If you’re developing an application for the masses, there are several things to consider when road-mapping it’s functionality and features.

It’s a common mindset to think you have to offer more than your competitors in order to be better. People want more right? Wrong. People (most of them) don’t know what they want. Psychologist and Author of The Paradox of Choice says that people, confronted with a large pool of options will be less satisfied with a decision. The more options there are, the higher their expectation. So even if they have made the best possible choice, their satisfaction level has by default, dropped.

We can apply this same rationale to our application design at an early stage. We’re not talking about eliminating core functionality, or even dropping the “bells and whistles” but taking a step back and asking whether or not the, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” is worth the added complexity to what the end user is going to actually use.

Too Many Chefs In The Kitchen

Another reason your application will die a fiery death is that most of us (designers and developers) need approvals. More often than not these approvals come from people who are either ignorant, afraid, or stubborn. Ignorant of what’s been proven or possible, afraid of failure or too stubborn to think that there might be someone who knows more than them. I’m sure most of you are thinking of someone right now aren’t you?

If you are one of said chefs, and you aren’t open to listening to and considering input from your peers, your product is doomed to fail and my suggestion to you is to either open your mind, or find a new profession. Perhaps a prison warden or a S&M phone sex operator. That way you either have a captive audience that has no choice but to do what you say, or you have people paying you to belittle them.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Later

Some of us have the luxury of not being burdened by deadlines. However a vast majority are perpetually cognizant of launch dates. Sometimes these time frames are so tight, that we are forced to cut corners. These sacrifices can range from clean coding, UI design and even usability testing. We’re not saying that we can’t iterate after the fact, but first impressions are crucial and a bad initial experience can crush even the most brilliant project.

Conclusion

The next time you end up at one of these roadblocks, consider the actions you’re taking to remedy the situation? If all you are doing is complaining about the hurdles, to see the failure you need look no further than a mirror.

We are hard-coded with the desire to do the best we can. No one sets out to fail. We need to continually educate ourselves with facts and information to consider success, but even then there is no guarantee.

There’s nothing wrong with launching a great product that can get better. By taking careful consideration to avoid these potential pitfalls, we bring ourselves one step closer to making sure your next app doesn’t fail.

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Why Your Next App Will Fail

In software engineering, a design pattern is a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations.

Are we pulling the emergency brake on innovation when we resort to using a pattern just because it’s been used successfully before? Henry Ford said, “I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.” Mr. Ford has actually said a lot of inspiring things in regards to innovation.

Sure. There is the usability argument that if people aren’t familiar with it they will shy away. People like the cozy and fuzzy and tend to migrate towards what they are comfortable with, so there are considerations to be taken. But if your innovation breeds experience, people will use it.

Patterns are a great to use as inspiration and to see what has and can be done, but they are not the holy grail and by definition, using them is not being innovative. There are times to use them as described but I would take them with a grain of salt. Look past what has already been done and find a better way. Maybe your innovation will be the next pattern.

A FEW PATTERN RESOURCES

ui-patterns.com/

uipatternfactory.com

quince.infragistics.com/UX-Design-Patterns.aspx

developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns

uidesignpatterns.org/designPatterns

patterntap.com

Agree? Disagree?

We would love to hear your thoughts!

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Do UI Patterns Destroy Innovation?

I recently had the pleasure of sending Andy Hatkoff, the Vice President, OEM and Technology Licensing at PANTONE some questions about their iPhone app myPANTONE. myPANTONE is an awesome companion for designers and creatives alike. We are excited to bring this information from behind the app and a review of the app itself.

The iPhone is a perfect platform to carry a pocket PANTONE guide, what steps have you taken to make this be the easiest way to locate and use the PANTONE colors you need?

In the development of myPANTONE, one of the key fundamentals in the design of the app and its user interface was to make it easy for the user to find the desired PANTONE colors.  To that end we have taken advantage of the iPhone’s “touchablity” with the fanned out guide view and allowing the user to move about the guide until they locate the color range they wish and then by touching the page desired bringing up a close-up few of a numerous pages and scrolling through the colors in a page view.  The idea was find the general area of color and then “zoom in” to get a closer view of the colors.  I liken this to mapping solutions that let to zoom in closer for more detail once you have the area geographic area identified. Another approach is the SEARCH function that allows the user to simply type in the PANTONE number desired.  myPANTONE will then return the colors where  those numbers are used. myPANTONE also provides color sorting in two ways (1) the standard order used in the fan guides and (2) a sort in more of a chromatic type sequence.  This make chromatic type sequence makes it simple to find, for instance all the reds or blue,  etc.

