Scott Hanselman humours about the icons that do not make sense in this generation. I personally, though, still like some old icons, like the calendar or telephone or the microphone. Today’s devices are so software-oriented that their physical design do not emote the functionality as well as their older versions. [Continue]
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ifacethoughtsPosts in design Category
Effect Of Minimalist Design
This is a great experiment to show effect of minimalist design. While the minimalist design might not always be the best one, this is a good reminder that sometimes making a design effective might mean removing some things from it. This is more so in digital media where the attention span is less, almost no control over reader’s environment and technology is always moving.
Touch Screens, Not For Me
I have been using a variety of touch screen phones for considerable time now, including their God. It has been a big change. I understand that improvements always cause changes and I wanted to give more time before I could form an opinion on them. [Continue]
Inherently, Design Is A Combination Of Art And Engineering
I witnessed yet another debate whether Web development was art, or engineering, or both. I personally believe that it is a combination of both, which requires close collaboration between corresponding experts. To think of it, this is true about every design. [Continue]
Psychology in Design
Jeremy Keith has great inputs on designing with psychology in mind. Though he talks primarily about Web designers, it holds true for most of the software application designers as well, or anyone who gets a chance to create an environment. A lot of times designers limit their exercises to observing and studying their users and design accordingly. [Continue]
Principles For Building Frameworks
Jonathan Crossland has a list of important principles for building a framework (via Ralph Johnson). Designing a framework is a tricky business. Through it you impose certain design decisions on its users, but you have to give freedom everywhere else to use it the way they want to. [Continue]
XML Schemas Should Be More Context Specific
I relived an intense past discussion while reading Uche Ogbuji’s nice introduction to XML elements and attributes design. We had discussed exactly the same issue, with the exact same examples of date and name to justify our decisions. What we ended up with was a lot different than what any of us had devised, because our examples were comletely out of context. [Continue]
Nate Koechley’s Talk On Front-End Engineering
Make sure you watch Nate Koechley’s excellent talk on Front-End Engineering (via Chris Heilmann). A lot of executives think it is only about the “Look and Feel”. I hope they will watch this and realize the underlying engineering objective. [Continue]
Restrictions Matter
I came across a case where a programmer, to design the epitome of flexibility and user control, gave an interface to the user who could change the information schema on the fly. This automatically made corresponding changes to the backend storage and the system model, and the application just worked. However, it failed to remain usable, as the ease of modifying the information schema only helped the user in creating a lot of cruft and in the end corrupting the data. [Continue]
User Interaction Can Make A Big Difference
Jared Spool gives an account of how changing a button made a big difference. Many site owners still measure their site’s success by registered members and that drives them to enforce registration. In fact a lot of user interaction is nowadays generalized assuming this. [Continue]
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This is the weblog of Abhijit Nadgouda where he writes down his thoughts on software development and related topics. You are invited to subscribe to the feed to stay updated or check out more subscription options. Or you can choose to browse by one of the topics.