Just noticed a small little detail in my OS X Dock this afternoon that I had never noticed before. Not only did the designers at Apple take the time to design beautiful elements at the top level, they also took into account how they wanted the elements to interact with other things on the page.
The icon above the dock is a .PNG file of a theme I have been designing for WordPress recently. I have always noticed (and loved) that most of the icons on the desktop show what the file actually looks like instead of having just a standard .JPG or .DOC icon. What I hadn’t noticed before today is the fact that they were so detail oriented that they built in a reflection aspect off of the Dock for things in its proximity.
The image below is a screen shot of just an icon near it but it also works work open windows near the Dock as well. If you look below the icon on the left it has reflected the name of the WP_theme icon above it. Beautiful.
Gowalla
iPhone owners, sign up for and play Gowalla. It was created by a local shop here in town called Alamofire who incidentally also launched a pretty new website (and stole my idea for page scrolling) this week and also happen to have a dotcomrade of mine on staff. If you have facebook, they also made a game called PackRat. Apparently it was big and fun.
Google Voice
Only available to those who made the beta of Grand Central (unfortunately, not me) right now, Google is rolling out a new feature that will have both Skype and your local phone company banging their heads on their respective desks. Voicemail, central numbers that all forward to, Voicemail transcribed to your email inbox and text messaging are just a few of the features they boast. World domination to continue.
While I am all about utilizing social media to market your product and I am also in favor of using it to garner as much feedback as possible from the consumer, there is a limit to which I would take it.
I’d say the creator’s of the new Joshua Jackson film One Week crossed that line recently. Their attempt to garner some hype over the movie was probably set back slightly after taking a full-page ad out in a Toronto newspaper this week and including a page filled with reviews of the film.
My guess is that they stuffed it with so many reviews to hide the fact that they were actually comments from users about a clip of the film on the video hosting site YouTube. And that at least half of the comments noted that they had not yet seen the film but are more along the lines of “this movie is going to be fantastic” and “can’t wait to see this.” Ouch. Social media marketing gone very wrong. I’m betting they know the fact this this movie should have gone straight to DVD.
Contrary to popular belief, there is some thought process and logic behind what I do. Yes, my job is still to make you look better; please let me continue to do my job. But in the process of making you look better I have to bear in mind that the prettiest option may not always be the best for your user.
Notice I didn’t say what was the best option for you. The problem is many times that you are too close to your product/service/brand to understand how others interact with it. Just because you like purple and gold doesn’t mean that 95% of your clientele does. Or the fact that you don’t want a website to scroll horizontally on your screen but you refuse to move your resolution up from a 800*600 pixel scree. I can think of 3-4 clients right off the bat that have had to overrule quality design decisions just because their wife/mother/spouse/other relative doesn’t like green (or any other color, button style or image).
Interaction Design (IxD) is the discipline of designing a system that a user can interact with. In English, it’s designing with the user in mind. It can apply to software design, website creation, mobile phone interfaces and even electronic devices. It’s all around you every day and depending on how well it was thought of and taken into consideration will tell a lot about how (and how often) you’ll interact with that product. (more…)
