Color theory is often referenced when creating or viewing traditional works of art. Using color to successfully portray balance, movement and atmosphere is crucial. A painter does not use color haphazardly, they use it with purpose. It is used to organize their composition, direct the viewer’s focal point and create an emotional impact. Can these general rules be applied to interface design? Can they help create a more meaningful user experience? The answer is yes!
Color in design can be quite subjective. Color affects people differently due to the user’s cultural expectations, previous…
Have you ever walked into a bank and wondered "what might be the best way rob this place?" Do you walk up inconspicuously to the teller and hand them a note that says, “If you don’t give me all the money in the drawer, I’m going to blow up my underwear and take all of you with me?” On the other hand, if you go in guns blazing, which guard should you take out first?
Perhaps you might have just walked into a convenience store and thought, “hmm how can I get away with stealing these gummy bears?” Do you hide it in your pocket or purse? Maybe you just simply walk out the door in plain sight…
Let’s talk about a hypothetical scenario. As part of a product launch team and as part of product management, you’ve just been appointed the dreaded process documentation assignment. To make things even more interesting, you have to both document the current process and identify possibilities for improvement. Or it is possible your team has that one task that seemingly takes twice as long as it should to accomplish. Maybe you are a user experience designer trying to understand a client process or identify stakeholders to talk with prior to starting a project. …
Does it seem like blue is the most common color utilized in interfaces? Besides black and white and the multiple shades of gray in between them, it only takes a quick analysis to see that blue is the color most used for links, backgrounds, window borders, icons, etc. This includes variations of blue ranging from green blue or aqua, to purple blue or indigo and from pure saturated blues to a range of blue grays.
Generations of operating systems have heavily utilized shades of blue and gray. On my current Mac desktop, I can set a preference for the “Appearance” to be “blue” or “gray.” However…
Visual design has the potential to make or break a user experience. The reason most people believe graphic designers exist is to make an interface look pretty. While this is an important part of the process, most people don’t realize that visual cues are designed with the end user in mind.
When you begin the artistic phase of your project, there are three important elements to consider:
1. Design for Your Target Audience
It’s important to know who will be interacting with your interface. This knowledge will help immensely with dictating the type of creative style to go with. If your…
Tuesday, January 21, 2014 - 14:25
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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Infotainment Systems, UX, Connected Car, CES, Smartphone, IVI
Everyone remembers his or her first car. Mine was a ’72 Pinto that I traded a busted CD player to get. My dad and I pulled a radio out of my brother’s truck so I could have some tunes while cruising. The tape deck occasionally got hungry and needed to be fed a mixed cassette or two to appease its appetite. I’d like to say I look back at it fondly, but I remember a lot of cursing. Fast forward to 2014, we find the field of In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems (IVI) is a lot flashier than when I got my first car, but there still seems to be a lot of cursing…
To understand how to create visceral appeal in a user experience (UX) it helps to compare and contrast other forms of media that preceded the digital medium. For example, in graphic design, color, composition and font choice can trigger our emotions. Industrial design is dependent on the quality of physical materials and their tactile appeal. In addition, the mechanisms - the responsive action of buttons or controls - matter greatly in how much we are attracted to use a device. In cinema and photography, camera angle, film speed and resolution set the stage, but the actual content…
A few months ago, we put on a webinar about usability testing. One of the questions at the end was about justifying spending on usability design and testing. More broadly, how to convince management that good design matters – and is worth investing in. This is an industry-wide question and one, which user experience professionals are often asked in an “elevator pitch” kind of situation. Not only do we need to be able to explain the advantages of good user experience design, but also we have to be able to do it quickly. Given the time constraint, let’s explore how to discuss the value of…
If I describe a user experience (UX) as having visceral appeal, is it the same thing as the user having an aesthetic experience? Traditionally, an aesthetic experience implies a complete, expansive encounter, while visceral appeal implies something less grandiose, a discrete event or several events. For instance, some animated transitions in an interface may have visceral appeal, employing smooth action and subtle bounce. However, to call the experience of those animations an aesthetic one, although not exactly untrue, feels like an exaggeration, at least in the traditional way we think…
Welcome to the post Qt DevDays 2013 edition of the UX Blog. I suspect that many of you who follow this blog also attended DevDays and I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I did. I met a lot of great people, saw some interesting demos and presentations and even gave a few talks that seemed to hold people’s attention for the full time slot. All in all, a pretty great week.
