John Gruber of Daring Fireball yesterday wrote about the incredible variety of UI solutions to be found in the various Twitter client apps.
From the post:
[T]hat it is not easy to write a good client for something as small in scope as Twitter hints at just how hard it is to write a good app for anything, let alone something truly complex.
I would add only that I feel like Twitter’s simplicity imposes a number of limitations upon developers, which — I believe — contributes in no small way to the diversity of these solutions; engaging with limits is the most powerful catalyst for creative brilliance.
Check it out, UI Design Design, software, Twitter
In contrast with the spirit of yesterday’s link to Designing Convertbots application comes news of the confirmed continuation of effort to bring Microsoft Office to the iPhone.
Absent an iPhone OS device with a significantly larger screen, I can’t imagine any purpose to cramming the UI of Word (or Excel!) into as space with the iPhone’s screen real estate. If Microsoft had any track record for pulling off surprisingly excellent (or even simple and focused) UI solutions, I’d leave room for a verdict.
Who knows? Maybe they’ll actually impress this time.
UI Design iPhone, Microsoft, ux, wtf
Wu Wei is a Taoist concept that means “act without doing,” or “action without effort.” It is an ideal towards which the Taoist aims in life.
One of the hallmarks of great design—whether in a newspaper layout, the construction of a utility knife, or a human-computer interface (HCI)—is its ability to recede, or “get out of the way.” The kernel of this idea is born from the notion that the layperson is typically most likely to take prolonged specific notice of design when it becomes an impediment; when the newspaper’s layout is too cluttered to follow the flow of an article, or using the utility knife’s scissors requires its serrated blade to awkwardly dangle out at 90º.
When a design presents no such distractions, its end-consumer is able to go about his task smoothly. In these circumstances, when the end-consumer becomes immersed in his task, the design of the item they are using is said to “recede.”
The more its design recedes, the more efficient it can be understood to be.
Successful design allows its end-consumer to take action with minimal effort, or—as Kathy Sierra said on the Creating Passionate Users blog back in 2006—to “help [its] users kick ass.”
And so I’ll say now that the official goal of any design should be to foster wu wei.
Design wu wei
There’s something intenesly satisfying about the fact that an ancient design principle can be so relevant to a modern medium.
Since the Renaissance, many artists and architects have proportioned their works to approximate the golden ratio — especially in the form of the golden rectangle, in which the ratio of the longer side to the shorter is the golden ratio.
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Applying Divine Proportion To Your Web Designs | How-To | Smashing Magazine
Graphic Design, Linking Out, Web Design golden ratio, phi, sacred geometry, timeless design