How accurate is the iPhone screen and what steps have you taken to make sure that the color displayed on screen are correct?

iPhone screens are not synonymous with color accuracy.  There are a number of limitations and issues that make accuracy of the display of colors on an iPhone a problematic.  ANY app on the iPhone that uses color to its benefit (including photo apps) suffers from the same issue – iPhones are not meant to be color accurate. There exist differences on the displays between the various versions of the iPhone. For example: the first iPhones were set to a cooler white point that made the screen whiter and bluer, while subsequent versions use a warmer color temperature and different white point.   From a developer’s point of view the Software Developer Kit (SDK) provided by Apple does not give us access to anything about the actual display except its size. At this point in time, the SDK does not offer the possibility to provide any control over the calibration of the display.  Additionally, issues such as ambient lighting and the angle from which the screen is held (and viewed) can affect the perception of color.

Because of these inherent limitations, we would caution users of myPANTONE (or any other color intensive app) should not be used to validate and approve color.  MyPANTONE is a creative tool and not a production tool. It allows users  to capture the idea of color with a wonderful mobile device  that is used broadly in the design community. The user of myPANTONE  can select a color and play with it, amend it and use it as inspiration in the design process. That’s what myPANTONE was developed for; and it is what you can expect of an iPhone app. A PANTONE Color guide should ALWAYS be used for an accurate representation of a color in a print environment, regardless of whether you used an app or a monitor in the design process.

Creatives are on the go more and more these days especially as mobile technology is getting faster and easier to use. This app allows you to share via email, post to the myPANTONE site & send to other devices. Why is sharing and integration the best possible outcome for an app like this?

It was important for us not only to provide a way to deliver a creative tool, but also to add significant utility and shareablitity.  By taking advantage of the iPhone’s  connectivity functionality, we can e-mail a palette as not only an HTML document, but also as enclosures whereby the user created palette can used within the Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress.  Getting information into the iPhone was only one half of the equation for the user experience- the other half is getting the information out of the iPhone and a way to make it useful and usable.  Through support of the popular design and page layout apps it is now possible to create a palette in your iPhone with myPANTONE and then easily integrate and use the palette in the design process.

At what point did a PANTONE app seem like a logical step?

It was clear that the paradigm for creativity was rapidly shifting from the confines of the desktop (or laptop) to a mobile environment.  The device was there waiting to be populated with tools.  In the same way that the computer is rich environment that will only become useful if  it was populated with meaningful solutions, the mobile platform of the iPhone also offered a robust canvas waiting to be inhabited with solutions that provide a rich user experience.  In focus groups and discussions with our customers, it was apparent that their creativity is was not restricted to the time they spent in front of computer.  They were seeking the freedom to be creative wherever they are and wherever they go.  The iPhone represented a great platform to untether their creativity and give them the capabilities to work with a highly portable version of the PANTONE Color Systems.

How many different variations of the current app have there been before it went to the final version?

It is hard know exactly how many concepts, wireframes and prototypes were iterated before we decided upon the current implementation.  Needless to say we wanted to take full advantage of the iPhone user experience and provide a robust app that would be not only cool but have a high degree of utility.  Our team wanted to make sure the app deployed the touchable aspects of the iPhone to full advantage and at the same time provide a visually interesting environment for a creative audience.  Obviously dealing with the size of the screen and understanding that apps need to be focused and are not just a small desktop application were challenges we had to understand.  At the end of the process, we were delighted that we had successfully married the user interface and capabilities of the iPhone platform (touch, e-mail, GPS, voice functions) with an app that is not only fun, but useful.

Now that the app has launched, is this app finished or will there always been a constant refinement of the app and pushing it into new developments and integrations?

When we were designing the myPANTONE app, we had so many more features, functions and product ideas that, rest assured, there will be ongoing enhancements to the existing product, but also a series of the other apps.  The mobile platform is an exciting way to deliver tools to our audiences.  Also, the mobile environment is part of a larger strategy where the desktop, the web and mobile will all be tied into a large Pantone ecosystems that will have a high level of interoperability and synergy.  The key is providing access and usage of the PANTONE Systems regardless of whether you are on the go, on the web or on the desktop.

The app is listed at $9.99 how does pricing weigh in to the app? Did you think of other price-points and has this one worked for you thus far?

The setting of price points provided many interesting internal discussions.  I think the market is in the formative stages whereby developers are trying to balance the original concept whereby a vast majority of apps were free.  But as the mobile platform evolves to serve as not only a delivery vehicle that is beyond games, social networking and other similar apps, there is a realization that developers can provide highly useful tools that can be monetized.  We have been extremely pleased with the response to myPANTONE.  In less than 2 months since it was launched we have over 27,000 downloads.  It is a learning experience and the customers ultimately will tell us what is working (and what is not).

The Review

myPANTONE gives you the ability to have several PANTONE colorbooks in your hand at any given place in the world. This is a perfect app for designers, Art Directors, Creative Directors, Interior Designers or anyone that has to deal with PANTONEs. myPANTONE is an amazing app to use. The app has a simple and clean user interface that is both intuitive and consistent with normal iPhone standard applications. The beautiful thing about myPANTONE is it operates like a PANTONE swatch book and you can rotates and flick through colors. This is extremely enticing if you have ever needed to leaf through a PANTONE book while you were on the go and needed something. However, this is not just for people that use PANTONE’s anyone could enjoy this app and learn new things about colors, hues and how to make a color palette.