This was the first year that the UX group participated in a Human Factors booth and based on the booth traffic, it appears that many of you are becoming more interested in the User Experience…
Congratulations! You've finished your usability test. What's the next step? How do you organize, analyze and present your findings and recommendations? Keep reading to find out!
Organize
Before you can begin to sift through your data, you need to be organized. Pre and post-test surveys should be collected and sorted according to participant number, then entered into some sort of tracking system like a spreadsheet. If you took written notes during the test sessions, type them up. In addition, if you were able to record the test sessions, watch the…
When we say that a user experience (UX) has “visceral appeal”, we mean that it elicits an immediate “I like it” response. A visceral response is an emotional reaction that involves little or no active thought. It is often called a “gut feeling,” and it can be either positive or negative.
According to Merriam-webster.com, visceral is defined as:
1. felt in or as if in the internal organs of the body: deep
2. not intellectual: instinctive, unreasoning
3. dealing with crude or elemental emotions: earthy
4. of, relating to, or located on or among the viscera <visceral organs…
We've all seen them. We use them on a daily basis, often multiple times a day and without much conscious thought. They're everywhere. Doors. Interestingly, doors can show us why we should care about the user experience.
Doors are straightforward, right? They open, and we walk through them. Nevertheless, sometimes something so simple on paper can actually be rather confusing in real life.
How many of you have walked up to a new building for the first time and reached for the door handle -– and the door won't open as you expected? The experience…
“Visceral appeal” is an expression that is thrown around freely in the UX community but it seems to be well understood on some level, yet not truly understood at all. Everyone seems to grasp the general notion that a user experience (UX) can immediately elicit a positive, gut feeling of “I like this!” The user doesn’t need to analyze why they are responding positively. They simply find something about their UX likeable; it could be the colors, layout, shapes, animation effects, performance, etc. Really, anything that delights the senses can be the trigger.
Visceral responses come from the…
What can you do in 30 seconds? Well, according to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, one thing you can do is lose a potential user of your application. If your application doesn't grab the interest of a potential user in 30 seconds, they may move on. It’s the user experience that generates that crucial emotional reaction to your software, not the other pieces. No matter how cool your code is, no matter how fast your server-side logic is, if the user doesn't say "Wow!" in those crucial first seconds, your app will be sent to the back of the market queue. Remember that when you're deciding where…
Wednesday, August 28, 2013 - 16:41
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Have you ever wondered why graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been the primary interface to computing? Why not use aural (sound), or haptic (touch) and gesture? A simple answer might be that technological evolution drove us in the direction of GUIs; where cathode-ray tubes CRTs met typewriters and never looked back. It also seems intuitively obvious. All of us want to see something first in order to touch it or move it with a gesture. In addition, although sound can exist without accompanying visuals, it is more manageable alongside text and images. Recent research in brain science…
Summer is rolling right along, and so are the attempts to simulate some of Tony Stark’s lifestyle here at ICS. A while back, I wrote about trying to create our own version of Jarvis here at ICS. We got a fair distance and demonstrated our results during the ICS QuickStarts earlier in the year. Jarvis was a bit twitchy even so, overall he performed well.
To give credit where credit is due, our work is based on the Perceptual Computing initiative from Intel. Intel is looking to move beyond touch as an interaction paradigm and add the modalities of voice commands,…
Monday, July 29, 2013 - 11:11
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By ICS UX Design Team
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Imagine for a moment that you are working on a project that has a virtually unlimited budget, like the iPhone or Android OS projects. You have the luxury of running 10 design teams simultaneously, seeing what brilliant new ideas they can come up with. You also can run 10 development teams with loose direction, just to see what amazing feats of engineering they can produce that could be worked back into some future version of your project. Sounds pretty good, right?
Now lets step back into the more typical situation. You’re working on a project that has a tight schedule and an even tighter…
Tuesday, July 9, 2013 - 12:10
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Even though user experience (UX) design must accommodate the needs of the user, which seem on the surface to be idiosyncratic, UX designs are built using user interface patterns, which are highly rule-based. It’s confusing and annoying to live in a world with no rules or inconsistent rules. Dreams are like that; you go through a door but are back in the same room or you run but you stay in the same place. The rules of physics define the behavior of the physical world. Virtual worlds, even lowly everyday apps, also need to build upon consistent rules or patterns of interaction, for people to…
Monday, July 1, 2013 - 11:47
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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June is usually one of my favorite months. Summer is starting, the bugs are clearing out and vacations are upon us; it’s a generally nice time of year. This year however, apparently several of my electronic devices are in collusion to change that.
