Blog - User Interface Design

Wednesday

25Nov2009

iPhone blogging

Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 11:25AM |

A HUGE Catch

Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:52AM |

2 Comments |

I've had my blog up for a few months now, and though contact forms often don't capture of a lot of attention. I hoped to receive at least one friendly message, but no luck! My new friend, @Gabriol took the time to shoot me a tweet! "@conceptsguy tried to contact you via your blog but there is no submit button to send you an email."

WHAT!?! No Submit!? Square space to the rescue!

A Huge Catch, and quick fix! from conceptsguy on Vimeo.

The joys of trying to use a CMS based content management system based on a template design structure, you have to kinda hack your way in to getting what you need. Don't take that as a bad thing. Building off the SquareSpace interface is a dream, and just down right fun! But as it goes, it comes with some quarks. As the video shows, it was quick check to see that I needed to increase the padding a bit on the main container, and the button was in plain view! A simple solution for a pretty huge problem!

Tuesday

25Aug2009

A Little Inspiration

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 12:39PM |

2 Comments |

While recently I've spent most of my time doing proposals, site testing, and project management, I'm constantly viewing all my work through the lens of design and usability.

I've taken a few minutes to capture just a few ways that I keep an eye of design, and where I find a little inspiration every day.

Twitter.com (more specifically Tweetdeck)

I've been using twitter for some time now, and while there is a ridiculous amount of confusion about what to do with twitter, I find that its a fantastic monitoring tool to stay up on design trends.

I absolutely love tweet deck for their column few of search results. My two favorite search terms, "User Interface Design" and "Web Design Inspiration" provide me with a regular feed of more amazing links to resources and inspiration than I could possibly ever consume.

Smashing Magazine

Smashingmagazine.com is will probably not be a surprise to anyone reading this list. They've been around for several years now, but I will say that they are consistently providing top notch material for designers, freelancers, developers, and creatives in general. I'm not sure how they manage to scrape the internets to find such great resources over and over, exposing new and fantastic content authors, but they they continuing to find resources for individuals that push the envelope in design and more importantly taken a clear stance on usability.

Envato

I wouldn't say that I'm obsessed, but boy am I impressed with the Envato community. I'll admit, I commonly rest in that space of the 95% of online users that consume content, but rarely contribute. And I feel like I'm just steeling in some horrible way when I spend time on any of the Envato sites. Tuts+Hub, Marketplaces, FreelanceSwitch, AppStorm, Creattica, and TheNetsetter. I could spend most of my day just enjoying the smooth styling of their pages let alone the resources I gather while I'm there.

These sites were created for me. I'm sorry guys! If you go there, have fun! But just remember that when Envato was starting I'm sure they were thinking, "What style, feel, content, and resources would George Brook in Kansas City want to enjoy?" They weren't thinking of you, and its not your fault! Maybe one day, but for now, I've fallen in love with the Envato sites.

The Rabbit Hole

As you all know, as you dig in to the web, it can easily become a glorious and almost overwhelming rabbit hole of information, but when it comes to design I love it. I love finding one page that links to another and then another and another analyzing how we can make code usable. How do we take data that once was impossibly in-consumable (double negative?) And put that top love of Creme (more to come on that theme soon), that golden Crema that rises to the top of the perfectly made espresso shot. All at the same time invoking emotion, simplicity, intrigue, and making information accessible to all.

tagged

Design

Tuesday

28Jul2009

Social Analytics at its best!

Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:32PM |

1 Comment |

Gone are the days of surveys and focus groups. Paying call centers to come in and call so many thousands of people and waiting for some small town person that could care less about your product review probably planning to hang up on poor guy sitting behind the phone. Gone are the stuffy focus groups waiting awkwardly for you to try a product and fill out a survey to get a free t-shirt. Companies no longer have to seek out looking for if their customers like their products or not. Instead, their customers blast it all over twitter, facebook, and youtube. They blog about their experiences and comment on threads of online news publishers. Advertising and marketing agency are flooded with desperate calls from their companies asking them to sift through the sentiments online There have only been a few tools that would step up to the task to really show what the online ecosystem has to say. But now their is one company that has finally taken the lead in this race.

Infegy "Understand Millions Instantly" And that's the dead truth. Infegy just launched their new website today! It truly reflects the quality of their product(Social Radar). and as I sat in their offices talking through their goals for the site, it took very little time after they showed me their tools for me to realize that this is going to change the way that brands view their customers. No longer do the companies control their brand through conventional media. People are the new media. Every business will tell you that word of mouth is the best sales person. But what if word of mouth could spread between single individuals at literally the speed of light. Wouldn't you want to know what those people are saying? I did. Its just incredible. I could see sentiment analysis showing me the positives and negatives of conversations. I could see trends. TRENDS!! They were archive over a billion feeds just so that you can look in to the past to see what changed from now until today. For the better, or in todays economy, for the worse.

How could I as a company begin to address the real media that matters? My customers. Not only can you see the global vision of what's being said by everyone instantly, but you can drill down to the top feeds, and even all the way down to the very individuals that made the comments. What an opportunity. No longer are customers 100 stories down, below the streets, in amongst my competition. They are right in front of me telling me exactly what they think of my product. Mind blowing!

Needless to say. I had a great time working with the crew over at Infegy helping them pull together a design that really spoke to that level of a product.

Don't wait to give them a call to start looking at Social Radar!