The fundamentals are simple and the app gives you access to big and bulky swatch books with just a few flicks of your fingers. Some other awesome features are the fact that you can share your colors between your machines (that will open the colors in In-Design or Quark or CorelDraw) or to your friends. You can email the colors which is great if someone in the office is asking for a color palette or a client wants to know their PANTONE color.

myPANTONE also allows you to pull colors from a photo which is great if you are trying build a color palette from a photo for a room or a design. This feature works flawlessly. I used a very complex image and this app was able to handle it with relative ease.The only minus that I found with the app is the fact that there is not a way to see the CMYK value for a PANTONE chip. This seems a bit off to me as color books give the CMYK value. It gives the RGB but not the CMYK. Aside from that being the only feature that I could see the app was lacking, this app surpassed my expectations.

Some other features include:

• You can capture and extract colors from photos and snap to the closest PANTONE Color.

• Automatically generates harmonious color combinations

• cross-reference PANTONE colors to other PANTONE color libraries

• Email an HTML image of your palette

• Email color palettes that can be used in Adobe Creative Suite and QuarkXPress & CorelDraw

• Text & Voice annotations of palettes.

• Post notifications of new palettes to twitter and facebook

• GPS tagging of palettes

Conclusion

myPANTONE is the perfect companion for any designer/creative that needs a simple and effective mobile solution. The pricepoint of the app is $9.99 which at first seemed high to me however, if you have used any PANTONE product you know that they are not low dollar and being able to have several swatch books in one application is more than ideal instead of ordering swatch books in paper form. The app has a robust enough feature list to be listed at $9.99  and more importantly is an app that anyone can use and get a grasp on quickly and easily.

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myPANTONE: Questions, Answers and a Review

Delibar is a full featured Delicious.com Mac client. Delibar focuses on giving Mac OS X users an easy and quick tool for searching, managing and sharing their Delicious bookmarks. Delibar will be your best friend while using Delicious!

Delibar is a beautiful Mac App by Shiny Frog that solves the problem of being able to share your bookmarks to delicious simply and easily. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh good grief Charlie Brown! Another delicious application that I will never use?!?!” Lets stop that train of thought there. If you don’t know Delicious is a social bookmarking platform that has been around since 2003. In 2006 Yahoo acquired what was then del.icio.us now known as delicious. Delicious provides a way for you to bookmark your sites  and share them with your friends, co-workers or anyone who has access to the site. Delicious allows you to “tag” your websites so that other people searching on delicious can find specific resources and sites based on your “tags”.

So which app is right for you? A plugin? A Standalone? But if I get a standalone I can’t update it from the site! Not true. Delibar has all of this covered in a small and neat package. I think I have tried every for of delicious app or plugin at some point and could never get anything that worked just right. Delibar has solved that and  I am can undoubtedly say that “Delibar brought the fun back to delicious”. No, that was not a paid plug. The reason that Delibar makes this so easy is because it utilizes  a bookmarklet to upload the URL which is great because you can click, tag and then go do something else. A really big asset to the app is that if  other people have already tagged this site, in the right column it shows you what they have already tagged so you too, can tag the site with the same tags (with a few clicks) or add your own.

Delibars integration is very good it allows you to share via email, twitter, shorten the URL, share with MarsEdit or send to Facebook all from its nice little compact interface. A benefit of Delibar is that you can run it in menubar icon only so you can that precious dock space for apps that you run on a daily basis and let your Delicious network only be a click away. The UI of Delibar is amazingly simple, clean and beautiful. Its not overpowering nor weak and puny. It is also is very easy to setup and use on a daily basis.

Delibar is definitely the last delicious app you will ever need. The app is updated regularly which is a great sign that this app will receive some awesome features in the next version. We can only hope that the second released will be as feature packed and successful as the first.

More Info

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What is Shiny Frog?

Shiny frog is a small software and design company based in Italy.  Since 2005 they have been dealing with web design and development of high quality applications for Mac and iPhone. Their mission is creating applications that combine nice look-and-feel and usability with a great set of features, both for Mac and Web.

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The last delicious app you’ll ever need?

How To: Dark Background with Noise

This is a simple tutorial to show how many sites now are using a “noise” background to add a nice texture. This is very simple tutorial that requires Photoshop. The source files are not for download because this tut is only a few steps long to show you, the idea of making a noise background.

1. Open a new document. For this tut I am using a 600×200px doc. Make sure your color space is setup for RGB.

2. Fill the canvas with your select color. For this tut we are using #343434 which is a nice dark grey that would show up well in a browser.

3. Go to Edit > Fill or Shift + F5 to fill the canvas. This just filled the canvas with the color that we had chosen in the step before.