In the software industry, you get used to the idea of new product releases. Version 4.5 fixes bugs in 4.4 and maybe adds new features that someone felt would be useful. Of course, as anyone in the business knows, with new versions also come new bugs that weren’t there before. It’s the nature of the beast and we’ve…
Monday, June 17, 2013 - 12:00
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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The tricky thing about free-form gestures… adding a few obvious gestures to an otherwise touch interface is easy. However, if you begin adding more gestures, the usability design challenges increase exponentially.
For a long time free-form gesture interaction has been just over the horizon for consumer products, except for gaming of course. Now its emergence on laptops, tablets and phones has begun. At ICS, we’ve been working on a few prototypes for free-form gesture interfaces, experimenting with how to add viable gesture interactions to kiosks and interactive signboards.…
Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - 16:47
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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A while back, I mused about the magic of Hollywood, specifically the user interfaces in last summer’s blockbuster movies. Besides prepping for this year’s ICS QuickStart series, I’ve had time to catch some of this year’s crop of movies too. It’s only May and we’ve seen a few good Sci-Fi tent-pole movies. Even better, there have been some good UI tidbits to observe in them.
The latest Star Trek installment, Into Darkness, has plenty of eye candy on the screens of the Enterprise. As a UI geek, it was interesting to me that this movie tries to maintain many of the physical aspects of the old…
Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 11:15
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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There are numerous blogs arguing for consistency in a UX design mostly for soft reasons, such as "it's good for company branding," "it’s just good design," and “it’s easier to learn.” Here is the most important reason for UX design consistency, based on how the brain works: Lack of consistency in a UX design leads to added “cognitive load” for the user and breaks the “transparent to task” effect.
Cognitive load: used in cognitive psychology to illustrate the load related to the executive control of working memory (From Wikipedia)
The brain can only handle so much load (short term memory and…
Thursday, May 2, 2013 - 11:30
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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Here is a piece of advice for both developers and designers that come from the words of Wilfred Hansen: Know Thy User. Many developers make the critical mistake of thinking they are developing for the user, when in fact they are developing for themselves. Does your target customer share your technical or cultural background? What about their demographics – Are they the same age and gender? Do they share your goals and motivations? If you cannot answer these basic questions, you may very well be creating the wrong product for your customer!
Now, with the understanding that our user is not us…
Monday, April 22, 2013 - 08:50
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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I’m an advocate of UX + Agile but it has led to some “can’t-see-the-work-for-the-methodology” blindness. People are wrapped-up in doggedly following the mechanics of the methodology and lose sight of essential common sense about how best to get the work done that initially inspired the creation of the methodology. This not very thoughtful behavior tends to dumb-down the value of the methodology, diminishing the promised gains in project efficiency… bad for any company.
You can recognize that people have stopped using their common sense when they start using the terms “iterate” and “increment…
Friday, April 12, 2013 - 07:55
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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Join me for a UX webinar—Introduction to UX Design for Engineers—on March 21 at 1:00 EDT. Space is limited, so register here today.
So, read any good books lately?
Seen any good movies recently?
Design any cool interfaces this year?
You may not think about it, but these questions are all related. Like any other industry, UX design has trends. The devices people use every day such as smartphones and tablets for example, set our expectations about how things are “supposed” to work.
If you have a tablet that has a certain level of interaction such as smooth navigation and the…
Friday, April 12, 2013 - 07:43
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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A physical demonstration of a touch enabled coverflow drag on an ICS kiosk.
With the popularity of smart phones and tablets, touch gesture expertise is mostly focused on small screen sizes. Large touch screens are much less common and present a unique set of problems that have not been as well explored. Recently at ICS, we’ve been experimenting with touchscreen devices of various sizes, and we’ve made some interesting observations about touch gestures on large screens.
We created a Qt/QML application at a native size of 1920 x 1400 pixels, testing it on a 22- inch touch monitor. The…
Tuesday, February 26, 2013 - 13:43
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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At Integrated Computer Solutions [ICS], we are proud of the many projects we develop and although we would like to display all of them, often we are restricted due to confidentiality clauses or because they run on specialized hardware. So recently we decided to create a touchscreen demo to exhibit some of our user experience [UX] and software development expertise. The demo was written in Qt and QML and can run on a variety of hardware. Initially, the demo was meant for display at several trade shows such as the recent Qt Developer Days 2012 in Berlin and in Santa Clara respectively. While at…