geography
A city of hills
A representational tension
To become completely lost
Roads to nowhere
Hyperart: U.S. Rail
The steepest grade on U.S. main-line track is at the small town of Saluda, on a Norfolk Southern route between Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Asheville, North Carolina. The grade goes on for three miles at a slope of 4 or 5 percent. Trains have not been running on the line since 2001, but the tracks are still maintained.
Midwest sunset
For those who've never experienced a sunrise in the rural Midwest, it's roughly as soft and romantic as someone's abruptly hitting the lights in a dark room. This is because the land is so flat that there is nothing to impede or gradualize the sun's appearance. It's just all of a sudden there.
BLDGBLOG
A Blog by Geoff Manaugh
The Best Interface is No Interface
"There's an app for that."
Slap an interface on it!
How do you make a better car?
How do you make a better fridge?
How do you make a better trash can?
How do you make a better restaurant?
How do you make a better vending machine?Aim higher
“There’s one more thing you need to do: Aim higher the merely trying to recreate Silicon Valley. You should try to kick our butt instead.” — Guy Kawasaki
This is UX
When you hire someone to generate UI, you won’t get new, innovative solutions. You’ll get more UI, not better UX.
This is UI:
Navigation, sub navigation, menus, drop-downs, buttons, links, windows, rounded corners, shadowing, error messages, alerts, updates, checkboxes, password fields, text inputs, radio selections, text areas, hover states, selection states, pressed states, tooltips, banner ads, embedded videos, swipe animations, scrolling, clicking, iconography, colors, lists, slideshows, alt text, badges, notifications, gradients, pop-ups, carousels, OK.cancel, etc. etc. etc.
This is UX:
People, happiness, solving problems, understanding needs, love, efficiency, entertainment, pleasure, delight, smiles, soul, warmth, personality, joy, satisfaction, gratification, elation, exhilaration, bliss, euphoria, convenience, enchantment, magic, productivity, effectiveness, etc. etc. etc.
The most seamless and wonderful way
I believe our job as designers is to give you what you need as quickly and elegantly as we can. Our job as designers is to take you away from technology. Our job as designers is to make you smile. To make a profit by providing you something that enhances your life in the most seamless and wonderful way possible.
The best interface
Let’s end the confusion between UI and UX. Let’s stop slapping sirens on children’s toys. Let’s prioritize personal goals over addiction. Let’s get our lives and our health back in balance by interacting with the real world instead of staring into a light, checking new notifications. Let’s think beyond screens.
The best result for any technology is to solve meaningful problems in impactful ways.
The best design reduces work.
The best computer is unseen.
The best interaction is natural.
The best interface is no interface.Adapt
Digital products can do so much more than have a fancy front end.
Even if your company’s core product is an interface, not everything that comes after has to be an interface. If things were that rigid, Apple Computer, the personal computer company, would never become Apple Inc., the world’s largest consumer electronics company. If companies didn’t go after opportunities beyond what they do today, Netflix would still be mailing DVDs in red envelopes.
Great thinkers adapt. Great companies offer their customers the best possible solutions, whether they have a graphical user interface or not.
Let them serve us
Instead of us serving computers,
let computers serve us.Forgetting
Inactivity could be another automatic trigger to erase any stored information. If they haven’t utilized the system in a long time, their food data could automatically clear. With so many services out there trying to grab out attention, knowing that a system collecting more general information will just forget everything it knows about you if you don’t use it for a long time might ease the resistance to trying out the new software in the first place.