“WordPress 2.5’s interface overhaul is getting closer, and now that I’ve been able to play with the release candidate, these are my thoughts.
The official WordPress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the WordPress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”
Edward Tufte: “The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with ‘Where am I?’ puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.
To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space).
This video shows some of the resolution-enhancing methods of the iPhone, along with a few places for improvements in resolution.”
“Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.”
“Web minimalism has come back as a trend in the summer of 2007. Rainfall Daffinson adores the concept of minimalism, zen culture and the essence of things. We chose 24 moments of minimalism web interface design in the last decade, selected several quotes to easily define the minimalism and represent some of the best new minimalism websites.”
“design|snips was born out of my realization that most sites I add to my ‘Design’ folder are bookmarked because of a few elements that are really well designed. Whether it’s the headline style, callout boxes or other modules, I usually am inspired by a few key parts of each site. design|snips will collect and categorize these elements and hopefully help you when it comes time to start on a new interface.”
“The craft of graphic design is replete with ratios, rules of thumb, and math—all an attempt to rationalize decisions that otherwise fall to subjectivity. Finding justification for design decisions is important to me—I want to bring purpose and intent to my work and depend less on taste and opinion. But I often find myself designing on impulse or intuition—pushing pixels around the screen or lines down a sketchpad with no structure, no rationalization— just because it ‘looks right’. That haphazard and experimental process gives me a lot of freedom, but it isn’t really design.
I asked Mark Boulton, Andy Budd, and Jeff Croft, three designers I deeply respect, about designing on impulse versus intention. They each had something different to say, but they each presented a design process far more rationalized and justified than my own…”
“The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into ‘Human-Computer Interaction.’ In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.” (Thanks Magnetbox!)
A great Flickr collection of “random findings of consistent interfaces and design across the web.” In other words, lots of screenshots of login forms, 404s, footer designs, tag clouds, upload interfaces and more. Nice.
“Have you ever tried an application that looked great at first, but once you started using it, it just didn’t feel right? The UI was slick and the feature list looked perfect, but the workflow just wasn’t there? I see this all the time, and quite often it’s due to developers not using their own applications. They built something they thought would sell instead of something they needed, so they don’t see their software the way an end user would. They don’t notice the hundreds of little things that would make their applications easier to use, nor do they notice all the minor bugs that customers consider too small to report.”
“So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.” (Thanks kottke.org!)
