Nov 29th, 2009
I’ve had the pleasure of working with Elia on a number of high profile web projects for our clients. He is highly knowledgeable and understands the fundamentals of good design and how to apply it for outstanding results. He continually meets or exceeds my expectations. Hiring Elia for your next project is a sure bet for design success.
Nov 25th, 2009
A few days back, AdMob published a very interesting report on market share of various mobile OS and smartphones. The data suggests that Apple’s dedication to User Experience results in higher apps approval and user adoption rates. The report is a great read but for those that don’t have time here are the highlights:
Smartphone Traffic by Manufacturer – Worldwide
Smartphone Traffic by OS:
United States Data by Manufacturer
Smartphone Traffic by OS:
It is interesting that Apple’s traffic comes from only 2 devices – iPhone and iPod. Android traffic comes from 9 devices currently available worldwide. RIM traffic is a result of their current 11 smartphones and probably some past models.
The full report is available here. http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Oct-09.pdf
Nov 15th, 2009
Rossul Design has been contracted to create a new look and feel for upcoming Atlanta’s Vacufit Studious website.
Nov 12th, 2009
Follow us on Twitter (rossuldesign) for daily usability tips that will help you to improve performance of your website or web application!
Nov 11th, 2009
Remembrance Day
Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism? ~Henry Ward Beecher
One of my grandfathers was killed in the first few month of World War II, and his wife raised 2 kids by herself. My other grandfather was killed during the Russia Finland War 1939-1940 and his wife raised their son. My father’s life was forever affected by Leningrad Siege that started on 8 September 1941. It is hard to find a family in Russia which is not affected by the Second World War.
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. – Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
There was never a good war or a bad peace. - Ben Franklin (1706-1790)
It is possible to live in peace.- Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. – Isaiah, II:4
Peace is the respect for the rights of others. (El respeto al derecho ajeno es la paz)- Benito Juarez (1806-1872)
Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God. – Matthew, V:9
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war. – Maria Montessori (1870-1952)
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. – Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
Nov 11th, 2009
Stats from June 09 shows Symbian being the clear leader on Mobile OS market, thanks to Nokia and a few Sony Erricson and Samsung devices.
![Market share of Smartphone operating systems as of Q2/2009 by Canalys.[5] (data does not include Palm WebOS, which was introduced in June, 2009)](http://www.rossul.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/450px-Smartphone_2009.svg.png "450px-Smartphone_2009.svg")
Market share of Smartphone operating systems as of Q2/2009 by Canalys.
Nov 11th, 2009
ZDNet reports that Windows Mobile 7 is on track for release to OEMs for testing. It is interesting to see what MS can come up with in the new highly competitive market. Android, Sumsung’s just announced Bada, iPhone OS, Symbian^2 – the first open version of Symbian’s OS.
Windows 6.5 was not up-to-speed with the competition. The UI is complex and hard to use. But, intuitiveness has never been a strong point of MS products. Here is a small analysis of the Windows 6.5 home screen from usability prospective.
Windows 6.5 and iPhone 3.1 Home screen comparison
The iPhone 3.1 home screen is an ample or much better and usable approach. And here’s why the Windows 6.5 screen isn’t as intuitive.
It may be hard for Windows Mobile to recapture the market unless they make it really usable and appealing to end-users.
Nov 10th, 2009
I really admire good design, a tasteful colour palette and the fine finish of all UI elements. But Google pays no attention to any of it. Their design is completely data driven and they are known for things like testing 64 shades of blue for few months before deciding on the colour of the box boarder. And still I find myself dumping the beautiful Apple Mail for Gmail. I bought Things – a most eye-catching app that scored Apple Design Award and yet find myself using Gmail Tasks. Beautifully designed iCal is also an app I rarely open, opting for Google Calendar instead.
What’s the reason? Usability I guess. Google is an adept in making usable apps. All their apps are highly intuitive and usable, albeit ugly. I save great deal of time when I have all apps in one window talking to each other. The ugliness of design elements does bother me but the usability pays me back in time saved.
