… and the real ripples made things happen. Liquid computing! The AUTOMATION!!!”

Snippet posted by Matt Donovan in Interface, Microsoft, Technology, User Experience .

Friday January 9, 2009

Welcome. Now, don't come back.

If your RSS feed is well-highlighted (like, so a 6 year old could subscribe to it) and contains the right level of detail (unlike this blog), then your experience design should really focus on first-time visitors. Great blogs never require me to return.

Snippet posted by Matt Donovan in Accessibility/Usability, Interface, Usability, User Experience .

Wednesday January 7, 2009

View more, if only a little

comparison of before/after states of a show-content action on Apple's movie trailers site

I’m seeing this “View More” link a lot lately. More often than not, the hidden content is no more than a few sentences long. I’m guessing this was implemented in the example above to keep the ads at the bottom of the screen from appearing below the virtual fold in instances when the selection box on the right is wider.

This just a friendly reminder to go back and test the dickens out of even the smallest features. Hiccups like this can easily be avoided.

Image posted by Matt Donovan in Infographic, Interface, User Experience .

Monday November 17, 2008

"The Much Under-appreciated Principle of Pleasure"

Nick Merritt posits on why Apple creates interfaces with higher perceived quality than their competitors:

It is not just enough to make using something easy … When it comes to deciding what choices to make, it helps that a team has a supremely clear vision of the role the technology is going to play in the lives of its users, as the original Mac team did, as I suspect, the iPhone team does today, and to be fair to Microsoft, the Surface team has.

Read the full post, Why Apple is great at interfaces when others are not on TechRadar.com.

Snippet posted by Mark Kraemer in Apple, Interface, Microsoft, User Experience .

Monday October 13, 2008

I Love Sketch

Mind-blowingly fast 3-D sketching application.

Video posted by Matt Donovan in Design, Graphic Design, Interface, Visual Design .

Thursday July 24, 2008

Halo Experience

HP's HALO Room in Action

I’ve used several teleconference systems before to have meetings with clients all over the world. But none of them compared to the very cool experience of using the HP Halo system I enjoyed at a client this morning. This system has been available for several years, but this was my first experience using it. The picture above doesn’t do justice to 1) how easy it was to use and 2) the “real presence” feeling it provides. Even though we were talking to people in Chicago (we’re in Dallas) it felt like we were in the same room. I think part of what makes this happen is the tight control over the color and scale of each Halo room.

Image posted by Mark Kraemer in Interface, Technology, User Experience .

Wednesday June 25, 2008

Replace the fuzzy Windows icons in VMWare Fusion

We’re in the Microsoft Services Practice here at EMC, but most of us in 404 run VMWare Fusion on our MacBook Pros. When you’re in unity mode, it’s nice that you can cmd-tab between Mac and Windows apps alike, but the Windows icons don’t scale up nicely. Here’s how to fix that . (hat tip: Team Fusion )

Image posted by Mark Kraemer in Interface .