Category: Design
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The Scrolling Experience and “The Fold”
Newstand by Berenice Abbott, 1935 In print design, the expression “above the fold” dates from an era where broadsheet newspapers were folded in half and piled up in stacks in front of newsstands, showing only the upper-half of the front page to potential customers. If an article or a picture did not appear “above the…
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iPhone Apps I Want
I am thoroughly enjoying the debut crop of iPhone Apps — a welcome improvement over the (mostly) second-rate half-baked apps available in the Jailbreak era. Here are a few imaginary apps and functions I wish I could be using right now. 1. Batch Sync Most New Yorkers with iPhones will recognize this scenario: You get…
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Quantity vs. Quality in a Design Process
The NeXT Cube and the Apple Mac Cube. Are they iterations? Discussing his upcoming biography of Steve Jobs, author Leander Kahney describes Apple’s prototyping process: It’s a process where they discover the product through constantly creating new iterations. A lot of companies will do six or seven prototypes of a product because each one takes…
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Research + Interpret + Produce = Design
A follow up thought to the user personas discussion among Steve, Jared, Joshua, me, countless other people, and in particular to Peter Merholz’s thoughts about the value of personas created through design team conversations. Let’s begin with a simple premise that I think most practicing UX designers would agree with in a heartbeat: The worst…
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Edward Tufte’s iPhone
The following is in response to an interesting and thoughtful video and essay by Edward Tufte, posted on his blog/site, in which he argues, among other things, that many of the applications on the Apple iPhone do not adequately take advantage of the iPhone’s screen resolution and its compelling and easy-to-use zoomable UI paradigm. In…
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Design Research is a Design Process
I have a tendency to be extremely skeptical about user research in the design process. This is mostly because so much of it is, IMHO, (a) fundamentally bad (e.g., employing sloppy research methods or hamfisted statistical analyses), (b) flatly dishonest (e.g., dressing unscientific research in pseudo-scientific drag in order to justify a desired result), and…
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Get Info
I found this on the inside of a 1950’s recording of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and thought it looked a lot like the iTunes “Get Info” UI. It struck me that metadata, and the graphic design thereof, has a vast history in print that is probably worth exploring very deeply when we design metadata displays for…