Corvus Consulting

A few months doesn’t seem like very long to look for changes in the landscape of wireframing apps for the iPad. But this is the App Store where life moves fast. In the realm of apps for wireframing, those reviewed last time around have made steady progress while a snappy new player has entered the field to challenge their early dominance.

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Even when they aren’t part of the deliverables, I write up personas to guide most of my interaction and experience design work. They keep me tuned into motivations and needs that aren’t strictly intuitive to me.

Personas are necessarily artificial; they present a single, fictionalized instance to stand for an entire audience of customers. Despite the assumptions that such abstractions come with, they earn their keep by reminding the development team what’s important to the people they’re building for.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the single-person focus typical to personas, and whether they need to be expanded to capture the real-world social existence of users even when the design doesn’t have socialization as a primary objective.

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Yesterday’s post about how touch-based interfaces disintermediate interaction brought to mind a 30-second vignette I witnessed at a hotel in Mexico last month. From behind sunglasses I watched several guests act out one of my favourite interface design rules: people try to interact with what they want to change.

There’s more than one problem with this sign, like the change from an action/outcome pairing to a translation pairing, but the real problem is that the buttons on the sign really look like buttons, and the arrow points right to them.

The sign, taken as an interface, was actually a legend to a pair of discrete buttons located elsewhere.

I admit it was a little funny to watch, but it was also a reminder of how we can do so much for people using our products by thinking carefully about where we place controls in relation to where the outputs occur.

Last week I got into a discussion on the blog for Spark, a weekly CBC radio show about technology and culture. From the comments came an interview with Dan Misener, and part of that conversation made its way into an episode that asks why computers are so hard to use. The segment starts at the 40-minute mark, and should you be disposed to listen you can do so.

As with most interviews there are parts that get cut. While I liked the parts Spark included, one part I wished would have made it on was about the importance of the iPad’s adoption of unmediated input. The following is a tidied-up crib of those thoughts.

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Managing traffic, the kind with cars and pedestrians instead of clicks, can surely be called one of the Big Problems for interaction design outside the realm of software. Two innovations for traffic that I recently came across stood out for their strong parallels with successful software interaction patterns.

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