Practicing with Sketch

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I spent an hour this week trying to come up to speed with Sketch as an interface design tool, not just a wire-framing tool. Lightweight software like this appeals to me as they tend to focus on specific use cases vs. a more swiss army knife approach. The result can be seen in both the speed of the software, it’s function, utility and importantly it’s price. Unfortunately for me I’ve come to rely on specific features of Illustrator which make up for my lack of love for bezier curves. With Illustrator, I can import sketches, create some outlines and in many cases just clean up the curves and be finished. I haven’t seen anywhere yet where Sketch has any crutches to help people like me.

I’m still planning to spend more time using Sketch before deciding to replace Illustrator and OmniGraffle in my workflow. I’ll be finishing the interface design solely in sketch of a couple apps. I’m involved with.

The above is a bit of skeumorphic goodness from the days before Apple dictated everything should be flat. It’s amazing just how dated that style has become in a very short period of time. Though unpolished it was great practice in using Sketch.


Interacting in the Global City

In today’s global cities, public urban space is constituted in my different ways. Residents in the same neighborhood may have very diverse types of knowledge about their shared public space: The children know the neighborhood at ground level, the tech designer knows the Wi-Fi coverage at the cafes, the homeless know about the night fauna.

How do these understandings of urban space affect our view, use, and design of technology?


Dangerous Popsicles

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Dangerous Popsicles are a collection of weird shaped popsicles inspired by cacti and life-threatening viruses. What will happen when we put these dangerous things on one of our most sensitive organs, our tougues? Does pain really bring pleasure? Is there beauty in user-unfriedly things?

Dangerous Popsicles create a unique sensory experience. Before tasting with your tongue, you first taste with your eyes and mind. The popsicles are nothing but water and sugar, but ideas of deadly viruses and the spikiness of cacti are enough to stimulate your senses, even before your first taste.

I love projects like this. From an adults perspective their might be hesitation to eat something with a form like this but I see kids, who are far more open, loving it.


Weekend links

The narrow streets of the city centre in Hsinchu. My favourite part of the city.

The narrow streets of the city centre in Hsinchu. My favourite part of the city.

New online series investigates the science of creativity

The Skeptic’s Guide To Low-Fidelity Prototyping

How to Generate Good Ideas: Methods to Try, Questions to Ask and Apps to Use

It’s all but impossible to earn a living as a working artist, new report shows

Published for the First Time: a 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity

We All Have Ideas. Here’s How To Become An Inventor

How & why I moved to Sketch

Khoi Vinh on Yosemite’s Look and Feel. Apple’s efforts of late seem half baked, unfinished.

“Malice has motivated people to turn in foreigners on labor law violations, an official said, adding that tips on lawbreakers result in rewards” Keep your nose clean and don’t make enemies or you might find yourself on a plane to “home“.

Japan Didn’t Cave

Why Haters hate: Kierkegaard explains the psychology of bullying and online trolling in 1847


The Dawn of the Next Era of Human Computer Interaction

The history of Human Computer Interaction has had a few notable eras and we are at the dawn of the next era. In this talk I will describe those previous eras and how various factors shaped our interactions with computing as well as lead into how the forces at play in today’s world are calling for a new era with new design solutions.

Nice talk.


Do you feel it’s possible for an American to call China home?

I think it’s possible for an American to think of China as home. Whether or not Chinese people accept that is probably another story. It’s part of the expat arrested development thing – everything about your existence is contingent, from visa runs to rentals to whatever. The baseline assumption is that you will be going home after a few years. That includes the assumption that you don’t really “get” China.

Whenever I’m asked “but do you really understand China?”, I just say “yes”, because fuck you. Ask a stupid question, get a flippant answer. People don’t really have a rebuttal to that. Try it sometime. I mean, I grew up in the US, but I don’t know that I “understand” the US – I don’t even know what that would mean.
Why I’m Not Going to Be Living in China Anymore But Might Be Back

You could substitute China for Taiwan and you would have something close to how I think about being a long term resident here. You are a welcome guest, treated well as such, but eventually long for a title with a bit more permanence or at least something other than your special status.


Sometimes amongst the noise of Facebook a signal appears; some great advice from a high school classmate.

I’ve always taken risks in my life, sometimes they didn’t work out and I was embarrassed. I learned from every one, because I looked for the learning. And I didn’t stop taking risks. Over time, they stopped feeling so much like risks and it’s gotten harder to embarrass me. I’ve learned a lot.

What are you afraid to do? Be bold today. Do something you’ve always wanted to do, something you’ve been scared to try. Look for the learning and do it again next week.
Kirsten

Fear of embarrassment has long been a motivator for me but also an inhibitor to stepping outside my bubble and trying something new. I think I’ll take her advice.


OmniGraffle for User Interface Design

A video detailing how Omni designs its own apps, “starting with a quick iPad sketch and ending up at a pixel-perfect, interactive design”. I may revisit using OmniGraffle but for the short term at least I’m invested in using Sketch.

This is not seat-of-your-pants level of exciting but I always enjoy listening to how another teams approach interface design.


