» UI Design

As you can imagine, the BOALT office is full of technology nerds. Everyone has their own little device or site that they follow, but consistently the thing that many of us overlap on is the Technology, Entertainment, Design or the TED Talks.Their slogan is simply: Ideas worth spreading. So I’m taking a cue from them and spreading this. They release a new TED talk almost weekly, sometimes we miss them but when we do see them, they definitely blow us away because each presentation is always groundbreaking and thought provoking.

The one that stood out in the office this week was from Pranav Mistry and his SixthSense technology. Essentially Mistry has created a combination camera and projector unit call the SixthSense device. The unit enhances the physical world with digital information.

The camera on the SixthSense device will determine what physical object you’re looking at or holding and then project digital information onto the object. You can then interact with the digital information through a series of hand gestures. Confusing?

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So you’re on a crowded street and you’re looking for a place to eat. If you have a smart phone, you’ll whip it out, open Google Maps, and do a search. Effective, but not sexy.

Today, at least for our friends across the pond, this has changed. BBC News has a story of a British company, Acrossair, that has created an iPhone application that overlays digital information on top of realtime video captured by the camera. Using this program, all you would have to do is look ‘through’ your iPhone camera to see points of interest on your path.

Smart and Sexy

Companies have already developed similar heads-up displays, but they’re nothing you’d wear in public; imagine donning this contraption on a first date. Using an iPhone to do the same is ingenious, socially acceptable and is sure to spawn even more innovation.

I wanted to do a quick product review for a product I started using today.  It’s called Litmus.  You got to see it to believe it!  It rocks!

Stumbled upon a gem of an article/essay; A Brief History of Web Design, written by a South African graphic designer, Ben Ceglowski. It’s a wonderfully thorough account of the evolution of visual design of the internet medium. The essay starts with a bit of a history lesson on how the internet as we know it came to be, and guides you through some of the technological advances of markup language, and how it’s impacted the ability of visual designers to work within the perceived limitations of web constraints — creating an artform within itself. It’s well worth the read, and bravo to Mr. Ceglowski for taking the time to put together such an impressive information piece. I found it very insightful, makes me wonder how it will evolve next. Let me know what you think.

Smashing Magazine recently cited some design trends for 2009. As a designer that’s seen the evolution of the web from it’s early incarnations in the mid 90’s to where it is today, I’m noticing some design styles and practices that are starting to come full circle. Because of the accessibility of CSS-based layouts, web and screen design is starting to break away from the standard web paradigm that dominated in the early part of this decade; left logo, horizontal nav bar, flash brand area, neatly clustered sub-content boxes — to large expansive displays of content, vertically and horizontally. Bandwidth and screen resolution no longer seems limiting. Designers have evolved from designing within a 780 pixel wide area to designing wide layout-breaking backgrounds for widescreen displays of up to 1980 pixels wide. For designers like myself, there’s a opportunity to expand the boundaries of what is generally thought of as baseline web design architecture. But doing so effectively, and maintaining the end goal of optimizing the experience for clients, users, and ultimately consumers is the core challenge. Pretty layouts, and ego-centric design can be nice on the eyes, be the main question usually is… will it drive the sale?

There seems to be an ongoing debate within our agency on how much time should be spent on information architecture.  In retrospect, I think the main reason we previously focused so much time on information architecture was because we needed a client sign off and found it more efficient to make changes in this stage.  But what happens when we’re working on one of our own start ups?  How should we approach information architecture?

The below snippet is from a 30 page set of wireframes that we provided to Aspen Snowmass when we designed and developed their booking engine user interface.  Information architecture was a must for this project because making changes in the development phase would have been extremely inefficient.

37Signals in their Getting Real book, swears by building out the interface first.  “Too many apps start with a program-first mentality. That’s a bad idea. Programming is the heaviest component of building an app, meaning it’s the most expensive and hardest to change. Instead, start by designing first.” (more…)