Your reactions to a design are revealing about you as a designer. Turning the classic usability protocol on myself, and with my first week with iOS7 under my belt, I note UX flaws, flat vs "skeuomorphic" good/bad, design choices I would have made differently, and more.
iOS 5 & 6.1 and Android (to 4.1) interrupt users’ video recording when calls come in, where webOS v2.2.3 and Windows Phone 7.5 wait until users answer the call. UX lessons about prioritizing users, flexible multi-tasking, and better notifications.
Ecosystems should be considered in terms of UX and actively designed as a whole to be user-focused. Our separate devices, software, services, data, and content should work together in personal digital infrastructure (PDI) enabling effortless access and seamless interoperability throughout it.
In a video interview with Josh Topolsky for The Verge, Matias Duarte, Head of Design at Android, and formerly of webOS fame, said, “Mobile is dead.” …Duarte’s point is that in an age in which users seamlessly transition from one screen size to another during their day, the idea that…
iOS 7: Apple Removes Text Messaging Options in Messages No Text Messages For iDevices! iMessage or the Highway! There are numerous stories reporting on an iMessage bug or outage that meant that iMessages failed to send or took a long time to send. In iOS 6, this wasn’t too big…
iOS 7: Make Messages Stop Using Nicknames I was wrong in my iOS7 First Impressions article. There is a way to get Messages to use normal names instead of nicknames!. The answer is on the Short Names page in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars [look in the Contacts section] >…
Multitasking updated in iOS 7 with new card-style interface | iMore.com. Gyahhhh!!!! “Who needs multi-tasking?” the webOS naysayers and Apple fanboys said when dismissing webOS. Apparently, you did, and you didn’t know it, and Apple wasn’t going to be able to give it to you until four years after webOS…
TechCrunch writer Scott Merrill dubbed ownCloud an “Open Source Dropbox”. As such, installed on your own computer, I imagine that, extended the right way, it could create and maintain a “File Stream” for your ecosystem of devices, keeping a “most recently used” list of files, all easily available on any device, making it easier to work or play seamlessly as you switch devices throughout your daily life.
Amazon strengthens the acquisition part of its “your music, any time, anywhere, any device” strategy by granting the ability to buy directly from their iOS device. Combined with their AutoRip-enabled CD purchases and multi-ecosystem Cloud Player, buying music through them may be the fastest way to buy music and have it available…everywhere–even with iTunes and iTunes Cloud–freeing users from the constraints of their gadget vendors’ ecosystems.
As a platform-agnostic personal assistant, Wintermute would be perfectly positioned to free users from vendor-delineated ecosystems. Its ability to work with multiple–in an ideal world, all–vendors’ ecosystems, would free users to use whatever ecosystems’ components they wanted, with Wintermute serving then as a PDI-level (Personal Digital Infrastructure, i.e., the users’ ecosystem of hardware, software, content, services, and social connections) service, or a property of the PDI.