Stuff I read last week (week 5)

Published February 5, 2012
  1. Wireframes are Dead, Long Live Wireframes
    “Traditional Wireframes Are Dead Or as close to dead, as it makes no difference. Here’s the problem with traditional wireframes: They give no sense or insight into flow. They have to be created at various different screen sizes to account for how customers will actually see them. The client won’t see them in their native element. The context is wrong.”
  2. The Best Of The Best: The IxDA Selects The Best Interaction Design Of 2012
    “A dashboard that encourages eco-friendly driving, a tiny music sequencer, and a cell phone geared toward old folks count among the winners of the Interaction Design Association’s (IxDA) first annual Interaction Awards”
  3. Why most UX is shite
    “If you want better UX, stop looking at your design team and whichever new sexy UI you’ve seen this week, take a long hard look at your organisation and whether it caring about UX is part of its cultural make up and what evidence there is, beneath the interface, of this being true.”
  4. Browser and GUI Chrome
    “‘Chrome’ is the user interface overhead that surrounds user data and web page content. Although chrome obesity can eat half of the available pixels, a reasonable amount enhances usability.”
  5. UX and Mobile Design: 2012′s Challenges and Opportunities
    “Rapid prototyping is now an essential design skill. We have to reinvent these techniques for the small screen, producing ways to test-drive the experiences we’re proposing.”
  6. What Arcade Games Can Teach Us About UX
    “Don’t follow trends. Your competitors may have flashy slideshows, social features, and even walk-on videos. But, you should resist using the latest features in your designs unless they create a solid improvement in user experience.”
  7. Clear: A To-Do List App With A UI From The Future
    “To-do list apps are lame. Why? Because managing the system–learning how to input items, strike them out, sync them, tag them–is often more complicated than low-tech methods like writing something on a Post-it. But people still keep inventing them. The latest, an iPhone app called Clear, is at least interesting for what it doesn’t do.”