carmel hassan

A UX Developer is...

unamalaidea — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:54:59 +0100

A UX Developer is all of that – a front end developer with a sensitivity and talent for crafting a UI that is going to be better to use – but in addition to that they have a declared interest in understanding more about the User Experience work that goes ahead of the UI design.

via @leisa

… a must read post.

An Important Time for Design (A List Apart)

unamalaidea — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 23:48:39 +0100

An Important Time for Design (A List Apart):

Reading this:

Design as partner

If we want to really show what design is and what it can do, we need to get design elevated to the partner level. Partners have major equity stakes, real decision-making power, and are involved in product development from the beginning. The design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the responsibility for the outcome of those decisions. If good design has an important role to play in the future of the web (it does), designers should work on their own terms and with a fair share of both the risk and the reward (read: cash money) set aside for them.

… and discoverying this: http://rockhealth.com/

Fireworks wireframing kit

unamalaidea — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 10:09:54 +0100

Fireworks wireframing kit:

Via @Wireframes

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software...

unamalaidea — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 23:43:22 +0100

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - “what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor’s office?”

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion’s new iPad app.

Via Cooper Journal

Is Microsoft Common User Interface ended?

unamalaidea — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 10:00:05 +0100

Is Microsoft Common User Interface ended?:

MSCUI provides User Interface Design Guidance and Toolkit controls that address a wide range of patient safety issues faced by healthcare organizations worldwide. However, in the last months we haven’t received any new a part from their Clinical Documentation Solution.

Does it mean it’s over? Despite the ambition of providing a definitive CUI, Microsoft has done an impressive work providing guidelines that work at least for its primary target market: the NHS.

Now it is in our hands thinking if the effort is worthless or, in the contrary, it is the moment of continuing validating whether that common user interface could be a real standard somewhere else or not.

Ended or not, we cannot ignore the big amount of knowledge and information that can be learned and used from MSCUI. This will be always a reference to take into consideration.

[Links] 2011 - A year of UX and more

unamalaidea — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 11:38:18 +0100

What we read from blogs we’re subscribed to it’s part of our every-day inspiration.

After a year, I’ve had opportunity to read and discover different posts with a special influence in me, anyhow. The year is ending now and this is the summary of the readings I recommend before 2012.

December

November

October

September

August

July

Store locator forms simplified to one text field

June

May

April

March

February

January

Hi Carmel, how can I get in touch with you? I am @IATV. Would you pls ping me? I came across you at the Design for Care forum. Thanx.

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:32:04 +0100

We can talk by mail, or chat using gtalk. My google mail is carmel.hassan@gmail.com, just tell me your preferred time to be connected.

New O’Reilly Book: Mobile Design Pattern Gallery

unamalaidea — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:28:26 +0100

New O’Reilly Book: Mobile Design Pattern Gallery

"Puesto que el ser humano - a pesar de sus miserias - tiene una esencial vocación de grandeza,..."

unamalaidea — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 19:00:41 +0100

“Puesto que el ser humano - a pesar de sus miserias - tiene una esencial vocación de grandeza, conviene que nos dirijamos a esa grandeza para luchar con nuestras miserias.”

-
Since the human being - regardless of their misery - is an essential vocation of greatness, it is appropriate that we turn to that greatness to fight with our miseries.

J. A. Marina “Los secretos de la motivación” (The Secrets of Motivation).

Do you have a project? Wishes ⇒ Tasks ⇒ Projects

A great example of responsive layout

unamalaidea — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 14:25:46 +0100

A great example of responsive layout

"you don’t come up with an iPod just by making a Walkman really easy to use"

unamalaidea — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 19:30:34 +0100

“you don’t come up with an iPod just by making a Walkman really easy to use”

- Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte, Rosenfeld Media, 2010;

[Book] Mobile First

unamalaidea — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:00:05 +0100

Brief, direct and simple. The idea: address your business strategy thinking first in your mobile experience. Why? to force simplicity, to reduce complexity, to get our users focus on content, to understand your product as pills of functionality handable by any user. Which user? that one who is in “one eyeball and one thumb” mode. Appealing, isn’t it? Well, it is challenging.

A book full of tips which helps you to understand capabilities and embrace constraints to take advantage until the minimum detail of the mobile experience.

Web App or Native App? Both. Do you want to know more? Would you like to agree or disagree with this argument? Read Mobile First, it won’t take you more than one day to start creating amazing web applications.

Enjoy it!

Designing and developing HTML5+CSS3 webistes and mobile apps

unamalaidea — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:39:09 +0100

In my previous post “CSS3 Tools“ we saw I few well-known websites which provides frameworks and tools to start with CSS3.

Here, I’d like to complete and extend that list with more useful frameworks, libraries and other assets to play with the new version of the html markup.

