I had the opportunity to take the course, Engineering the User Experience – Essentials for Software Professionals, from Infragistics using the online on-demand option.  The course has the following objectives:

• Understand, communicate, and apply the background and concept of user experience.
• Assess the user experience of interactive products.
• Apply UI design best practices to their own work.
• Understand the process of user experience and how to merge it within their development process.
• Understand the role and power of user interface controls and patterns.

The course is presented online via Silverlight, takes approximately 3 hours to complete, and costs $395.  For a limited time, when you purchase a NetAdvantage product this course is included for free.

The first part of the training defines User Experience (UX) as including usability and appeal and states the case of why UX is important.  More content is this area would have been useful.

Next, various user interfaces were shown and categorized as belonging to the Hall of Shame or Hall of Fame.  This exercise took only 5 minutes and some of the “shame” examples were too obvious.  I think it would be useful to show more examples in this section.

The section on design best practices was the most extensive of the course.  The first topic was the steps of specifying an information architecture and the defining the UI to include layout, navigation, and detailed design.  Then approximately 24 usability and appearance principles were discussed including suggestions of things to do and not do.  The principles include: context, grouping, text, menus, icons, color, and composition.  This section provides enough detail to be useful.

Patterns (collection of controls to solve a specific challenge) are introduced as well as the Quince tool via a video tour.

The final major section was about assessing UX.  This was a fire-hose experience with a lot of information given.  Maybe it was because I took this course all in one morning, but this was the hardest content for me to remember.  Maybe if there was a concrete example of a UI that was then assessed, then I could remember better.  I will need to go back over this section again when my mind is clearer.

Overall, I found the training useful.  Many points of the training confirm what I have learned over my 14 years experience with software development.  Some topics were new to me like card sorting, Fitt’s law, and Nielsen’s 10 heuristics.  There were a few issues with the training.  First the sound level of some of the videos were too quiet or too loud compared to the others.  There were a lot of lists embedded in the videos that I can’t find elsewhere.  It would be good to have them for later reference.  It would also be useful if this document had links to additional resources.

I give the training a solid B.

If you take this training, I would love to hear your comments about it.

Now there are rumor leaks of new Dell phones: Flash, Thunder & Lightning. But what do their buttons reveal?

According to Engadget and pocketnow.com, the Dell Flash will run the Android Froyo OS. The posted image shows 3 buttons that might be similar in functionality to the 3 Windows Phone 7 buttons:

Another phone leaked to run the Android OS is the Thunder and its buttons match the icons on the Flash:

The Lightning icons more closely match what you might expect on a Windows Phone 7 namely the Windows button and the Search button:

It is interesting that the 2 Android phones have 3-button designs. The first appears to be a Back button and the second a Home button. On the Windows Phone 7, the third button is Search which will bring up Bing. The Android phones’ third button appears to be a Menu button although some could argue that it represents search results.

Why has Dell chosen to have 3-button designs on phones for two different operating systems that mostly do the same thing?  I wonder how Microsoft feels about this dual usage of the 3-button design?

1. Create an Infragistics login
2. Launch Quince
3. Sign up for a trial Pro subscription
4. Create a library
5. Share the library

Create an Infragistics Login

Go to the Infragistics New Member Sign Up page and create an account.  If you already have an Infragistics account, you can use it.

Launch Quince

Go to the Quince site at: http://quince.infragistics.com/

Sign in with your Infragistics account.

Sign up for a trial Pro subscription

Once you have signed into Quince and have customized your settings, find the “PRO for free!” link:

You will then see the Subscription options screen:

Click the link to try a 5 User subscription free for 30 days.

Create a library

Click the link to add a library or at any time from the main toolbar by clicking the Libraries link and then “Add a Design Library”:

Give it a name and click the “Make My Library” button.

You now have your library and you can add screen mockups or other images by clicking on the add Example button:

Then browse to an image file:

Share the library

If the person you want to share your library with already has an Infragistics account, then add them as a member of the library by clicking on the Members button:

Type in their username and click the “Try looking in all of Quince for matching members.” link:

Once the user is found and listed below, click the “Invite to Library” link:

Finally, click the Send button:

They will get an e-mail with an invitation link.

Another way to share you library is by clicking on the Share button:

That should get you started on your way to collaboration in the cloud.

From the Infragistics site:

Quince Pro™ is a private, secure and organized way to collaborate, communicate and cultivate private UX design libraries to ensure consistent user experiences across teams, departments and companies.

First there was Quince, a free, interactive UI patterns and practices catalog.  Quince is still available, but now Quince Pro is available and allows companies to create private collections of their own UX patterns.

This video gives a quick 3 minute overview of the challenges that Quince Pro solves:

The next video gives a 10 minute tour of the Quince Pro features.  It is quite impressive: Introduction to Quince Pro.

You should now have a good understanding of Quince Pro.  What do you think?  Does it solve any challenges you have in your organization?  Once you start using it, I would love to get your feedback.  What features would you like to see added?  How could it be improved?

Windows Phone 7 introduces concepts such as live tiles, an application bar with buttons and menus, and panoramic applications.  The UI templates should take those things into account as well as the WVGA display that can show 800×480 pixels in either portrait or landscape orientation:

When an application is pinned to the Start screen, the application tile is shown:

Applications can receive notifications to let the user know of important updates even when the application is not running.  One type is the tile notification which can update a pinned tile with a background image, text, and a counter:

An application can choose to include an Application Bar which appears at the bottom of the screen in portrait orientation and vertically on the side when in landscape.  The Application Bar should be limited to a few important buttons that can easily be represented by images.  Other actions should be put in the menu.  The Windows Phone Development Programming Guide encourages the use of no more than 5 menu items as it will force the user to scroll:

One type of application that can be developed for the Windows Phone 7 is a Panorama application which spreads the UI across multiple screens with a slight overlap to tease the users on to the next screen:

When creating the 5 UI templates for Windows Phone 7, I made sure the above concepts were included.

The first two templates include a WVGA screen inside a phone device chrome.  When printed the phone image is roughly the size of an iPhone or Nexus One.  The template includes two tiles to be used for the application tile and the updated tile based on notification.  Three Application Bar images have been included for 2, 3, or 4 buttons.  As well as a place to write up to 5 menu items.

The next two templates display 6 screens per page in either portrait or landscape orientation:

The final template is for Panorama applications and allows for 5 portrait screens side by side with a slight overlap.  The template uses alternating red & blue borders to show each screen’s full width.  The two grid spaces between red & blue lines is the tease overlap for the next screen:

The templates are available for download as a PowerPoint file.

Have you already started designing Winodws Phone 7 Series applications?  Do you find these templates useful?  What changes would you like to see in these templates?  Would you be willing to share some of your designs with others?

Examples of metagames in the life include collecting, karate, & Scouting. 

Some of the main concepts of metagame design are points, feedback, rewards, and viral outreach.

Some great examples of metagame design in the wild are Farmville and stackoverflow.

For those genealogists out there, it would be interesting to learn if James Philip Munroe, Richard Anthony Boyer, or William Alexander Walker were real people.

Here is only that I found called Family Mystery: The Story of Amy:

If you are interested in family history as well, check out my other blog, ThinkGenealogy.

When I played Dragon’s Lair in the arcade in the early 1980’s the graphics and animation blew me away.  It was a leap forward in video game animation and encouraged the use of laserdisc in other arcade machines.  I admit that I was never very good at the game and poor Dirk the Daring would often get attacked by skulls.

Great to see Dragon’s Lair available for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

Here is one of many that I like: