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!

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