I guess to justify Google’s approach to UI, they need to think about every bite going through their server with the amount of data they process. To a certain degree they comply with a basic rule of design: Take out everything that is not necessary until you can’t anymore and then you have a well designed product. (Michelangelo used to joke that his trade is very easy. Take a rock and cut off everything unnecessary).
Nov 10th, 2009
Rossul.com has been launched with completely new design and architecture structure. We’ve worked hard making it more focused on our main business - design of Usable Graphical User Interfaces for both Web and Desktop Apps, Web portals and complex websites.
Nov 10th, 2009
TweetBoard makes Twitter available right on your website. The window is dynamic and doesn’t get in the way. It seems to be very cool and usable way to facilitate your marketing efforts and may be even communicate with your customers. We are awaiting alfa testing approval and will let you know about integration process and usability of the product.
Tweetboard
Nov 10th, 2009
MagicMouse is a great a very well designed device. I got it on the first date they were available and spent about 10 days using it. The mouse is great. Very responsive and precise. Still runs on the original batteries with about 40% charge left which means it will go for about about 3 weeks.
The gestures work great. Very usable . Especially swiping back though web pages. Scroll with momentum works and feels exactly as one in iPhone, which is very intuitive and beats Logitec’s Hyper-fast scrolling feature.
Apple's MagicMouse
The only 2 things bother me so far and they are really minor. First is that the thumb is positioned over 2 movable parts which creates a strange feeling that took me few days to get used to. The other thing is that if your hand are wet for any the fingers won’t “swipe” over mouse plastic making gestures almost impossible.
So if you live in a hot place with high humidity without an air conditioning MagicMouse not may be a mouse of choice for you. In any other case – highly recommended.
Nov 10th, 2009
After debut of Apple’s Magic Mouse - a super well and smartly designed piece of hardware OpenOffice Mouse produces mixed feeling. The bulky and very impressive design that places 7 buttons under each finger might require an extensive training to use. (Piano players will have a definite advantage using it). Thumb button makes it look like a toy form Master Mind.There is differently coloured version of on OO website but it doesn’t really help.
Nov 9th, 2009
Here is a good example of what design should do for us making our everyday life a bit easier. Art Lebedev – a russian design studio that come up few years back Optimus Keyboard (1257.14€) is back with a useful concept that does solve a real problem in hand. Rozetkus 3D looks like any other socket but with a push of the button above, it pops our giving you access to additional sockets. Smartly done concept and seems to be simple in production.
Art Lebedev's Rozetkus 3D socket concept
Nov 7th, 2009
Quiet Read is a small app beautiful in it’s simplicity and usability. A good example of design providing solution to a problem. I think it is going to be quite popular for several reasons. It does one thing and does it well. It’s got well designed UI that doesn’t draw unnecessary attention and blends well in your desktop environment. And it is free.
Quiet Read
Nov 5th, 2009
Elia has a masterful way of translating technical and branding requirements into creative, attractive and eye catching website designs. Elia has delivered great results time and time again.
Cathy McKnight,PMP, Senior Consultant at Prescient Digital Media
Nov 5th, 2009
When I first saw Vista my initial reaction was “what the heck?!”. It wasn’t incompatibility, performance, nor stability that caught my attention. What amazed me at that time was Vista GUI, which now seems that it will transferred over to Windows 7. So what is so special about it? To tell you the truth I can’t see much logic behind it.
Windows 7 Desktop Screenshot
Wallpaper is the most obvious way to personalize the human-computer interaction experience. All OS vendors provide an easy way to customize it. We use personal photos, stock photography or even rotate set of images. Desktop (wallpaper for Windows users) is traditionally given to a user to make the computer interaction experience more “personal”. As a result the OS GUI designers have no way to predicting thewallpaper color or image palette.
Fancy background colors can be very distracting. A logical move for designer would be to isolate a user form potentially distracting desktop environment so that they can focus on task on hand. MS decides not to do that and introduce transparent windows instead. On top of that they blur content underneath the window (making it very clear how hard it is to use a computer if you can’t find your glasses). Note that about a year ago Apple tried to introduce atransparent tiny bar on top of the screen and had to back down from making this feature optional due to user complains.
