Have you ever wondered how to nail a pudding to the wall? I guess I figured it out: — freeze the pudding first!
Have fun!
Category: HCI Design
Human Computer Interaction Design
10 Questions to Hartmut Esslinger
Guy Kawasaki interviewed Harmut Esslinger.
- How does Steve Jobs’s mind work?
- Why is it that companies with billions of dollars who can hire any designer or design firm in the world put out such crappy products?
- Can customers truly tell a company how to innovate?
- What can customers do then?
- If a company is hiring a design firm, how can it know that it’s picking the right one?
- If a company is hiring a designer (as an employee), how can it know that it’s picking the right one?
- What are your top ten products of all time?
- What are your ten worst products of all time?
- Why has the One Laptop Per Child project met with limited success?
- If a young person wants to be a great designer, what should he or she do?
Read the answers at OpenForum: The Inside Scoop on Design: Ten Questions with Hartmut Esslinger
The Top Five Innovation Killers
- An intolerance of failure.
- An excessive customer focus.
- A desire for a magic pill, not a daily exercise regime.
- An unwillingness to cannibalise sales.
- A reliance on a small cadre of innovators.
Google Design by Numbers
Quite recently Douglas Bowman left google. While this is not big news in itself it reveals some insights into google design process. There seems to be a clash between google’s data driven design by committee approach and Doug’s design attidude as an x-designer.
SpatialKey
ritsch ratsch click
At least someone starts to think about camera UIs. But none of them is really convincing, or has the wow factor.
BTW_ I like to see a camera that can be controlled just by touch – i mean just with your fingers without the necessity to look at the screen all the time.
Information Architecture TV
Jan Jursa colected more than 300 presentations and clips over the last 2 years. Bring some time to watch the show…
ease of search vs. ease of scrolling
Some websites (read: their web developers) want to be smarter than the user. They try to anticipate my behavior on the page — and fail. I talk esp. about flickr’s search results.
Shake it, baby
A couple of new window management features of Windows 7 are quite remarkable. First of all the shake of windows, that hides all other screen clutter. Shake the window again and the other windows come back. This is an excellent, fun, and easy to remember gesture to remove distractions and focus on the current task. For me on Mac the shortcut Cmd-Opt-H has a similar effect. It hides all windows from other applications. But I suppose it is not as much fun, and not consistently implemented across all applications. Back to Windows’ gesture, I would expect just one caveat: The trigger MouseDown-RapidSmallMouseMovements works best with a mouse — a trackpad is not the best graphical input device to perform this gesture.
Two other gestures grabbed my attentions. Move a window against the upper border of the screen and it maximizes. Move it to the right or left border to use the right or left half of the screen. These gestures simplify the task to compare two documents side by side. A small, yet powerful aspect to work with windows.
There is another shake gesture that becomes fashion. Shake Apple iPods and you get a new random song. I would like to see this feature for iTunes as well. Shake the iTunes window to randomize to the next tune. Alt-Click on the forward button is my most used function in iTunes anyway.
