Firefox 4 Beta: Tabs on Top Are Better

With the release of Firefox Beta 4, Firefox joins Internet Explorer and Chrome in placing tabs at the top of the browser application window, above navigation controls, instead of between the navigation controls and the page content.  Application-level functions like settings are now collected into a “Firefox” menu at the top. Buttons that affect the current web page, like back and mark as a favorite, are now lower, closer to the web page. Alex Faaborg, a user experience designer at Mozilla, has posted a video to his blog that explains the new features and the design advantages, but central to the design changes are classic interface design principles: proximity, error prevention, simplicity, context and grouping.

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You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.

That’s an error message I saw on coffecupnews.org recently, I’m not kidding. I love it!

It has several elements of a great website error message

• It does NOT blame the user
• It has a sense of humor
• It provides some suggestions for what to do next
• It wraps the error message in all of the standard parts of the website – logo, search box, links to the most popular articles, etc.

It could use a little improvement, but not much

• Explain what happened – most people don’t know what a 404 error message is, and “lost at sea” is a little vague, although most people will probably guess that the page doesn’t exist
• Point out in the text of the error message that the site has a search box, although again most people will probably find that on their own.

My favorite error message is still the one I saw on Sesame Street’s website [blog], although the iPhone lolcats app gets the most points for style [blog].

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The zombies think they have brains

I am hopelessly addicted to Plants vs Zombies for the iPhone. The plants are fun (pea shooters that shoot frozen peas), the zombies are silly (floating across my pool in a giant inflatable duck? Hah!), Crazy Dave is the best (rock and roll!), and the awards are even better (Don’t Pea in the Pool). It has a certain style about the humor which comes across in the game messages, the notes that the Zombies leave for you after you complete a series of levels, and the almanac that reminds you of the capabilities of your plants and the zombies you’re fighting against. But what really got me was the hilarious help message. The help message got me on several levels. First, it was seriously funny and totally in keeping with the humor of the game, like the error messages for LOLcats [blog] and Sesame Street [blog]. Second, it made sense to me that the zombies that populated the game were so confident of their success that they didn’t need to write any help for the application.

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Lulspeek 4 awsum error mesage

I’m always on the lookout for a good error message. I love the one I saw on Sesame Street’s website [blog], but even better is the one for the lolcats (or I Can Has Cheezbuger?) app for the iPhone. If you’re not familiar with lolcats, it’s silly pictures of cats with captions, and the idea is that since your cat is talking, the captions have lots of spelling and grammar errors. If you’re not a cat fan, there’re also loldogs and lolrus. The image below is the error message I get on my iPod Touch if it’s not connected to the network.  I love it because it keeps the spirit of the app, with the same misspellings and references to cats wanting cheeseburgers and being mischievous. Even if I can’t see any new lols, at least I can laugh at the error message.

P.S. The full text of the lol is: After a busy day of orchestral rehearsals, the horn section takes a break

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Cheap Interactive Prototyping with HTML

An interactive prototype is a useful tool for a designer to relay and test their vision.  Send a prototype to your stakeholders for their approval.  Have participants use it during user testing.  Give it to your developers so they understand the final product.

There are many prototyping tools out there, from Visio to iRise, OmniGraffle to SketchFlow, Flash to Expression Blend, all with widely varying costs, features and limitations. Might I suggest using HTML, CSS and JavaScript?  Often used for web development, they can also be used to create your interactive prototypes.

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Reuse our Recycling Presentation on Prezi

Our friends over at Prezi just released a new feature – Reusable Prezis.  This new feature allows you to start with an existing presentation that was created by any member who chooses to share their work – you can keep the layout, keep the content, improve it, or just mix it up however you like.  We are excited to say that our presentation for the TriUPA Design Challenge is one of the featured Prezis selected for the initial feature rollout. We can’t wait to see how you use it – please share our work with the rest of the world as you see fit and be sure to let us know if you find it helpful for any of your upcoming presentations.

For those of you who don’t know already, Prezi is a fun and unique alternative to PowerPoint.  It does away with the concept of “slides” and has helped us find interesting ways to share the “big picture” during our presentations, especially when we are speaking in front of larger groups.  It is a relatively new tool for our team, but we have found that it gives us a little edge that helps to set our work apart. We hope it will do the same for you!

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Party Video Games: Design for New Users

Games are an interesting design challenge because if they’re too easy they’re no fun, and if they’re too hard they’re no fun, and “easy” and “hard” may be different for different people. Party games, or video games that you’d break out with a group of friends, are a special challenge because they need to be fun for the group, which may contain people with mixed skill levels or experience. Wii Sports is a great video game because the direct interaction style is fun. Want to swing the tennis racket? Just swing the controller! But it quickly became a party game, even for people that didn’t play video games. Why? Because it was intuitive, easy to learn. No need to memorize complex combinations of button presses used in many video games. Instead, people could pick up a controller and start playing immediately.

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Good design from limited functionality: Facebook Lite

When my husband and I went home for the holidays, we got his parents on Facebook. They’re still not sure whether or not they should thank us – time will tell. But the process of explaining Facebook was much easier because we had them use Facebook Lite. This is a new version of Facebook, still in beta, that has pared the interface down to the essential features. It’s different from Facebook Mobile, which is designed for mobile phones and also has a more limited feature set, but doesn’t translate well to large-screen displays.

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Improving the Online Customer Service Experience

I dread going to the mall during the holiday season (Black Friday to Christmas Eve). But, this past Sunday night I was able to find a parking spot very easily. I went into a store to make an exchange and found that there was no wait. Then, I did a little browsing and went on my way. Surprisingly, my experience actually wasn’t that bad.

But, I think I know why it was so easy…

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Ease of Use = Sales Pitch

Last week I needed to create a special website for a client project. The specific website is unimportant, but it’s a service that several companies offer – you create an account and configure the site, and they host it. I looked into two different companies for this web service…

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