Applications

Libraries

Frameworks

Helpers

Sass
Less

Documentation and Books

I’ll update with more resources soon, just keep tuned.

Two more brief books for my self-enjoyment :)

unamalaidea — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 13:20:00 +0200

Two more brief books for my self-enjoyment :)

"And one of the biggest misconceptions, or one of the questions I hear constantly, is “How do I write..."

unamalaidea — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:00:05 +0200

“And one of the biggest misconceptions, or one of the questions I hear constantly, is “How do I write good stories?” One of the points to make about stories is they’re called stories because they were meant to be heard. They were meant to be discussed and talked about, and how they’re written isn’t as big an issue as what people talk about and what pictures they form in their heads.”

- Read/Listen the podcast of Jeff Patton – Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile and UX Together

CSS3 Tools

unamalaidea — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:34:56 +0200

Digging into web and gathering recommendations, I’ve created this post with a set of tools for CSS themer who wants to develop with the latest version of cascade style sheets CSS3.

Hope you find them useful, too.

Modernizr

Open-source JavaScript library that helps you build the next generation of HTML5 and CSS3-powered websites.

Selectivzr

JavaScript utility that emulates CSS3 pseudo-classes and attribute selectors in Internet Explorer 6-8. Simply include the script in your pages and selectivizr will do the rest.

CSS3.Me and CSS Generator

CSS3 Generator helper tools.

CSS Template layout mode

This specification is part of level 3 of CSS (“CSS3”) and contains features to describe layouts at a high level, meant for tasks such as the positioning and alignment of “widgets” in a graphical user interface or the layout grid for a page or a window, in particular when the desired visual order is different from the order of the elements in the source document.

Font Dragr

A revolutionary way to test custom fonts in the browser. No coding, no uploading, just drag and drop.

Compass and Sass.

Compass is an open-source framework that uses Sass.:an extension of CSS3 which adds nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, and more. Sass generates well formatted CSS and makes your stylesheets easier to organize and maintain.

CSS3 Cheat Sheet.

A complete listing of all the properties, selectors types and allowed values in the current CSS 3 specification from the W3C. Each property is provided in a section that attempts to match it with the section (module) that it is most actively associated within the W3C specification.

MSCUI Clinical Documentation Solution

unamalaidea — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:38:00 +0200

MSCUI Clinical Documentation Solution:

A great tool as clinical documentation solution where we can see how the UI follows the real artifact with accelerators to help filling the form out.

What I liked from the video sample:

The form looks like a document (since it is a document indeed)
It is supported by a summary of the form on the right to aid users to understand the final status of the information (completed or uncompleted among others)
It integrates SNOMED (r) for quick coding

What I didn’t see very clear:

The way they have integrated prescriptions management. I think the real case workflow is more complex than the one showed in the video, actually it is the simplified version of their own Search and Prescribe control.

Anyway, it is inspiring, isn’t it?

Usability Toolkit

unamalaidea — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 11:57:29 +0200

Usability Toolkit:

Templates, forms, and checklists ready to use for conducting usability tests, and user interviews.

"It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea, as to have it in the first place"

unamalaidea — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 16:05:05 +0200

“It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea, as to have it in the first place”

- Alan Kay

[Book] Sketching User Experiences

unamalaidea — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:34:38 +0200

This is a book about process and design. Divided into two parts, Bill Buxton engage you (designers, product managers, business executives, etc.) in a analysis about methods, processes and business careers from a historical point of view.

It brings other fields of the industry into the emerging User Experience with Sketching as the starting point of new ideas and as a way to lead the new product requirements for innovation.

It makes you think about your role and your company culture reminding us:

how important innovation is to the future of your company, the role of design in this, a recognition that innovation cannot be ghettoized in the research or design departments, since it is an overall cultural issue, and awareness of the inevitable and dire consequences of ignoring the previous three points.

Buxton stops when talking about Design when makes distinction between Interface Desgin and Experience Design (may we say design for experience?), when clarifies why Sketches are not Prototypes and disagrees with D. Norman who stated “We are all designers”.

Reducing things to such a level trivializes the hard-won and highly developed skills of the professional designer.

It is not a how-to book, although there’s a complete section about techniques to create sketches, with best practices where the main messages is: think, create, share and test.

Personal opinion

When reading this book I have had always the feeling of mixing things and not going into the real root of any point. I would love to have the two parts of it into two different books with a more deeply detailed materials where to learn more about the author’s ideas.

Nevertheless, for me, it has represented a creative way of learning tips to introduce simple, fast and cheap sketching techniques into my daily work at the same time that I have considered the need of innovation not only in products but also in the process itself.

In order to create successful products, it is as important (if not more) to invest in the design of the design process, as in the design of the product itself.

By the way, digging into his web site you can take a look to this interesting and inspiring device collection (in HTML or Silverlight).