While using vectors is great especially when target screens have different pixel densities: i.e. for mobile devices, read Android, they also have some (one?) drawbacks. Due to screen antialiasing they often appear smoother or maybe fuzzy. If this is bad or not depends on what you are trying to achieve. Full article:
An article about how to design (iPad) apps for kids. Interesting read
Great article about menu design (mainly for desktop):
for creating forms: wufoo
team task management: trello
bug & issue management: sifter
jpeg compresser: JPEGmini
Highly fashionable responsive design information:
A web apps guide oriented towards non-mobile designs:
A somewhat old CIO Magazine article about the cost of outsourcing. Written mainly for big-scale project but much of it holds for smaller projects as well.
Some developer rates and opinions on ways to get your app developed:
Interesting design read from the guy who did the Windows Phone “Metro” design:
Interactive prototyping is an excellent way of transmitting design and UX information to other stakeholders. Especially important if working in a geographically dispersed team.
Here’s the major ones:
“While the “whats” (detail oriented content, messages, etc.) are important to a user, content they can connect with on an emotional/behavioral level (“hows” and “whys”) is what drives deeper comprehension because it connects to the area of the brain that defines our behavioral context.”
So, iPhone apps are fairly easy to test, but how about Android ones? Ouch! Or Blackberry? Bigger ouch! Device differences, multitude of OS versions etc make it a pain. Here’s some services that can be helpful.
Remotely access 1000′s of devices:
Outsource testing to:
Automate the testing:
Distributing iOS apps to beta testers used to be difficult. Now there’s some solutions:
Both iPhone and Android web browser does scaling of graphics in order to compensate for pixel densities (in iPhone language: retina display). This can be bad if you want to be pixel perfect. Two articles on how to deal with it:
Use these when checking if you can use html and css tags.
Desktop:
Mobile:
A discussion of formulas for copywriting:
On how to do great landingpages (PC not mobile):
The Anatomy Of A Perfect Landingpage
An article of additional android screen size complications (except for resolution, size, ratio):
What Steve Jobs can teach us:
The Top Ten Lessons Steve Jobs Can Teach Us – If We’ll Listen • Forbes
Interesting Google IO video on (mobile) web performance. Personally, three bits of information I found particularly interesting:
On the most neglected aspect of user interfaces ever:
PhoneGap and Appcelerator are the most talked about multiplatform – use your web skills - development environments. Their different approaches gives different pro’s and con’s. Continue Reading →
Fairly old, but still very interesting article:
strengths and weaknesses with agile in a dispersed team:
By Smashing Magazine (Node.js is for server-side asynch scripting):
nice infographic that weeds out the hypes from the reality:
The most important mobile payment infographic. Ever. • mobile payments today
Client-side:
Server-side:
A must read for those (few?) who are going to design an Android tablet app:
A nice summary of main factors for getting people to do things:
7 principles that make your website more engaging • Dr. Susan Weinschenk
Some interesting thoughts about the future of tech/sw:
From the guy behind Google+ (now working for Facebook), this presentation was the start of the Google+ development:
Boxes and arrows on:
From the author of the book 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People, a nice summary of psychology for designers:
Applying the advice from the great book “Elements of Typographic Style” to the web:
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web • webtypography
Definitely the way to go:
Designing for Content: Creating a Message Hierarchy • web standards sherpa
Mobile web browser compatibility tables:
Layouts:
Font sizing:
Apple is pissing off app developers when imposing 30% cut on everything that is sold via an app (off App Store as well). Web apps coming to rescue?
On challenges of managing global distributed teams. It is specifically written for UX teams but most of it is applicable to all kinds of teams.
Managing A Globally Distributed UX Team • UX Matters
It refers to Tuckman’s stages of group development which is a very useful read.
A must read for web app developers
Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site • Yahoo Developer Network
A research insights and analysis regarding developer economics:
Some great slides on how to optimize a mobile website:
Mobile Web & HTML5 performance optimization • Mobile Web Programming
A thorough analysis of the mobile advertising in 2011.
Two nice articles about how to use Photoshop to design multi-resolution graphics (well retina and a “normal” resolution display):
Android have more apps available, but many of low quality and very few that sells. AppStore is still the way to go if you want to earn money on your app.
Why it’s harder to make money on Android than on Apple’s iOS • CNN
Mobile Entertainment on Monetising Mobile:
Seems that tablet owners like to use it for doing their shopping, which is probably because of the bigger screen which is more adapted for showing a lot of content. In any way, 15% of the mobile owners did more than 6 purchases the last 6 months, compared to 25% of the tablet owners (and they were much more satisfied with it).
Tablets Beat Smartphones for Online Shopping, Buying • eMarketer
The Android revenues are rapidly increasing, but still in the shadow of the App Store ones. In-app and carrier billing promises to help catching up (together with massive sales of Androids of course).
Indoor positioning is a technology that is not yet implemented on the phones but once it comes it will really open the doors for improving the app user experience.
Top 5 Apps That Could Benefit From Indoor Positioning • TheNextWeb
HTML5 is growing and improving but there is still a long way to go on the mobile side (slightly less on the desktop side).
