Toolkit for Innovative Designers – Part I

I have seen at times, we as designers spend most of our time trying to get the ‘just right‘ device shape for mobiles and tablets, getting the perfect glare angle and how the external product looks, since presentation does make a difference!

But are you spending more time on it than required?  Won’t it be an enormous step forward for all the designers to centralize their thoughts for some innovative thinking, rather than getting the device shape right, especially during the initial phase.

In this post I have tried to consolidate some of the templates available across the globe.

Santa Claus bag of goodies for designers
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/mobile-devices-gui-prototyping-templates/

Have always been a great follower of Teehanlax guys
http://www.teehanlax.com/tools/

Library for user experience, designers and developers supported with Stencil Kit.
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/about/stencils/

https://www.graffletopia.com/stencils/tags/mobile

A gift must to have  http://www.uistencils.com the collection spreads across iPhone, Android, Windows and many more. See a sample here http://www.uistencils.com/collections/frontpage/products/iphone-sketch-pad :-D

This will tremendously help to design a great idea and a product. Elevate yourself towards an innovate designer and not just a visual designer!

War between YouTube and Vimeo?

Copyright gettyimages.com

According to Nielsen analysis of consumer behavior suggests 70% of worldwide internet users watch videos online. And I agreed with them as I also most of the time while searching for a product demo, song, tutorial video, national/international advertisements just move towards youtube.com and when I’m looking for talks related to specific topics Vimeo is the way to go.

Younger the faster or Older the wiser?

Though Youtube is a year younger than Vimeo and surprisingly Youtube spread its wings more faster into this space. YT was the product created by 3 ex-employees of Paypal, who later sold it to Google. Now its one of the popular online video site. Youtube moved towards social networking mode allowing users

Ready to use templates for iPhone, iPad and Android

As in my earlier posts, I have mentioned how important it is to have the right data at the right time. Moving further with the same thought and to make sure the designers creativity doesn’t come to a halt, I had started the ‘Quick Tips’ category. Through this post I researched and created a repository for UX and Graphic designers, a compilation of Wire-frame stencils and Photoshop source files for base devices.

iPhone

• Mock-up Stencil for Balsamiq users http://mockupstogo.net/iphone-in-app-social-networking
  This stencil has additional Twitter and Facebook screens.
• You can also upgrade your version for iPhone mock-ups from http://balsamiq.com/blog/2009/03/01/iphone-controls-new-icons-and-much-more/
• Photoshop file for visual designers http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/2010/06/14/iphone-gui-psd-v4/

iPad

• Mock-up Stencil for

Are we ignoring user experience or the users have become smart enough?

Recently noticed most of the sites nowadays have moved away from marking the form fields as mandatory or required. Is this the change in design trend or there is a reason behind it? Are we ignoring user experience or the users have become smart enough?

Attribute of a designer

Provide a design to user which is self awakening and user-friendly. A user should be able to complete an activity in minimum clicks and it’s the responsibility and power of a designer to straighten out the complexes. In a project which is not conceptualized by a designer goes nowhere in the long run, we all know this with our own experiences. Fortunately, user experience and designers are now becoming essential for any good web designing firm that targets to reach the heights and survive there for long.

Power of good design

An intelligent design can change the perception of users. When the web world is facing North, only a designer can make web users turn to see towards South, such is the power of designer!

A quick peek into the user experience forms of the most appreciated sites during 2009, which have become a point of reference for most of the design boutiques

Beanstalk – Here I submitted the blank form to test what all fields I actually need to enter data and which ones I can avoid. Surprisingly all fields are mandatory to create an account excluding the Discount section. The instruction below Coupon Code field is very supportive for user ‘If you don’t know the code, just skip this field’. Similarly if a single line instruction was added above the form saying

iGoogle – Set the mood for the day in your browser

iGoogle – You can have your very own browser and Google provides lots of gadgets for the user to play with but what really took my attention today were the ‘artist themes’. Right now I have kept different themes for IE and Firefox browser in my machine and enjoy the liberty to change it with my changing mood Isn’t that great!

Seeing the character relaxing on the sand reminded me of Fido Dido – the famous ad cartoon character of late 1980s seems to have gained weight with time:-DI kept this theme on the browser for few hours and it made my Friday into a ‘Lazy Sunday noon’ and to my surprise with the falling daylight the theme also changed from noon to nightMyriad of themes are divided into categories like games, fun, technology and so on. Check out some samples:

When they made Sofas!

At times I wonder – The companies that provide best of the service solutions are somehow not able to implement those solutions within their organization itself. One of such examples is ‘madebysofa.com‘

They produced apps like Versions the ‘Subversion Client for Mac’ and Disco the ‘Powerful Disc Burning for Anyone’ as the company states. Honestly, I am impressed with the design of both these websites.

Another product of this company is Checkout – which won Apple Design Award runner up, in category of ‘Best Mac OS X Leopard User Experience’ for the year 2008.

I think a few small considerations can add value to user experience in ‘madebysofa.com‘