Architect Magazine: Clean & Modern design

 The other day an architect friend passed me his copy of  Architect Magazine, and I fell in love with the visual design system for the publication. Overall, it's an incredible balance of white space, bold sans serif display type (haven't identified it yet!) and just makes you feel smart as you read it. The main piece in this month's issue uses data visualization in a fresh way, incorporating vector illustrations related to the theme of the article (sustainabiltity) and unconventional charts that make it fun to read, while still conveying the survey results. I'm not sure how Edward Tufte or Stephen Few would feel about it—probably would criticize the approach—but I give the designer a thumbs up for creating an experience worth reading through.

Unsolicited Redesign of the Week: Fixing the iTunes account sign in screen

This screen makes me think every single time. Am I stupid? No. It's just the way the information is presented that makes me do a double—sometimes triple take when signing in to manage my account?

Here's the screen. Notice how the Apple icon is to the left of the username input field, and then the AOL image is to the left of the password input field? That's what drives me nuts about this form.

After giving it the 15second PrettyUseful once-over, never again will I or anyone else be confused by it. Well, not true. A simple holding box around the selected service and a connection to the input forms will go a long way to improving this. Next step is to get Apple to incorporate the tweak!

Unsolicited Redesign of the Week: Time Magazine

First in my series of quick and easy redesigns that can be done in 10 minutes or less to dramatically improve a site. Hey, maybe they'll even run into these posts and adopt the change. Free of charge!

Site: Time.com

When the page loaded for me, the first thing I noticed was the red border around the main content of the site. Yikes, when good branding goes bad. It's totally unnecessary and distracts the reader from what their primary activity on the site is: reading!

So, here's the page as it is online:

And here it is after literally 25 seconds of design work to tone down that red border to keep the readers eyes comfortably on the content area, and extended the header strip to be full-width. Ahhhh. Now that's better. Another thing I'd recommend by not going to waste the time doing is to decrease the left-margin of the post content, it's way too far into the page, thus reducting the span of the content. Plus, it just looks bad. I suspect that the content was indented to get it away from the red border that is screaming out for attention.

 

And that wraps up the first installment of the "Unsolicited Redesign of the Week."

Have a great weekend folks.

Developing a User Experience Strategy

I've had the privelege of working with miskeeto in the past on a project for our company. We're in the midst of realizing that we are lacking a strategy that informs all of our product design decisions. In this post, Robert lays out the fundamental steps in creating a UX strategy.

http://miskeeto.com/bytes/developing-ux-strategy/

Tech-mology.

Today was a first for me. I conducted my first Skype interview. I've been recruiting for an interaction designer for House Party (the company I've been leading the IxD effort what now seems like eons!) and I've interviewed a few candidates face to face already.

One applicant emailed me while traveling in Australia and requested an interview via Skype. I had to think about it for a bit before agreeing. I thought about what it might have been like decades earlier when the telephone was just becoming popular, but the analog face-to-face method of interviewing and doing pretty much everything was the status quo.

(I am now envisioning a black and white scene in which I am sitting at a desk sans computer, but with a gigantic telephone off to the corner with a thick cord running out of it into the wall.)

An intern enters my office with a memo reading "Interested in position, requesting a phone-based interview. Please confirm."

"Hmm." I think as I light a cigarette indoors because back in the past, I am (was) permitted to—no better yet—encouraged to.

"This just might work." I mutter to myself bemusedly.

So I write note on the memo: "Request accepted. Please call {number ext.} at 8:00 am EST," and put it in my outbox, which is later picked up by the intern (go-fer) and routed to its destination.

(exit daydream sequence, return to present moment.)

So there I was, conducting an interview with a total stranger on the other side of the planet, almost face to face (though with video chat, I end up watching myself in the little thumbnail because it's one of the rare moments in life when you can truly observe yourself without looking yourself in the eyes.) Now, in face-to-face interviews, both parties do their best to be composed, the candidate usually trying his or her best to mask their nervousness. One can be confident that she is in almost total control of their body and the non-verbal signals being sent to the other party. Video chat interviews are a different animal altogether. Quite similar to a well structured web site. Your content and your presentation are no longer married to eachother. For a website, this is a good thing. For a human being interviewing for a job, this could be bad.

During the course of the skype interview with the candidate, there were moments during which the screen froze, and what I saw was this person whom I had not know until that moment, stuck inbetween facial expressions and I found it very amusing. Then it occurred to me that she was probably seeing me in a similar state. This would never happen during a live face-to-face interview. You just would never freeze in the middle of a sentence with your mouth gaping open and your eyes closed. But, we humans adapt to technology, and like banner ads, we learn to ignore the glitches and focus on the content that this other person is conveying. And it works. It really works. If anything, it really breaks the ice. Both parties entering into an agreement that what is about to transpire is going to be a bit funny at times, possiblly embarrasing, but it's ok. It's all about the content anyway.

Tech-mology.