4. We are now going to go to Filter > Add Noise This will pull up a dialog box which then you can send the amount of noise you want.

5. The point of adding noise is not to go overboard but give it a nice subtle pattern where, we can make a nice background image. The amount is very small set at 99%. Make sure the distribution is Gaussian and also make sure Monochromatic is checked. If it is not the noise will be in color and will overpower your backgound instead  of being in the black and white.

6. I then like to add a tiny bit of gaussian blur. This makes the noise a bit “blended” into the background color. I do this so you can’t focus on the edges of the pixels because its pretty distracting if left 100% in focus.

That wraps up how to make a dark noise background. You can experiment with different colors, blurs and noise levels.

**NOTE: **I also would recommend putting a dark gradient or a nice layer mask that makes the noise layer fade in from one side to another. This again makes another subtle background statement. You can also try making a repeating background by making a square pattern and then defining that pattern and using fill again to “fill with pattern” instead of just filling with color.

Examples:

Scraplr

Spiffing Apps

Flowchat

Eddit – Snow Report

Simply Tweet

Tweetie

iPhone App Template Site

Go Squared

Parking App

Birdbrain App

Teehanlax Labs

Beak – Twitter Client

JQTouch

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App Trends: Dark App Site Design

Throughout my career as a user experience designer, I have continually asked myself three questions:

• What should my deliverables be?
• Will my deliverables provide clarity to me and their audience?
• Where do my deliverables and other efforts fit within the spectrum of UX design?

Useful Glossaries For Web Designers and Developers

In a day in age where there are just as many freelancers as there are university educated designers, developers, and all around web gurus, it is amazing to me how much many of us don’t know or have forgot about our trade. As a self-taught designer, I will admit to you upfront that there is a lot I don’t know when it comes to official jargon or certain aspects of things like typography and graphic design. It is these reasons that I call upon glossaries from time to time.

Quick Usability Checklist

After reviewing websites for a few months, I’ve begun to see general patterns emerge that make a site more or less usable. In this post, I’d like to highlight some of the more common problems designers should address on their own sites in a Usability checklist of sorts.

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

In eCommerce usability improvements usually have a huge impact on conversion rates. However, usability doesn’t only mean better visual guide or better site hierarchy. It also means a better communication with potential customers using a professional, trustworthy design, delivering the right information at the right time and communicating with users instead of throwing ad-slogans at them.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites.

iPhone Needs a New Home

The guys over at Teehan + Lax seriously made some awesomerness for the iPhone home-screen. This is a proposed home screen design that I think would work better then what the iPhone has now, which in turn, give you a more seamless experience.

Confirming Passwords is Annoying: Is here a better way?

The defining characteristic of a password field is that it abstracts text as dots. While the intention of this behavior is understandable (it makes users feel secure and protects from prying eyes), the unintended effect is that it creates a usability problem. Users can’t tell if they’ve entered a password incorrectly until after the site’s validation informs them. It’s like typing with your eyes closed.

Convert and the Evolution of a User Interface

An awesome post about the usability design of Convert. Just a constant reminder that experience design is always changing and the finished product is not going to the be the first.

Testled – Usable Usability Testing

See where your users spent their time, what they missed, and where they had problems. Analyse what they typed, where their mouse moved, and even what they are saying and feeling, with data straight from their webcam.

Off the Desktop and Into the World

Great post that “makes you think”. Dane Peterson talks about how Experience Design isn’t just “on a computer” and there are experiences everywhere.

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10 User Experience Related Resources & Findings

The Review

First, let me just say that Loren did his homework; Tweetie 2 is everything one could want in a mobile Twitter app. Since he re-wrote the entire app from the ground up, Tweetie 2 is smaller, faster, and more sleek, than the original application. The user interface is a beautiful adaptation of a Twitter app that implements an easy-to-use design. For example, when viewing your time line or @mentions feed, you can refresh the feed by “pulling down” on the feed. You would normally scroll to the top of the app to see the most recent tweets anyway, so this is certainly convenient. Also, you now have the ability to double tap on direct messages and @mentions to mark them all as read. Additionally, all tweets in the replies/main time-line are able to be indexed and searched in real time. These are just a few examples of the unique features that make this app better than its predecessor.

The original Tweetie application won an Apple Design Award in 2009 for being cutting edge, and I strongly believe that Loren is in the running for another one. Tweetie 2 uses the iPhone platform to its full advantage and adds features that are not only simple to use, but are also 100% useful. Tweetie 2 is heavily designed to keep you focused on the task at hand, which is to send tweets. As seen on the “Compose” screen, there is a “down” arrow that allows you to hide the keyboard, as well as expose several other features, such as shortening links and adding an image.

The Price Debate

As previously mentioned, Loren has received some flack by not offering an upgrade price. Now, if you are buying this app for the first time, it’ll cost you $2.99, which is cheaper than a few of its top competitors. However, if you are upgrading, it’s a bit different. You paid for the first one at the price of $2.99, and the second is also $2.99. This brings you to a total of $5.98, which is about the price of a $5 Footlong from Subway with some tax. It is also just barely above its competitors:

• Echofon (formerly Twitterfon) – $4.99

• SimplyTweet – $4.99

• Birdfeed - $4.99

If you ask me, with all the research and functionality over gadgets and whistles that Tweetie 2 has, I would pay for each additional update to this app. My reasoning is that Loren literally thought about all sides of this app. The only negatives that I have seen or heard, is that there are no themes like there were in Tweetie 1.0, and it also doesn’t have a “Reply All” function (I know there is a way to reply to multiple people in one tweet, but I am talking about multiple people in a time line.)

Now, to the controversy (that I wasn’t going to talk about, *cough*.) Do I think that Loren has a good reason to charge original users to upgrade? Simply put, yes, I do . He completely re-wrote the app to be faster, kinda like Apple did with Snow Leopard (and their upgrade was $30.) He also added more features that impact your user experience everyday, like Adobe does with its products (except Tweetie doesn’t cost $700 for an upgrade.) Now, regardless if you agree with me that he has a reason to change or not, you should be able to agree that this app is stellar and there is not like anything else on the market.

Concluding Thoughts

The little details that have gone into this app separate it from all other Twitter apps. Once again, Tweetie 2 sets the bar high, through its speed, sleek new features, and its amazing user experience. Most importantly, though, you should purchase Tweetie 2 because it was created by a developer who pours his heart and soul into his work, and doesn’t settle for anything less than stellar. Tweetie is setting the trend for iPhone Twitter clients and I am deeply looking forward to seeing what the next step for Loren Brichter is.

Note: Do you need help using Tweetie while on your iPhone? Loren even thought of that too. He made an iPhone optimized help guide that gives you all the simple/advanced features for the app.

Screenshots

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Full Feature list/Reveal Post

Twitter

iTunes Link

Site

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Tweetie 2: Beautiful on Your iPhone

Campaign Monitor

Simply Tweet

Webset Icons

GeeMail

Threadsy

Twitt App

Macristocracy

PayPal – Change How We Pay

Panelfly

CloudApp

GUIFX

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Good Ole App Site Inspiration

From their in-game graphic user interfaces to working game interfaces, video games have always been a source of inspiration for me. The creative possibilities are virtually endless when you’re designing a video game interface; you can create just about anything your mind can think of. You can have a futuristic design like Halo or something cartoonish/illustrated like Grand Theft Auto. Video games have always been a good place to acquire some unique and cutting-edge inspiration.

Ember App

EmberApp.com is an amazing online repository for screen captures and other images. Ember is made by RealMac software, the creators of Little Snapper & Rapid Weaver. Ember is a great place to browse through interface designs, web designs, typography and anything in between. With great interface designers, like Tim Van Damme, uploading images everyday, there is more than enough for you to look at, drool over, and make notes of, for your next interface.

Flickr

This rapidly-growing image uploading service receives an exorbitant amount of images everyday. Flickr has become so massive that there are even interface design groups, as well as various other groups, within the web interface, to find inspiration from. Most importantly, its minimal interface allows you to easily view the beautiful pictures that others have uploaded.

Library or Bookstore

by Dunny

In this digital age, we often tend to forget that print publications still exist. Books and magazines still provide tons of places for inspiration. Go to a book store, take your laptop, get some coffee, and read; not on digital format, via your Kindle, but on actual paper. Leaf through some magazines and you will be surprised by the mountains of fascinating ideas that will flow into your brain. Oh, and don’t forget to take a sketchbook or notebook with you so you can record your thought process.

Outside

by Casey Templeton Photography Inc

Sometimes we, as slaves to our own work, forget that we would be 100% better if we just got out of the house for a change. It’s true. Go out for a walk or a run, and even take your dog (if you have one) with you. You will be able to come up with some amazing ideas when you have relaxed and set your mind free.

Concept Cars

This is probably my favorite of the entire group. Concept cars have always been able to push the limits without having to actually have everyday function since they are, concepts. The cars are made to push the boundaries of the Transportation Design industry, so they tend to have sleek steering wheels, doors that open in the opposite direction, solid glass roofs, pushing function over form instead of form over function. Nothing can inspire me more than a groundbreaking concept car design that has amazing attention to detail and incredibly elegant lines.

Where do you find yours?

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Unique Places for Interface Design Inspiration

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is inspiring the help desk 2.0 movement through a focus on enlightened customer support. By leveraging the benefits of Web-based communications and social media, Zendesk extends good help desk karma to any company looking to offer professional-grade support service with very little effort. For nearly two years, Zendesk has helped companies large and small move their help desk and customer support operations to the Web.

Notable Clients

Twitter, MSNBC, Yammer, Books-A-Million, Scribd, DeviantArt, Viddler, Slide Rocket, and Fuel Brand Network.

Since Fuel Brand Network uses Zendesk, I personally have had experience with it and I can tell you firsthand that the software is awesome. It organizes everything in an Inbox layout and sends you an e-mail when you are sent a request/bug/feature/contact. The best part of the app is that it allows you respond right from your original Inbox. This feature really comes in handy when you see a response that requires an immediate answer. Zendesk also recently integrated with Basecamp, which makes this program even more awesome.

Pricing

2. User Voice

Your customers have great ideas. Are you ready to listen?
Uservoice communities are the easiest way to turn customer feedback into action:

1. Share ideas.
2. Vote up the best.
3. Respond, implement & repeat!

Notable Clients

Nike, Microsoft, Mint(financing), AMC Theatres, PostitScience, Zappos

Pricing

3. Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction is a direct connection between people and companies that fosters problem-solving, promotes sharing, and builds up relationships.
Get Satisfaction is open, transparent, and free. Tens of thousands of companies use this neutral space to support customers, exchange ideas, and get feedback about their products and services. Everyone is invited and encouraged to participate.

Notable Clients

12 Seconds, TechCrunch, MySpace, psdtuts, Sun Microsystems, Tweetdeck, Urban Dictionary, Zynga, Sony BMG Music Entertainment.

Pricing

What do you use?

This is just a slim selection of customer monitoring software. What do you use to track what your users are saying?

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3 Apps to Monitor Customer Feedback

“User interface design or user interface engineering is the design of computers, appliances, machines, mobile communication devices, software applications, and websites with the focus on the user’s experience and interaction. The goal of user interface design is to make the user’s interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals—what is often called user-centered design” - Wikipedia

Over the last few days, I have been trying to submerse myself in as much UI as possible. Why? Because I am on the hunt to cut down my workflow and become more efficient. Everyone does it, but I have made it my job. I have been reading about adding “droplets” to Finder . I’ve  timed my actions and tried to see which methods of production work the best. I’ve deleted apps, re-installed apps, bought apps, deleted apps I bought, etc., in hopes that these applications will allow me to streamline my social networking life, my design life, and my blogging life. Ultimately, I will be able to get more done in less time.

Thoughts

In one of my tweets today, I said, “I have an easier time editing things on the iPhone than on the native app.” Now, this is not always true, but I have started to notice a trend that things (normal app functions) are easier to accomplish on an iPhone. Responses? Dave Kaneda said, “Restraint + context = win.” And according to Graham Smith, “…therein lies the real truth to simplicity in user interface design…”

If people recognize the simplicity in user interface design, why is it executed more effectively on the iPhone and not in the native application? Why do people insist on cramming 65,000 features underneath crazy animated dropping tabs, weird swirls, and whatever else they can pull out of the magic interface hat? 9 times out of 10, I find myself utilizing the simplest and cleanest apps, unless another app is offering something the pretty one doesn’t.

What should you learn learn from this experience?

Simplicity is key. Keeping things simple makes for a more satisfying user experience. The reason I can do these tasks better on an iPhone is because the screen is small, the platform is clean, and that creates a more enjoyable experience overall. These constraints force the apps’ to stick to its core features and omit extra fluff.

Your Turn

Do you find this to be true, or am I simply too close to the spray paint? Hopefully this trend will start to receive greater acknowledgment, and we will soon see simplicity in our desktop apps in addition to our mobile apps and engross us in an app where the interface fades away and let you accomplish what your set goal is.

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User Interface Design Rant

1. Iconfactory

Icon factory has always had a selection of beautiful finely crafted icons. They are responsible for the beautiful UI of Twitteriffic & Ramp Champ.

Do one thing and do it well. If ever there was a philosophy for what we do here at the Iconfactory, this would be it. From day one we have dedicated ourselves to being the best in the challenging and niche field of icon design.

2. 365 Icon

Whats better than an icon site? One with an icon for everyday of course.

3. We Love Icons

We love icons. Do you?

We Love Icons is a joint project by Guifx designers Dan Wiersema and Nando Albuquerque. We started We Love Icons because, well… we love icons! Our sole purpose is to provide you with ONE place to go to find links to the BEST freeware icons on earth.

4. Interfacelift

My Interface needs a lift. I can has?

Interface lift has always had great icons and backgrounds. They have iPhone backgrounds in their arsenal too. If you like to change your background several times in a month and love customizing things this is your place!

5. Prettify

Dang. That there is prettified.

Nice icons and wallpapers for the discerning individual, collected and curated.

6. Deviant Art

I need some art.

With over 80,000 images uploaded a day and 2 million hits its hard to argue that there won’t be fresh content here daily. They have icons all over the place as well as anything else that the word “art” could encompass. Check it out.

7. Pixel Girl Presents

Pixie Girl to the rescue.

A recent favorite of mine. Pixel Girl has a copious amount of icons on her site and a good amount of cartoon/illustrated ones. This is definitely a site worth checking out.

Extra Resources from Comments:

Where do you like to grab your icons from?

IconFinder

Iconerz

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7 places to Find New App Icons

Recently I have been scouring the web high and low to bring you the best app news, resources and information. Here is a list of some well designed app related sites from along the way. What are some of the sites you have run across this week? Put your thoughts in the comments!

Thermometer App

Typography App

Sifter

Notify

Mozilla Labs

Mobify

Meta Lab Design

Livestream

Teehan Lax | Labs

JUFTi

Firerift

Fileshare HQ

Convertbots

Bottle Rocket Apps

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Found: App Related Sites

**UPDATED**

9/23/09

10/15/09

11/11/09

Articles:

iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

Phone and iPod touch are sophisticated devices that combine the revolutionary Multi-Touch interface with powerful features, such as email and instant-messaging capability, a full-featured web browser, iPod, and, in iPhone, a mobile phone.

The Making of Things iPhone

One of the first major design decisions was to either have a Tab Bar or a Toolbar.

We liked the idea of a Tab Bar very much as it allowed to quickly browse your tasks from different perspectives (by Projects, by Tags, by Due Date, Search, …)

How to Create Your First iPhone Application

What if you had a nickle for every time you heard: “I have the perfect idea for a great application!“? It’s the buzz on the street. The iPhone has created unprecedented excitement and innovation from people both inside and outside the software development community. Still for those outside the development world, the process is a bit of a mystery.

App Store Heresies: Higher Price, Better Ratings. Don’t Discount Your App At Launch

Lower your price, lower your ratings. Lower ratings, lower social proof. Lower social proof, lower sales. That’s my theory, and I’ve got data to support it.

Inspiration:

60 Sleek and Sexy iPhone App Websites

Like most of Apple’s expensive toys, the iPhone is a beautiful piece of kit. Its cool curves and bright display seem perfectly suited to sleek, glossy web design. Here’s a big bunch of lovely iPhone app websites for your admiration and inspiration.

Downloads:

iPhone GUI PSD

Over the past few months we’ve had to create a few iPhone mock ups for presentations. The problem we’ve encountered is the lack of resources to help us design something efficiently. Up until now we’ve used a nice PSD from 320480.com but we still found ourselves having to build out additional assets or heavily modifying bitmap based buttons and widgets.

iPhone PSD Vector Kit

Today, we are glad to release the iPhone Starter Kit, a set that comes with several button elements as well as six different iPhone interface options. This pack may be useful for mobile developers and front-end designers who need a professional way to show mock-ups to clients or to work out ideas. This set was designed by Renee Rist especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Ultimate iPhone Stencil

This is the ultimate stencil for folks designing iPhone interfaces.

• Contains backgrounds, title bars, buttons, selectors, and other iPhone UI elements

• Text is fully editable on lists, title bars, buttons, and scroll wheels

• Buttons can be resized horizontally by ungrouping, resizing the middle element, and then regrouping the elements back into a single button

iPhone PSD file

iPhone PSD for snapshots, icons, etc… Made entirely in photoshop. Based on the iPhone design by Apple Inc.

Resources:

MobileLex 2009

Sam offers his Keynote slides from MobileLex that highlights:

How I Made an App that Has Over a Million Users

Scrolling Like Butter

Web Services with Cocoa

iPhone Development: The Why and How

I cover what your options are for iPhone development and some tips and resources on how/where to get started. I also speak about how to maintain a good user experience with your iPhone development. Check it out!

The definitive iPhone user interface gallery from Engadget

After getting our hands on the iPhone we set ourselves the irresistible task of photographing every conceivable menu option available to us. So here it is: the definitive iPhone user interface gallery, almost 300 images deep. If you’re the type to obsessively pore over every possible menu, submenu, setting, and function in a new device, this one goes out to you.

Coding:

iPhone View Switching Tutorial

The world of iPhone development can be a bit of a daunting task and irritating at times. I’m the kind of person that likes to do things from scratch as much as I can. So when I headed down this path, I decided to start with the simplest template and create a very, very easy app: creating 2 views and switching between them.

14 Essential Xcode Tips, Tricks and Resources for iPhone Devs

Cutting Through The Clutter

We’ve collected a set of tips, resources, how-tos, tutorials and links ranging from newbie-to-expert to help you wring the maximum amount of productivity out of Xcode.

Learn How To Develop For The iPhone

We’re going to start off with 2 psd’s I made and get those working in an iPhone page. I am using images for the background and header although you could use just straight colors instead of images.

Tools:

Notepod

What’s a Notepod 3-Pack?

Three 60 x 110mm, 100pp Notepods printed on both sides. 80gsm laser throughout with a stiff black strawboard back.

