Photoshop CS6 Improvements for Screen Designers -
Layer Searching, Layer Effects on Groups, Pixel Snapping Everywhere, Paragraph an Character Stylesets, Strokes on Paths, Near Object Transform Info, Gradient Layer Scale goes up to 1000%, and there is still more.
Adobe managed to get me excited about PS again. :)
“Salad bars exemplify what happens when you give users too many choices: they want everything and the resulting salad isn’t very good.” — @taylorcarrigan
Finally you can download Instagram on Android. It’s very similar to the iPhone version, in features as well as UI. It’s available on a wide range of android devices, basically everything that identifies as a phone with camera and 2.2.
They had over 300k subscribers to be notified on launch and managed more then 16k retweets that they launched in the first 6 hours. Now this should be a good thing. For everyone. So I thought. Then I stumbled upon tweets like this by @jessiechar:
“How do we feel about the Instagram UI for Android basically being the same as for iOS?
Seems like kind of a copout to me.”
I’m not an regular Android user, but to me Tim Van Damme aka @maxvoltar and his team crafted one of the cleanest, most well looking Android UIs I know of.
I’ll curiously watch how this will unfold.
Update: @mraaroncruz just sent me this blog. So iPhone users are better then Android users, huh? *sigh*
Update 2: So it’s 1 Billion, huh? Whatever the reason is, I’m now even more curious what Facebook is cooking up.
[video]
“Simple ideas […] will naturally occur to many people. A small percentage of those will have the ability to execute on them. A small percentage of those will then actually do so. And an even smaller group will combine it with an otherwise interesting product, thus making it into something.” — I could rant about this for days, but Neven captures the essence in 2 Tweets and 15 characters.
Lately I’ve found myself to adopt a rather unexpected workflow for Rapid Prototyping of iOS apps.
I start out with balsamiq, creating a rough draft of my ideas and after some back and forth with the client, we have a basis to agree on.
After that I continue to scribble the interaction design with Keynotopia, continue with some pixel-crafting in Photoshop (6) and finally I use Prototypes to give a feeling of the final look and workflow of the app.
This also makes for an excellent brief for the developers, as a good level of detail about the apps user experience is already defined.
Simple, self explaining, pain alleviating, and it’s no more expensive then a normal lock. A true treasure of UX improvement for an everyday problem, no one addressed in the last few centuries.
When I woke up today, I was bombarded with news about Facebook implementing a “Dislike”-button. It was on TV, public radio and everywhere from ORF teletext (update: they removed the article again) to twitter and blogs.
After some research, I couldn’t find any official statement or even anything coming close to being an authoritative source for this, so I dismissed it to as rumor. Actually, it’s a rumor that surfaces every few weeks, only this time the austrian mass media decided to run it, without first checking the facts.
That traditional big media institutions forgo simple fact checking is nothing new in this day and age (even if it still irks me to no end), but in this case good came from it by motivating me to write a article about this whole “dislike” shenenigans.
Reason #1: Informational Uselesness
Facebook has very carefully created an environment where every statement comes from an identified source. This very much eliminated trolling on Facebook. Liking something has subtle social implications1, but more importantly it creates the kind of information Facebook is seeking.
It allows to target you on the stuff you have a positive connection to. Stuff is getting sold on good feelings, not on bad ones2. A dislike button would generate information that is only of secondary importance to the brands Facebook is living of.
Reason #2: Moral Culture
I’ll admit it, I don’t believe that Facebook operates on a strong altruistic streak, despite what they say. Still, their current approach to negative sentiments requires people to articulate themselves about what is bothering them, thus (theoretically) requiring them to think about it (which generates valuable feedback for a brand3).
A dislike button would just dumb down the conversation about disagreements. In fact it would further weaken the already desolate culture of debate we have nowadays.
Conclusion
A dislike button would reduce the quality of content and provide little relevant data about you. If Facebook ever finds a way to create meaningful information about you through a dislike button, I’m sure they will implement it. But I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it.
1) Most lifestyle brands profit from people wanting to be associated with them. If you think brand X is cool, you will like it and by doing so communicate that you share certain values. Which means that you declare a bit of your own worldview and values. It’s subtle and very fuzzy, but it still is a very important part of how your online identity is constructed.
2) Sometimes this good feeling comes from a motivation to avoid/get away from something bad, so it may look like you sell something on a bad feeling. But in the end you only create loyal, returning, happy customers if you cater to a positive feeling.
3) Well, to those brands who listen anyway. The new pages actually facilitate the honest communication between brand and person, without requiring the person to go public or the brand to react to (sometimes unwarrented) trolling on their timelines. Believe it or not, most people are not interested in public swearing, no mater how good it may feel.
In his latest article on 52 Weeks of UX, Joshua Porter once again nails an important aspect of UX:
One strategy we might employ is to optimize until we reach a point of diminishing returns: design until changes just aren’t having a big effect. Then, stop optimizing and return to other kinds of analysis to figure out the next steps. Conduct interviews. Do user testing. Give surveys, ask questions. Find out the biggest existing pain points instead of focusing on tiny design elements at this stage. Focus at the activity-level. What are people trying to accomplish? What are their higher-level goals? What aren’t people doing that we want them to? What big hurdles keep them from taking the next action? This level of insight will allow you to make those bigger changes.
If you’re a freelance, chances are good that you’re hired at the beginning of a project, or when it’s hopelessly stuck. You rarely get to the place where small change optimization reaches the point of diminishing returns.
The more important it is to keep an eye on it, so chances of innovation aren’t missed.
“The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision.” —
Jason Fried, Getting Real
This quotes latest reincarnation appears in Mike Rundles excellent article Kill The Settings, Build Opinionated Software and is still very true.