P.S Watch this Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwvVh0_ZelI
It's brilliant in the way it describes UX in today's modern software. From: Scott Barnes Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 9:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: SilverZine - Silverlight designer resource Interesting article. The thing about these articles is they are often great at pointing out the obvious about bad UX and so on, but really leave you still fumbling around in the dark as to how to execute on all the lessons / learning's end to end. I often speak with folks here on campus (Microsoft) about all things UX and one of "the roll of the eyes" moments I often see is how focus group a found 1 in 5 housewives preferred xyz functionality in the app over the other (basic variant testing etc)..so tick, job well done. Yet often folks can become distracted in their daily lives from their workflow and at times this becomes the pain point, in that "what was I doing again, damn it, how do I get back to where I was again"..which at times focus groups don't pickup.. it's a small example of how the best intentions in theory, often don't measure up to actual behavior. Thus actual metrics associated to your UX is required, assume your first shipment of an experience fails, and spend the time post delivery proving you didn't fail.. suddenly your feedback on right/wrong UX can shift dramatically... unless you have someone on staff whom is a dedicated UX research of course :) Another point is that bad design is costly, as I've read research where a direct correlation between bad UX and sick days exists. The footnotes stated that given a employee was forced to repeatedly use a badly designed software they in turn were less productive and were more likely to take a sick day. That being said, to compare across a breadth of users would require a lot of A/B testing with multiple variants to isolate this theory (I think anyway). Anyway I think this article taps into four basic principles of psychology. * Users see what they expect to see * Users have difficulty focusing on more than one task / activity. * It is easier to perceive a structured layout. * It is easier to recognize than recall. The last point is often something I batter our folks here at, whereas at times we often as a company will describe a square to you "picture a shape that has a top line, left line, bottom line and right line. Now picture that shape filled blue..what did I just describe?" ...by the time you've read this you're either bored or scratching your head as to what the point is.. whereas just show me a bloody square visually and move onto the other parts! :) (i.e. diagrams normally reduce cognitive load) Alex.. sorry you're Jordan's brother.. we have you in our thoughts. p.s Kidding Jordan - You know I have much MS Luv for ya Jordan :) From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Asheesh Soni Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2009 8:32 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SilverZine - Silverlight designer resource Good one Alex! And for those who dismiss the role of beauty and aesthetics in website design: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy However, I'd like to point out one small issue with animations running in an infinite loop... Although animations (like the continuously running logo anim on your page) do bring a website to life, they also continuously eat cpu cycles. If I open your website in firefox and unblock silverlight content (using noscript plugin), the cpu usage jumps by 10-15% and remains high even when I am not interacting with the page. This is especially bad for people like me who open a lot of tabs and then realise that firefox is eating 70% of the cpu cycles even when its minimized. I've found Silverlight to be better behaved than Flash in this respect. I usually get around the cpu issue by blocking all flash content using NoScript plugin and then only unblocking what I need. Just my 5 cents. Cheers - Soni On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Alex Knight <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Everyone, The other day I launched a new site dedicated to designers (and developers looking for tips) working with Silverlight. http://www.silverzine.com Would love to get some feedback and I'm always on the lookout if anyone would be interested in contributing, so if you have any ideas, shoot me an email either through the site or on here. Cheers Alex AGKDesign.net ________________________________ Support procedure: https://www.codify.com/lists/support List address: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subscribe: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Unsubscribe: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists ________________________________ Support procedure: https://www.codify.com/lists/support List address: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subscribe: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Unsubscribe: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support procedure: https://www.codify.com/lists/support List address: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists
