Yesterday I had a presentation at Webxpo 2011 with topic of Icon Design Not just decoration. In case you missed it, I exported my slides with notes with almost all of the information that I said.
This “motto” is a commonplace for many designers. And it’s often perceived as a bad habit. Especially for product design. However, every product has to give you some sort of delight. Either by being highly usable, by visual appeal or in the best scenario by being both.
I received my new VOID watch today. Designed by Swedish designer David Erricson. In order to fulfill his “artistic” intention, he had to come up with a new solution for presentation of time.
In comparison with standard watch layout, his solution is less familiar, it has to be learned and it requires more effort to use it. Still, VOID watches are considered beautiful and well designed by many people including me. Simply because it is an absolute delight to look at them. Their smooth shapes and lines together with quality materials are more then a tradeoff to necessity of learning how to use them.
I think, that this applies to UI design too. We should not design just usable products, we should strive for delightful experience.
I realized that I forgot to post online my master thesis, which I finished more than month ago. It is focused on User Interface design performed in a small team and I tried to identify suitable methods for User Research, Analysis, Interaction and Visual Design. PDF version of the thesis in full length. It is available only in Czech, sorry. I will be glad for any feedback.
I was thinking a lot about sustainability of desktop applications recently. Few years ago, everything was moving to web. Now, everything is going mobile. There are predictions, that desktop apps are going to die and everything will be either on web or mobile. They are wrong.
There are types of applications, which can’t go online or mobile (at least not in a foreseeable future):
These are not going to die on desktop.
Moreover, I expect even opposite trend. I think that there will be tendency of many web apps to be cloned for desktop again. Because of these reasons:
What is going to change is online data storage. Cloud storage is very popular already. Synchronization among many devices (or desktops) is not being a problem anymore. Why would you use a web app, when you can use the same native app on different computers or platforms?
So don’t get caught up in a panic, desktop is not over yet.