Business and industry have learned that their products ought to be aesthetically pleasing. A large community of designers exists to help improve appearances. But appearances are only part of the story: usability and understandability are more important, for if a product can’t be used easily and safely, how valuable is its attractiveness? Usable design and aesthetics should go hand in hand: aesthetics need not be sacrificed for usability, which can be designed in from the first conceptualisation of the product.
Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Doubleday, 1988


Humane Interface Design

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. We make mistakes. No matter how hard we try to concentrate and prevent errors, errors will happen when our concentration wanes or when we are forced to do something that is beyond our cognitive abilities like multi-tasking: the act of consciously thinking about two things at once — and, with the use of Queueing Theory & Little’s Law, we learn that multi-tasking leads to lower productivity.
Aza Raskin

A humane interface design philosophy:

1. It’s the fault of the interface, not you.
The main thing you have to remember—and please remember this, because it could be vital to your sanity—is that any problems you have with an interface are not your fault. If you have trouble using your microwave, it’s not because you’re “not good with technology”, it’s because the people in charge of designing the interface for that microwave didn’t do their job right. User interface design is incredibly hard, and carries with it a great deal of responsibility; this is something that’s taken quite seriously when it comes life-critical systems such as flight control software. But in today’s consumer culture, what should be blamed on bad interface design is instead blamed on the “incompetence” of users. Just remember that it’s not your fault.

2. Don’t take something simple and make it complex.
Some tasks—for instance, teaching a child arithmetic—are intrinsically pretty complicated. But some aren’t. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn’t be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches—ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts—it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason.

It’s right and proper for complicated tasks to take time and expertise to accomplish. But something that is fundamentally simple—like changing the time on a wristwatch—should stay simple.

3. Fewer choices are better than many.
People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don’t think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability. We believe that when someone wants to do something on their computer, they want to spend their time doing it, not deciding how to do it. For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu. Each one of these mechanisms is useful in one or two situations but horrible in others, and each has completely different instructions for operation. Microsoft even gives you a wealth of choices to configure them the way you want, which makes the situation that much more complex.

When we can, we try to avoid burdening our users with choices like this: we’d rather just take the time to make one simple mechanism that the user can use for all their purposes. Because the less burdened a user’s mind is with irrelevant decisions, the more clear their mind is to accomplish what they need to get done.

4. Reliability is sacred.
It’s that simple, really. When one ensures that a machine can’t lose a user’s work, interfaces become a lot simpler; no more dialog boxes asking questions like “Are you sure you want to delete that entry?”; no more remembering to click a “Save” button like it’s a nervous twitch. You never need to regret any action you take, because any action you take can instantly be undone. Not to mention your complete lack of terror when you’re in the middle of working on your computer and the power goes out.

5. Your train of thought is sacred. Don’t break the flow.
You can only really think about one thing at a time. If you’re thinking about paying your taxes, you can’t be thinking about your vacation in Tahiti. Indeed, thinking about that vacation in Tahiti will actively prevent you from thinking about your taxes. That’s why when you want to get something done, you want to get everything out of your head except the task at hand.

Quite simply, you need to preserve your train of thought. And that means that the interface you’re using can’t derail it. No talking paper clips bothering you from the sidelines, no fiddling with windows to find your work, no distractions.

6. Good interfaces create good habits.
When you’re first learning how to use even the best of interfaces, preserving your train of thought can be hard because so much of your mind is focused on how to use the interface, rather than on what you need to do. But as you become more proficient at using a good interface, it eventually becomes second nature—it becomes a habit, like walking or breathing. You don’t need to think about what sequence of motions you need to perform an action because it’s like your hands have memorized them as a single continuous gesture, saving you the trouble of having to think about them.

Bad interfaces, on the other hand, prevent habits from forming—but they can also make you form bad habits. Have you ever closed a window and hit “Do Not Save”, only to realize a split second too late that it was exactly what you didn’t want to do? That’s a bad habit from a bad interface.

Good interfaces make forming good habits really easy, and they make forming bad habits nearly impossible.

7. Modes cause misery.
There exists a mortal enemy to your habits and your train of thought: it’s called a mode. If an interface has modes, then the same gesture that you’ve habituated performs completely different actions depending on which mode the system is in. For instance, take your Caps Lock key; have you ever accidentally pressed it unknowingly, only to find that everything you type LOOKS LIKE THIS?

When that happens, all that habituation you’ve built up about how to type on a keyboard gets subverted: it’s like your computer has suddenly turned into a completely different interface with a different set of behaviors. And that derails your train of thought, because you’re suddenly confused about why your habits aren’t producing what you expect them to.

When you think about it, almost everything that frustrates us about interfaces is due to a mode. That’s why good interfaces have as few as possible.

8. It’s easy to learn.
Good interfaces aren’t just effortless to use once you know them—they’re also easy to learn to use. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone should be able to use it without any instruction, though—it just means that knowing how to use any feature of the interface involves learning and retaining as little information as possible. Keep it simple, and keep it consistent.

9. An interface should be attractive and pleasant in tone.
How messages are phrased is important, how the interface looks is also important. But these are of secondary importance in terms of task completion. It used to be said that the Mac OS X interface looked so good it was lick able.

Source.


Perfectly executing the wrong plan

I’ve always felt that starting from the perspective of solving a personal problem or pain is a great way to start a product idea. But Tomer Sharon suggests otherwise in this video From Google I/O, which makes sense when you are in a position of using someone else’s capital investment. It takes very little time to validate some of your basic assumptions.

App developers ask themselves excellent questions about their users: Do people need my app? Can people use my app? Why do people sign up and then not use my app? However, app developers answer their excellent questions in invalid and unreliable ways. It is shocking to see how much effort app developers put in writing elegantly structured, refactored code, with good unit test coverage in an agile environment, and yet, their apps fail miserably.