XenoAbe Design

Parallax. It may be an unfamiliar term to many. It’s defined as the apparent displacement of an observed object due to a change in the position of the observer. For example, a driver may look at a speedometer and it reads 65, but when the passenger looks on it appears to read a different speed due to the difference in angle they are viewing the speedometer from. There’s nothing different with the speedometer itself, but just the angle it is viewed from makes it appear different.

We need to view our designs from the parallax as well. Well, to clarify, we need to view them both head on and from the parallax as well. Doing this doesn’t change the content but gives us a different viewing angle of that content from which we base our designs. This can mean many different things. We can adapt this to mean designing a web app to fit a mobile experience or we can adapt it to mean moving a local machine experience to a network-based experience. Or maybe it’s just a simple (or not so simple) redesign. It’s really just about taking the same basic problem and adapting that problem for some difference in an environmental variable, but the purpose is to use these different angles to feed various POVs into our designs to improve the user experience.

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I’m putting together some designs for a Chrome Extension that would basically serve as a home page every time you open a new tab. I’ve seen some out there, but frankly they are terrible. I want one that is beautiful and provides lots of functionality that a user would want instantly at their fingertips. This would be fairly customizable and tailored to each user.

Some features I’m already considering:

• Bookmarks
• Twitter
• Facebook
• RSS Feed
• Notes
• Gmail Notifier
• Sports Scores

What are the features you would like to see in a home page?

Let’s spend some time talking about the design process. Of course, we’re not going to hit every step here but we’ll hit the basic steps of getting to the wireframing step. Ideally, this would all be proceeded by steps such as some preliminary user research, persona creation, requirements gathering and other necessary steps in the UX process, but this article will focus on the meat of creating wireframes and mockups. We’ll talk about how to set up flows, how to translate those into functions, and then ultimately transform those into a usable form.
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WARNING: Hot Topic. Should designers know how to code/develop? This is a question I’ve seen asked many times recently. I’m a designer that started college majoring in Computer Science. This situation is not a unique one, although it seems to rarely happen that someone who majors in design becomes a programmer. I believe many share my opinion on the matter, but I’ll leave that for the end of the article. First, we need to look at why a designer may need to have development knowledge and vice versa. Let’s also look at some reasons designers and developers are hesitant to stray into the others domain.  I’ll give you a hint though, sticking strictly to one domain may inhibit your professional progression.
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As designers, we’ve all had our designs criticized at some point. Whether it was a simple “I would like to see this changed here” to an all-out “I don’t like this at all,” we’ve all heard something about our designs that didn’t pan out the way we expected. I’ll use an analogy. Let’s imagine design as music. There’s pop music that’s going to fit a lot of people’s taste and make them happy, but there’s also indie folk and death metal that sits on the fringes and makes a niche set of people happy. No genre is better than the other but they serve different purposes and are never really going to satisfy everyone. Universal design is an ideal and not a 100% solution, but we’ll save that for another article. The fact is that design is not science and, while there are certainly principles and theoretical practice that improve designs, there’s virtually never one right answer. That’s why we’ve got to be able to accept the fact that our designs aren’t always going to be that 100% perfect solution for our clients. Here’s some tips to handling criticism of your designs.
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As you can see, this is a series we’ll start here on XenoAbe Design. We’ll take a look at specific types of websites and a few usability issues as they relate to those websites.

News sites are some of the most visited websites on the internet today. They are where people go to find out about what’s going on in the world around them. Therefore, news sites store incredible amounts of information. This information needs to be well organized so that visitors can quickly access the particular bit of news they may be looking for. Actually, news sites need to follow similar rules to other sites, but there are some particular aspects of UX that are extraordinarily poignant for news sites. Let’s take a look at these and figure out what we can learn from them.

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Remember those Lincoln Logs you had when you were a kid? They came in all different sizes and sometimes they gave you a splinter, but most of the time they gave you a nice little log home for your G.I. Joes or Ninja Turtles. Now, it probably took you 15-20 minutes to get the log home just the way you wanted. How bad would it have been if you had to actually carve out blocks of wood yourself to create that little log home? It would have taken a long time and, frankly, would have caused a lot of frustration.

So, why would a designer always create everything from scratch? It’s only going to take more time and cause more frustration. Frustration is when we start to not think straight, make mistakes, and leave out details. We should stick to our equivalent of Lincoln Logs.

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I’ve seen so many awful restaurant sites when trying to find a place to go eat. Even scouring through the many sites of restaurants featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives I had a hard time finding just a handful of well-designed sites. I’m not sure who is putting these sites together but they fall victim to several follies and mistakes. So I figured that we need to take a look at what is important about a restaurant site that’s a little bit different from other sites.
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I took an Intellectual Property class my last semester of graduate school at Georgia Tech and, while the class was taught on a surface level, I learned a lot about trademarks and their legality from writing a paper on the use of collegiate trademarks by college sports fans. Something else also came out of that paper that was a bit unexpected. That is the idea that we can learn something from Intellectual Property and its governing when designing social media.
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First of all, I apologize for such a long layoff. The Master’s Project ended up eating all of my time for the past few months.

Anyway, what are these adaptive websites you speak of? A lot of people are using web statistics to change and adapt their websites. Google statistics has become virtually ubiqitous in today’s information superhighway. My Master’s project is on machine learning and my independent study is about using statistics to help Flash games adapt to players. These got me thinking about using statistics not just as a redesign tool for designers or developers, but to have the website itself adapt to the users.
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