Over the Air - Visual Design on Mobile
This session was with 2 guys from Idean; Petri Heiskanen and Harri Lehmuskallio.
I think this was a fantastic session. It was great how the discussion evolved into a open dialogue between the speakers and the audience, and for me it was really great to see interaction between an artist and a user experience designer.
The biggest thing I got out of this session, was it has allowed me to change the way I think about UI design. Typically (and stereotypically in fact), a programmer tends to design a UI around functions, and sometimes you can easily see a UI that has been designed by a programmer. I’m not trying to slag of programmers, everyone is different, but generally programmers are not good at UI design.
After this session, I found myself thinking about UI design in a totally different way (i.e the user’s experience, not features or functions). “Right, I want this application, and I want it todo this!”.
It has also opened up my eyes to the importance of a user experience designer/engineer. This is something Steven has been saying for a while, and after this session, I can so clearly see the benefits of having someone purely as a user experience engineer, where as before I had trouble seeing it outside the role of an artist. The 2 things are so so different, they are not the same!
Posted: April 10th, 2008 under Conferences.
Comments: 1
Comments
Comment from Andrew Buckingham
Time: April 10, 2008, 1:09 pm
I completely agree with your post, this lecture completely altered my view of UI Design, it was fascinating to see the design process and it was fun as they kept in the spirit of the event by designing the entire demo UI overnight.
I’ll admit, like most programmers, I’m not brilliant at UI Design, but this lecture gave me a few tips to take away and hopefully improve my overall design process:
* Don’t have too many Icons, and don’t over-complicate the designs of Icons you have.
* Text styles can be used to relay information, to help reduce Icon usage.
* Only change the screen layout/format when the interaction style of the screen changes.
* The current focus should always stand out and be obvious from first glance.
* When starting a new design, always design the layout using black and white wireframe drawings/sketches, make sure you’re happy with that layout before even thinking about styles.
* SIMPLICITY AND CONSISTANCY IS THE KEY!!!
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