A Clean Design

I tried to log in to an old last.fm account today, which I have not accessed in years.  This should be simple for me using my handy-dandy password algorithm method - except that Last.fm wants to throw a curveball my way.  They require a username and password to login.  And, as their designers cackle maniacly smoking Havana cigars in their evil island fortress, they even require a username to retrieve forgotten passwords.

Let me make it clear to Last.fm and every other website in existence: I haven’t the foggiest clue what your specific username requirements were when I registered, or whether I decided to use my first name, full name, moniker, or favorite Steinbeck character.  But I do remember something very well - the same email that I’ve used for the last 6 years.  Ask me for that for login credentials, and we’ll get along just fine.

Interaction Designers - I’m looking squarely at you.  This is our job.  In my opinion, a username is a completely invalid login requirement for all but the most fundamental credentials, such as your OS account, or for bank accounts (which can claim the “higher security” excuse).  What do you think?

— Update —

@salConigliaro points out, “At the very least let me use my email address as my username.”  While I agree, this also means that your publicly displayed username, assuming that’s why the user name exists in the first place, has to be your email address.  For both privacy and formatting concerns, this may be less than ideal.

About a month ago, the folks at Zurb published a nice article about sketching wireframes.  I went ahead and purchased some new sketching items including a nice thick sharpie and a cool gray “dropshadow” pen.

The difference in my sketches is incredible.  Zurb hits the nail on the head, saying, “Although we advocate keeping things as simple as possible, presentation is everything.”  I wholeheartedly agree.  While it’s important to stay in a sketchy, mostly grayscale environment while doing early prototyping, there is nothing wrong with keeping your deliverables professional looking.

In that sense, and through deep offense at the default White, Black, and Blue widgets offered with Axure, I’ve created a small library of widgets that are just a little more aesthetic.

This is for version 5.5 and above.  Put the file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder.

Download the Widget Library

Buen dia!  A Clean Design has lain idle for a couple of months now, as I’ve disappeared into the concrete, wine, and beef jungle known as Buenos Aires.  At the same time, we’ve launched two websites at BIG.  If my experience of quitting a corporate job and moving across the world while working as a freelance designer interests you, read on.  Otherwise, hang tight as we get back into the groove of UX and IxD related posts.

Read more…

We’ve been busy over at the Breakthrough Innovation Group working on our passion project, Do the Right Thing.com.  Although successful at first, the original site has become somewhat inactive after the concept failed to produce the real change that we are hoping to make.

In the name of transparency and providing a useful example for the design / ux / development community, I’ve posted the Axure prototype for our next version.  We’re pretty excited about the upcoming re-release, and I hope that the prototype can help show a piece of the process that our UX team goes through.

See the Axure Prototype for Do the Right Thing v2

The new design focuses on ideas - which are fundamentally more positive than complaints and compliments, because they are guaranteed to have a call to action.  The final release will have a few changes, and we had the liberty of leaving out some pieces that have already been implemented on the first site, but overall this is a fine example of what a site prototype can look like.

In other news, posts have been slow recently because I’ve made a move to South America.  There are challenges to being a global Web Worker, and I plan on writing a bit about the experience in the future.

There have been some great developments in the Axure community lately - these are definitely worth a look.

Jeff Harrison figures out how to do Drag and Drop interactions.

Axure releases excellent Widget Libraries for 5.5 (beta available here).

W. Scott Williams made a nice Sliding Drawer widget.

Wireframing is like playing a piano: I’ve seen designers ripping like Vivaldi, and others plodding along like a drunken Tom Waits.  Here are some techniques that can help ensure your designs make it from your whiteboard, or your head, into a digital wireframe as fast as possible.

Read more…

Inspired by the neat JGrowl JQuery plugin at stanlemon.net, I’ve whipped up a little notification master in Axure.  Growl is a program that allows the display of nicely styled notification messages in Mac OSX.

This technique is a simple combination of the animation hack with the use of transparent fills.

Preview the prototype

Download the .rp file

Let me take you on a short journey in which you will have fun, be creative, learn a new skill, and improve something.  This will take 10 minutes - unless you get hooked. If you’re already a mind mapping pro, you can skip this.

Read more…

Axure has now made the 5.5 beta available to the public.  Go try out those features I mentioned yesterday!

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you may have noticed that Axure RP is my prototyping tool of choice.  Axure is currently working on the 5.5 version of their product, and a few of us Axure zealots have been able to beta test the next release.

The current version of the beta reflects some awesome new functionality.  There is a much-needed dynamic panel manager, a Location and Size pane, 9-slice image scaling, and the ability to change the way drag-selecting objects works.  There is also native support for loading custom widget libraries, of which there are an increasing amount.  Heavy Axure users will understand how great many of these updates are.

Read the full announcement and explore all the updates at Axure’s blog.