Wade Meredith: UI Design/Development

Mediaqueri.es: A Collection of Responsive Web Designs

A gor­geous, and nicely pre­sented, col­lec­tion of web­sites that actively respond to your browser width, includ­ing the Mediaqueri.es, itself. (Giving you a pur­pose­ful UX on any device.)

What is Responsive Web Design?

The term Responsive Web Design was coined by Ethan Marcotte and is the prac­tice of using fluid grids, flex­i­ble images, and media queries to pro­gres­sively enhance a web page for dif­fer­ent view­ing contexts.

What screen res­o­lu­tions do you use while tak­ing screenshots?

Smartphone - 320px

Tablet - 768px

Netbook - 1024px

Desktop - 1600px

It’s worth book­mark­ing for this gem of a yard­stick, alone (men­tioned on their about page).

Goofy URL aside, this is what really great UX Design is about. Lots of hard work and pol­ish by the designer to cre­ate some­thing that just works for the user-no mat­ter what.

Google is Bucket Testing a New GUI

I mean, it’s great that Google appears to be try­ing to clean up the look of the results page, which has got­ten pretty clut­tered over the years as they add more and more types of infor­ma­tion and snip­pets. But the new design is too sparse. And the col­ors are too soft. It looks like Bing on a bad day.

The weird­est thing about the test is that it actu­ally gives you much less infor­ma­tion on the screen. This will require users to do more scrolling and pag­ing through results to find what they’re look­ing for.

MG Siegler over at TechCrunch doesn’t much care for it, but I think it’s an improve­ment. Less infor­ma­tion doesn’t mean less util­ity as long as it’s the right infor­ma­tion. In fact, it may mean more util­ity if that’s truly the case.

Interacting with Designers

Abandon the hope of value-add through weirdness.

This is such great take away from Jakob Nielson’s iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing:

Abandon the hope of value-add through weird­ness. Better to use con­sis­tent inter­ac­tion tech­niques that empower users to focus on your con­tent instead of won­der­ing how to get it.

This study is just turn­ing one year old, but it’s a great read full of rel­e­vant gems like this. It’s been a fan­tas­tic resource as I’m cur­rently in charge of UX devel­op­ment for an iPad mag­a­zine web app at Voltage. The full ver­sion of the 93-page report is avail­able for down­load here: Usability of iPad Apps and Websites.

Electrolux Bio Robot Refrigerator

The Bio Robot cools biopoly­mer gel through lumi­nes­cence. A non-sticky gel sur­rounds the food item when shoved into the biopoly­mer gel, cre­at­ing sep­a­rate pods. The design fea­tures no doors or draw­ers, and the food items are indi­vid­u­ally cooled at their opti­mal tem­per­a­ture thanks to the robot.

Is it sad that I’d rather have this fridge than a fly­ing car?

Beating the Unknown with Consistent User Experience

People are scared of User Experience (UX) because the fun­da­men­tal def­i­n­i­tion of the thing states that it’s out of your control.

ISO FDIS 9241–210:2010 Human-centred design for inter­ac­tive systems.:

A person’s per­cep­tions and responses that result from the use or antic­i­pated use of a prod­uct, sys­tem or service.

It’s a scary admis­sion in busi­ness to say that your customer/constituent may have a neg­a­tive expe­ri­ence with some­thing you’ve poured sweat and tears into no mat­ter what. To be clear: no amount of fur­ther sweat and tears you could pro­vide will change that.

A good user expe­ri­ence is like the tango. It takes two. There is a non-trivial ele­ment to this for­mula that has noth­ing to do with you. It’s your user’s cur­rent state of mind upon entry of the trans­ac­tion. If some­one is receiv­ing an intent to divorce notice via text-message while check­ing out your prod­uct, try­ing to use your refund sys­tem or encoun­ter­ing your brand­ing for the first time all you can do is hold up your end of the bargain.

There’s a rea­son overnight suc­cesses are almost always years in the mak­ing. No one ever talks about the grind because it’s bor­ing. The mete­oric rise at the end of the grind when pre­pared­ness meets luck is a great story, so that’s what gets passed around. The secret is the grind, and the grind is deliv­er­ing con­sis­tently good UX. When you come through on your end of the UX part­ner­ship over and over and over, there will be misses that are out of your hands, but you will also ensure that there are no misses when it is in your hands.

No misses when it’s in your hands.

It seems like an obvi­ous point that deliv­er­ing con­sis­tently good work is good for busi­ness, but I’ve seen incon­sis­tency get a pass over and over. It’s hap­pened to me as well-I’ve got­ten bogged down by one customer/client/user that has a bad expe­ri­ence and it affects the rest of your work. This can either eat up your time, atten­tion or money; or all three. The key here is to pick your bat­tles. Yes, you should care about all your con­stituents, but not at the expense of incon­sis­tently deliv­er­ing good UX to the rest of your customers.