George’s posterous

George’s posterous

George Penston  //  A UI designer with too many ideas and too little time. I have an unhealthy amount of knowledge on Adobe and Apple software and video games. You should follow me on twitter here.
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Jul 28 / 8:05am

User Interface + Humor

Dropbox includes a bit of humor in their progress messaging. I find it interesting how many user interface designers are playing with the notion of adding humor and personality into the products they design.

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Filed under  //  design   funny   user interface  

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May 29 / 8:44am

Why the Zune HD doesn't have a better UI than the iPhone

According to the Gizmodo, the Zune HD is "tighter and more physically beautiful than the iPod Touch and it's got a better UI".


While it's easy to gain hits by saying the Zune HD may have a better UI than an iPhone, any user experience designer will tell you it suffers from the same major issue as the original Zune UI: no affordance. There are no apparent visual cues as to what is meant to be tapped and what isn't. You're expected to know that big lowercase text words are intended to be tapped to navigate. Sure, you could argue this is a heuristic process but why should it be? It's yet another example of Microsoft going the other way with something to be completely opposite from Apple but not realizing they're also doing something completely opposite of what is good user experience design.
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Filed under  //  apple   design   ui  

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Mar 21 / 8:03am

Doug Bowmen says Goodbye to Google

Doug Bowmen, a well known designer that Google recruited about three years ago, has finally decided to leave. His reasons are pretty interesting. I always thought it was odd Doug had decided to join Google since they didn't seem to value design as they did engineering. But I thought having Doug join them was a great boon for Google and perhaps a sign of good things to come. Yes, Google Calendar is designed far better than I would imagine Google would design it (Doug worked on this). But all in all, I still think Google isn't interested in building well designed software both inside and out — just building good software (whatever it takes).

http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
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Filed under  //  design   google   web  

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