Design Comission iPhone Stencil

- Layout Nav Bar, Tab Bar and Keyboard
- New overlay icons provide cleaner look
- Additional icons
- Overall dimensioning and layout improvements

Quickly sketch out iPhone UI prototypes. Brainstorm your application ideas using our precision cut stainless steel stencil and mechanical pencil.

Mobile Sketchbook

• 100 pages of to-scale design templates
• One organized place for User Interface Designs
• Get your designs down on the Sketch Book today!

What Not To Do:

iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals

The development of iPhone applications has recently become a hot topic in the design community; everybody tries to come up with some creative idea, port it into a stylish iPhone-alike application and sell it to thousands of users through the iPhone app store. However, many of these applications are poorly designed and therefore miss the chance of providing users with a truly useful product that users would find worth recommending to friends and colleagues.

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An Ever Growing iPhone Resource Thread

Be Authentic

The key to cultivating your fan-base right from the start is being authentic. Now, if you are pushing your application, of course you’re going to want to highlight it with links or offers. However, this is NOT all that you should do. If you are using social media as a broadcast method, no one is going to come back for more information (unless you’re a news site, which you most likely are not). They know that you’re going tell them, “Hey, here is my great product.” If you properly engage your target market, fan-base, clients, etc. they will develop a genuine interest in what you are saying, and eventually return to hear more. Vin Diesel is a great example of how to interact with your fan-base on Facebook. He has built an enormous amount of fans (6,223,076) as a result of being authentic–engaging with them multiple times a day. (In depth breakdown by Mashable).

Provide Feedback/Communication

Twitter has proven to be an amazing platform for providing issue issue correspondence and information tracking, thereby allowing you to follow what people are saying about your app, in real time. If you haven’t joined Twitter and you’re launching an application, you should. Media Temple (web host) has done a really great job at using this as a tech support line. They have a correspondent ready to answer your questions and help you complete your help request faster. I have had several issues and, after DMing (Twitter-short for ‘Direct Message’) my support request number, they have been more than speedy at initiating the resolution process. Shaun Inman (creator of fever & mint) uses Twitter for tech support, but he uses it in a different way. He utilizes Twitter as a channel for updating consumers on the status of their pending emails, pertaining to his apps. This informs the user of Shaun’s progress with responding to emails and whether or not to expect an immediate response. A recent addition in this field that should be examined is TwelpForce, from BestBuy. They have recruited select professionals in certain areas of the company to manage their Twitter feed, resulting in an around-the-clock online customer service. With so many people driving the team, they have roared to 8,000+ updates (to put that in perspective: I have 13,000+ updates and have been on Twitter for more than a year) and are around to answer your tech questions. This is definitely a productive way for a business to embracing a medium to its full advantage.

Gain Momentum

When you are initially releasing your app into the wild, your goal is to build momentum and develop a fan-base. The quickest way to do that is through social media. Since most social media sites with mega users update in real-time, your product can literally spread to all surfaces of the globe overnight. Twitter has also been hailed as the “site killer”, due to the fact that if your tweet gains enough traction, and is RTed (’retweeted’, or reposting information you find useful to share to your followers,) it could crash your site due to an overload of traffic. It’s easy to believe that this could happen when people, who have over 1 million followers, target your site and retweet it.

Connect & Help the Community

One of the most effective ways to grow your product and your brand is often overlooked. Marketers are on Twitter and Facebook screaming about how amazing their new book is and why you should buy it. Self-promotion is fine every so often, but social media is a bit of a give and take. If you do not help others out by cross-promoting their material, you in-turn will be labeled as a broadcaster rather than a converser. If someone helps you out, help them out in return. As a result of this, you are making connections that could turn out to be incredibly valuable in the future; you never know where things may end up.

Resources

Here are some articles on the same topic that can provide you with some valuable insight on how to grow your fanbase on Social Media.

Ultimate How-To: Grow Your Social Media Network

In social media, who you know — or who knows you — can certainly make all the difference. That’s why figuring out who to connect with and taking the time to build relationships with these people is key to leveraging the power of social media.

6 services that help you find, follow friends on Twitter

Finding friends on Twitter was simple when the service was in its infancy, but today, Twitter is home to millions of users. In fact, 70 percent of the entire Twitter community is composed of people who signed up in 2008 and 5,000 to 10,000 new users sign up each day.

Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking

Is your organization considering setting up a profile on a social networking site? Are you wondering what tasks are involved, how much time it will take, and how you might streamline your efforts? Maybe your organization has established a presence on MySpace and is now contemplating adding one to Facebook. Perhaps you are wondering how you can juggle multiple profiles and still have time left to do other work.

Why Social Networking

Your capabilities don’t matter much if you don’t have a robust enough network to get them out to where they can do the most good.

The pillars of social media site success

Why people choose to visit online social sites:

• Who likes me?
• Is everything okay?
• How can I become more popular?
• What’s new?
• I’m bored, let’s make some noise

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How To: Grow Your Fanbase