March 4th, 2012 | Thoughts | 0 comments
So…is it a quality or usability bug? But wait…quality means usability as well no?
I was thinking a lot about the difference between the testing done by Quality Assurance/Testers and User Experience Designers, many have different perceptions and some might argue that its the same thing. It’s tough to draw the line sometimes but I personally would agree to disagree because they share similarities in some areas but are vastly different in objectives, approach, required expertise, and much more.
February 20th, 2012 | Tutorials | 0 comments
Photo courtesy of flickr user Paul Bence
Remember the time when you landed a brand-new UX design role, project or job? There could be like a hundred features to build. It could be a legacy product that needs to be revamped, or a greenfield project that needs to be built from ground up. Everyone could be moving in different directions. Stakeholders have high expectations. Everything design related is in a mess.The previous designer left the company with a gaping void or… worst, developers were doing UI design. Add to the fact that requirements is in a disarray and features are being built and rebuilt again continuously. Decisions keep changing.
Sounds familiar? Sounds like the norm in many software companies out there. Oh and to add further salt to the wound, you’re the only user experience guy in the team.
Where on earth should you go from here?
February 16th, 2012 | Trends | 0 comments
Just gave this talk the other day on “Real World Prototyping” in Tech Insight 2011 (which was indeed a few months back), and being mean and all, I promised the attendees that I’ll be uploading the slides and sample applications soon.Guess “soon” took quite some time to materialise, stuff came up, RL and all.
Without further ado… below are my slides from the presentation.
December 10th, 2011 | Trends | 0 comments
After literally waiting for ages, Silverlight 5 is finally released and will be available for download today!
For myself, I can’t wait to see hardware integration up and running, and not to mention the possibility of having double click event working for ListItems 
Here’s the link to the announcement & download link from the Silverlight blog:
November 14th, 2011 | Trends | 0 comments
Tech Insights 2011 is coming to town and happening this week!
I will be delivering a session titled “Real World Prototyping”, which will be at Wednesday (16/11/2011) at 10am, below is the blurb for my session:
If you are…
- Failing your user acceptance tests?
- Dealing with stakeholders that see to believe?
- Finding a lot of development rework due to bad requirements?
- Facing issues with consistency in software user experience?
Not to fear, here comes prototyping to the rescue. Come see how effective prototyping in real world software development can help resolve many of these issues, with a demo heavy session stepping through scenarios of how Expression Blend – Sketchflow is used to rapidly create prototypes to facilitates better communication, requirements, expectations, software and ultimately deliver a better and more engaging user experience.
This session will be targeted at a developer, business analyst and project management audience. I can assure you it will be packed with demos stepping you through how Expression Blend’s Sketchflow – a world class prototyping tool, can be used to enhance your whole software development lifecycle and deliver better ROI to you, your organization, and your clients.
I’ll be uploading my demos and slides up here after the event as well so stay tuned.
There goes my shameless promotion. Hope to see you there!
October 21st, 2011 | Tutorials | 0 comments
I’m pretty sure many of you have the experience of using a new application, where everything was butterflies and roses…up until you suddenly hit a dead end. You’re lost, you’re not sure how to get to the next step or to do what you wanted to do. Frustrating indeed. Being forced to have a glimpse of a hundred paged help document…just makes you feel like giving up.
Don’t worry, you’re definitely not alone in this.
Having a clear indicator to user on what they should and could do next is key, in order to provide a seamless and smooth user experience. Users need to be led and even guided on what to do next, and no, I do not mean standing beside them and showing them each step, its about crafting a user interface that does exactly that for you.
Lets step through methods to help achieve exactly that, after the break.
September 6th, 2011 | Thoughts | 1 comment
Great video from TED.com on Prototyping
When it comes to software development, especially for RIA or complex enterprise solutions, prototypes are one of the many important steps that are usually neglected as many fail to recognize its value and how much of a positive impact it would be.
August 13th, 2011 | Trends | 0 comments
A friend of mine just asked me if there is someplace to get those slick Windows Phone 7 icons, and it just so happen I stumbled upon this awesome site that provides them free for download a few weeks ago.
I’m a big fan of the UX on Windows Phone 7 and I must say the icons in this new mobile OS is seriously one of the best ever. Pretty sure these icons will come in handy (for use or reference) not only in creating WP7 apps, but also any other RIA app out there.
So… I thought I might as well share it with you guys too
Here’s the link: Metro Icons
August 11th, 2011 | Thoughts | 1 comment
When it comes to forms, there are loads of situations where our applications would like the user to be presented with a list of options and allow them to choose not only one, but multiple choices. Achieving that is simple, lets just use a checkbox list!
That’s works great, with 3 choices that is, what if we have a list of like…50 choices?
Ouch, that…might not work out. Even referring to books and sites on UI Patterns didn’t get me the best solution to deal with this scenario, so its back to the drawing table for me.
It wasn’t easy to decide on the best approach, so I’ll step through some of the solutions that I’ve thought of to deal with this problem and cap things up with a conclusion at the very end.
August 3rd, 2011 | Thoughts | 1 comment
Photo courtesy of flickr user Jason Robb
One of the highest impact design decisions when it comes to software is none other than the overall layout, which should in turn determine the placement and arrangement of information throughout applications.
Many considerations will need to be made to determine the optimal layout to present information, and especially for applications that deal with a huge amount of data, complex processes, client facing, depended upon to perform day-to-day operations by organizations and people and many more. Such decisions could prove to be very impactful indeed – even to the extent of deciding the success or failure of an application.
Here are a few steps that could help get you going when masterminding the overall layout of your applications.