Tag Archives: UI

Interaction Design In The Cloud

May 11, 2012   SmashingMagazine.com

Interaction Design In The Cloud

Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these wireframes were primitive shapes drawn to represent various UI elements. Many of us cannot imagine life without them.

There are, however, reasons to consider moving to the cloud to do interaction design. In short, today’s cloud-based tools are:

  • Optimized for collaboration,
  • Editable anywhere,
  • Interactive,
  • Published in real time,
  • Self-maintaing (the user doesn’t need to update software),
  • Payable monthly,

Emailing your old static designs will feel old fashioned once you see what these tools can do. Going a step further, there are tools for the user review process, too. Just upload your ideas, from simple mockups to final layouts, link them together, and

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Removing Stumbling Blocks In Mobile Forms

May 4, 2012   SmashingMagazine.com

Removing Stumbling Blocks In Mobile Forms

A few weeks ago, I was quite surprised when I saw the pavement quickly approaching while I was out for a walk. Laying there stunned, I soon realized what had happened: I fell. Ouch. B-minus. I normally try to be as attentive as possible, but this time a big crack in the pavement caught my shoe and threw me completely off balance.

After reporting my clumsy accident to friends and family, I instantly received comments like: “be more careful” or “better watch out next time”. In the end, I started to defend myself—if that crack would not have been there, I most likely would not have been face-planted.

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Writing Unit Tests For WordPress Plugins

March 8, 2012   SmashingMagazine.com

Writing Unit Tests For WordPress Plugins

When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat.

My first goal for the WordPress Editorial Calendar was to make it do anything useful. I was new to JavaScript and PHP and didn’t really know what I could pull off. In a few days I had a proof of concept. In a few more I had a working version and was asking friends to install it. The calendar worked… sort of.

I spent three times as much time fixing bugs as I did coding. Once the plugin worked, I wrote unit

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Designing Engaging And Enjoyable Long-Form Reading Experiences

March 8, 2012   SmashingMagazine.com

Designing Engaging And Enjoyable Long-Form Reading Experiences

Finally, some good news from the media industry: digital subscriptions are growing. We’re seeing positive reports from newspapers such as the New York Times and magazine publishers such as Conde Nast: announcements about increases in their digital content sales and paywall members.

When you have fantastic and original content, ensuring the best possible reading experience is critical to keeping and building your audience. The following practices will help you design your content in a way that improves the experience for readers.

Navigation Methods

We often think that having many methods for finding things is easier for users. Unfortunately, the result can be mess of unhelpful and unrelated links, menus, widgets and ads.

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Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System

March 6, 2012   SmashingMagazine.com

Japanese, A Beautifully Complex Writing System

As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese is a difficult language, isn’t it?” Those asking are often surprised when my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”

While it is true (at least to many Westerners) that Japanese is an exotic language, when compared to learning other European languages, it may seem harder because it has has no relation to their own language. But from my own experiences of learning English and German (and also from seeing some European friends learning Japanese), I can say with confidence that learning spoken Japanese is, in fact, not so difficult. The grammar is in

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