Transparent windows immediately great another problem. Blind window titles. Making them dark doesn’t make them readable on a dark background and white wouldn’t work on bright wallpaper. Many designers would say, “Hey! Something is wrong here. Let’s backup.”Instead Microsoft habitually chooses to apply a “patch” and so introduces a white glow around letters.
Incidentally, the need for patches is a sign of weak design structure and of logic flaws in the original design. Not only the GUI design. Any design in general (not to be confused with ”art”). Good design tends to achieve the maximum with the minimum. Any design is a structure or set of rules based on a certain logic — physical or abstract. For example we can look at a chair as a set of physical rules. If your design requires you to introduce a 5th leg and then in turn 2 small legs to support that 5th then you may want to start from the beginning and rethink the original concept. GUI design is no exception. OK, back to Windows issues.
Windows7 GUI Transparent frames. Transparent on blur on transparent over blur
Not only is the user presented with information he or she doesn’t require but this information is also unusable. Why is it required for a user to see the text underneath a window coloured blued to the point of unreadabilty? If my wallpaper is colorful enough my windows will inherit the colors and will all look different, which violates the very core rule of consistency for similar elements.
The absence of windows titles is an equally strange decision. Window titles oddly position inside the main frames, which makes them potentially invisible if several windows are open. Try to understand what is the third window on the above image (the one above the clock).
Windows titles
Another issue worth mentioning is the window footer icon. I’m not sure why they need this icon there in the first place, but it is strange to have the footer height dictated by the icon size.
Windows7 Finder Window Footer
Active/inactive rules set in windows clearly don’t apply to widgets. They are in the background but behave as active windows, with strong shadows and no faded colors.
Summarizing, it looks like Microsoft’s patching practice will also be applied to the GUI of upcoming Windows7. It also quite apparent that many visual effects have nothing to do with optimizing user experience and just follow the “rich” GUI trend.
To be continued…. (probably)
Nov 4th, 2009
Floating windows are most annoying kind of internet advertisement according to Russian internet statistic agency.
Only 3.4% of users are actually order something using advertisement links.
Nov 4th, 2009
Surveys shows that average users still prefer blue text links over other colours even if they are consistent across the site. This probably doesn’t apply to web apps such as intranet site, gmail, etc that users use on daily basis.
Nov 4th, 2009
A survey recently conducted (France, Germany and the UK) showed 38% were planning to get a touchscreen on their next mobile phone while only 47% of people who already owned a touchscreen said they would get another one. In other words, less than half of touchscreen owners thought they’d stick with the technology on their next purchase. Apple has a high customer satisfaction rate and since iPhone is the only available device iphone users don’t really have a choice.
As a designer I can’t help but love the idea of one surface that becomes what one needs it to be at the moment. I’m not moving back to physical keyboard. At least on my phone.
I don’t play many games on my iPhone and when I do tactile feedback is not something I miss.
The possibility of tactile feedback was mentioned in the original iPhone patent application and last year Apple filled “Keystroke tacility arrangement on a smooth touch surface” patent. It desscribes various tactile feedbacks on a smooth sureface keyboard such as:
We may see it implemented in rumoured Apple Tablet Mac that supposedly should surface in next few months. So it looks like touchscreen are going to become smarter and more “user-freiendly”.
Nov 2nd, 2009
I came across few useful text editing shortcuts for Mac OS X @ www.ss64.com – a site dedicated to all kinds of applications/os syntax…
Editing Text (email, TextEdit, Pages, etc)
⌥ ← Move one word left ⌥ → Move one word right ⌘ ← Beginning of line ⌘ → End of lineScroll one page up (cursor retains position)
Scroll one page down (cursor retains position) ⌥
Scroll to beginning of document ⌘ ↓ or
Scroll to end of document Add shift key ⇧ to the above to also SELECT the text. ⌥ ⌫ Delete word ⌥ Del Delete next word ⌥ Scrollbar Jump to exact scrollbar location ⌥ Scrollbar arrows Scroll page at a time (page up/down) ⌥ Volume up/down Open Sound preferences ⌥ Brightness up/down Open Display preferences