Archive for category Design
Thoughts from US autos
Fast Company has a great story on redoing the US auto industry. I think it is applicable to the economy in general.
Some quotes:
“If you can’t figure out what makes your product special, then it’s probably not special.”
- Mike Hughes, creative director @ The Martin Agency
“The seismic shift from manufacturing to services has not only changes the composition of our GDP, but also changed our national mindset toward work. We no longer celebrate the way things get made. We are more interested in the way things get bought.”
- Mike Rowe, “Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe” on Discovery
iPhone prototype!
This has to be a great day for any aspiring product designer. The early prototype of an iPhone caught on video.
My observations:
- Apple uses lo-fi prototyping in UI design.
- The actual prototyped UI looks very different from the deployed UI; app icons are utilized as status icons.
- Indeed, apps are almost missing from this version of the phone. Would they have tested the app layer differently?
- Interesting debug options – “ping google 10k”, tracking multi-touch, “terminal”, “send AT commands”
More thoughts to come..
Tim Cook on netbooks
Rumors of Apple netbooks. I don’t understand why they’d work with Wintek.. doesn’t seem Apple-esque.
My favorite quote from this article is from Tim Cook:
“It’s a category we watch, we’ve got some ideas here, but right now we think the products are inferior and will not provide an experience to customers they’re happy with“
Taking a definitive stance on UX, however, is Apple-esque.
xobni
I’ve been trying out a new Outlook plugin called Xobni (’inbox’ backwards). Its supposed to allow you to search your Outlook inbox really well, and to some extent it does.
However, for reasons that are beyond me, they felt it necessary to go all web-two-oh and add in a bunch of useless stuff that I suspect make Outlook just run slower (LinkedIn integration, analytics tools etc).
If they focused on just getting awesome search in there (a la Google Desktop, which I feel I must return to), and scrapped the other stuff, they might have been on to something.
Time for an uninstall.