The new 90€ android phone from vodafone (successor of the 845 model) might reinforce the smartphone-for-the-masses market. Consequences for you? Small screen and on-screen keyboard means that the design has to be adapted.
An analysis of the UX of Angry birds. A must read!
Some NFC apps appearing:
The design affects the user decision making and this is most often (unfortunately?) used for making them buy stuff. A couple of articles on the subject.
A nice book for designers. You can download 2 chapters for free. I read it and it is great!
Your app could use an article extractor? Here’s one open sourced:
Today the (mobile) coupons market is full of actors like Groupon, Living Social, Facebook and Google Offers. Little opportunity for you unless you have the users already on a product where you can glue on coupons in a coherent manner.
Looks like Google has taken the Android OS & screen fragmentation critics seriously. The upcoming ice cream sandwich release will join all different Android OS versions into one and will also re-work the way UIs are done in order to make it more screen-size independent.
I’m curious of what solution they will propose!
Ice Cream Sandwich – Full Google I/O Details • Android Community
Some interesting stats on mobile browsers, frameworks and technologies:
The State of (Mobile) Web Development 2011 • webdirections.org
There are quite a few cross-platfrom development tools stepping into the lime-light. Especially since Adobe CS 5.5 uses one of them. Here’s a few:
An entire book on “Mobile Interfaces” available at O’Reilly or as well at this wiki: 4ourth mobile patterns wiki
A collection of screenshots of different mobile patterns:
Another collection: lovely ui
Easy to understand graph over software licenses and how they are connected.
Simple description of popular free software licenses • Paul Bagwell
Looking for style guides or UI guidelines? You’ll find plenty of them here.
A huge list of Style Guides and UI Guidelines • The UX Bookmark
Some psychology of how we buy things: interesting for those who set the price and for those who don’t want to be a sheep following the herd.
Why We Buy: How to Avoid 10 Costly Cognitive Biases • psyblog
On of the highest adoption rates of mobile devices etc etc… all the statistics point towards a huge market. But it is different: users tend to stay on prepaid and to avoid contracts. They also tend to put an effort into reducing bandwidth usage in order to save on the mobile bill. An article sponsored by BlueVia but still has some interesting statistics.
Apps in emerging markets: one size doesn’t fit all • guardian.co.uk
A framework for creating a great web front-end (from scratch). Have a look, it is a great stepping board for quickly getting into web development when you don’t have years of experience.
A really nifty app icon kit in a PSD file. Highly recommended.
The new BlackBerry 7 OS that is incompatible with older devices and now forcing developers to develop for even more OS versions.
One of the new “features” is that they have replaced their home-brewn web browser with the WebKit. Should probably not be a bad move for multi-platform web developers is it doesn’t increase the fragmentation on the browser-side. Let’s just hope they keep their WebKit as standard as possible and that they don’t mess around with it.
RIM unveils shiny new BlackBerry 7, only for shiny new BlackBerrys • arstechnica
Some guys about why their business ideas did not work. Basically because of difficulties getting paid (starting as a free service or competing free ones) or because the user experience was not right.
The creators of no-longer-with-us products explain what went wrong • 37signals.com
Some great statistics delivered for free from opera. This is updated monthly!
Proposes a way to design a mobile (non-app) web site. In short:
The design considerations for mobiles are:
A User-Centered Approach To Web Design For Mobile Devices • smashingmagazine.com
So now google is collaborating on an NFC solution for coupons… the promised land of plenty of revenue. They will not be the only ones.
NFC-Based Coupons Coming to Your Android Phone • ReadWriteWeb
Real-time data is becoming more and more common on the web and is a new sales argument for web sites. That could probably be used on the mobile app and web sphere as well.
Real-Time Data And A More Personalized Web • smashingmagazine.com
Basically: the app store ranking algorithm is obscure and inaccessible + there are many apps in the store = you will have to go out there and make yourself known the hard way.
The best guidelines for conceiving a mobile UI.
In short: simple app 10 – 23k€ , average cost of apps 30k€, advanced apps 60 – 114k€. Get your money out and start buying!!!
What does the companies use for developing their products & services?
Programming languages & frameworks: 71% .NET, 64% Java, 40% Spring or Hibernate, 24% lightweight web frameworks (Ruby on Rails, Zend, Cake, PHP). Use of .NET is lower in Europe (surprise surprise).
On open web tech: 8% HTML5 & related, 52% planning on using it soon. Developer interest in CSS3 41%
Mobile: 78% of development organisations plan to use in-house developers for mobile multi-platform development. The platforms the intend to develop for: 56% iPhone, 50% Android, 42% Windows Phone/Mobile, 36% iPad, 19% Blackberry, 8% Symbian.
About the growing healthcare app market.
Photoshop CS5 marquee-tool presets for common screen resolutions, layered PSDs with devices and a reference chart for resolutions and device landscape.
Using jQuery mobile – an alpha release library – to build a mobile website. Smooth according to the author.
An article with statistics geared towards monetization on how mobiles are used. The article is still there but not the webinar.
An interesting article with a different opinion about what makes people pay for software (deliberated of ads and coupons).
