I recently spoke with Aral Balkan, the designer and developer of the popular Twitter client for the iPhone – Feathers. The interface design of Feathers has unique points of engagement that is quickly building a strong fan base around it. It’s more than a usable application, it’s pleasurable.
Aral shares some interesting insights into how he is encouraging emotional engagement in his app.
User Experience Designer Robert Hoekman Jr has written a pair of wonderfully lucid books that examine best practices in interaction design. In Designing the Obvious, and Designing the Moment, Hoekman extolls the virtues of understanding specific user tasks rather than generalized user personas. It’s easiest to design usable interfaces when the activity it serves is clearly understood.
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On February 26th, 2007, Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design, spoke to my User Centered Interface Design class at The Art Institute of Atlanta via Skype. The topic of our conversation was Robert’s current work as an Interaction Designer and Usability Specialist, and his task-centric design approach that, instead of focusing on nebulous personas, focus on how tasks are performed. Once a task is fully understood, the knowledge can be extrapolated to any demographic.
Robert’s lecture was recorded and is released here along with the slides for your listening and learning pleasure.
Robert Hoekman Jr. Lecture | Robert Hoekman Jr. Slides ‚Äú95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.‚ÄùThis statistic nicely illustrates the importance of strong typographic design in order to deliver clear information design. One site the article mentions as exemplary in information and typographic design is Subtraction, which I have long admired as it’s very hard to pull of a black and white design using color so sparingly. The information hierarchy is always clear and logical; the design is functional and attractive. Of course the recent A List Apart redesign is also mentioned as an example of strong typographic design. Jason Santa Maria got his inspiration for the design from classic book layouts. The Morning News is a site that is not mentioned that I think is quite good at delivering a lot of content in an elegant and functional manor through good typographic design.