A blog by Ben Gilman

This article from Techradar makes some interesting points about Apple’s success in interface and product design - primarily that pleasure is the key to interfaces and that is the base ingredient of Apple’s success.

For me, one section jumped out discussing the original Mac team’s approach to design:

“Rather than survey a bunch of users on every decision, the Mac team decided each issue among themselves, invariably going for the option that might amuse a user the most, that would give a user the most pleasure, and therefore imbue the Mac with personality.”

As one who has a love-hate relationship with user workshops and focus groups this is music to my ears - confidence in your own abilities over those of the crowd. Clearly the problem is that those self-sourced decisions have to be resolved correctly. Undoubtedly other companies have taken this auteur approach and failed miserably where Apple have succeeded. Equally companies have released products fully backed by a panel of target audience users that have failed. Apple’s magic-touch is indisputable and ongoing. Surely not, though, impossible to replicate.

“…it’s one thing to be, uh, “creatively inspired” by what other companies are doing, it’s quite another to have a philosophy that enables you to do it first.”

Which leads me to two conclusions:

1. Believe in the vision of your product
   The designers and engineers on Apple products seem to believe completely in the vision of what they’re building. More importantly than that though, that belief runs through the whole company, all the way down from His Jobs himself. That belief has to be above all things - the team will make the right decisions as long as that remains the case.
2. Create a pleasurable experience
   Every product should be fun to use, even if it’s subject matter is far from it. Online banking could, and should, be fun in some small way - it’s never going to beat playing a game or watching a film but a nod towards enjoyment as well as functionality and security can play a massive part in creating a positive feeling around your product and your company.

Now to quit rambling - back to the kitchen, I have sauce to mix.

I’ve just been putting the finishing touches to a simple website for an artist friend, Allan Williams to showcase the results of a recent project he’s undertaken to document the people and images of the soon-to-be London 2012 Olympic site in London’s East End.

Take a look at www.beforelondon2012.com to see all the pictures and interviews with the people involved.

From the Southern Electric website…

Nice grass effect, nice button, but I’m not sure that error message and the associated tooltip really give you all the information you need to proceed from here.

Just found Automattic’s iPhone WordPress blogging application buried in the lower half of the App Store Top 50 so thought I should give it a go.

The application is immediately very usable and like many of the better-developed iPhone apps, more feature rich then I’d expected. It’s also proving pretty stable - a quality not yet evident in all the apps! Adding that picture up there was very easy - it’d have been even easier with a cut+paste function though It works with Wordpress.com hosted or self-hosted blogs.

Still, some of my best blog post ideas come to me when i’m away from my computer so hopefully this app might be the tool to at least stop me forgetting them! That might be all though - the iPhone keyboard is good for many things but maybe penning long blog posts won’t prove to be one of them…

Check the WordPress application out in the store or Wordpress.org - it’s currently sitting pretty at rank 30 - one below the not-so-criticaly-acclaimed AOL Instant Messenger app. iPhone iChat anyone?

They’ve been busy at Amazon.co.uk redesigning the rather dated topbar - given that this is the largest part of their page design, it’s got to be a big thing when they decide to rearrange it.

First impressions….not bad but not so good. The colours are nice and the search bar is nice and bold. However, visually I think it would benefit from some tidying. Bevel effects are a rather strange choice on today’s web and the various different uneven glows and strokes around the top bar elements jar a little.

Having said that it has now made all of the categories available from the homepage (ala amazon.com) and reiterated their recognition that (surely?) the majority of people head straight into a keyword search. However, I’m not a fan of the left-nav - a very simple improvement would be to make the main menu elements clickthrough to something. This is a real annoyance for me with these sorts of navigation - particularly evident where you hover over the ‘Books’ item and then have to move right to click…. ‘Books’ to proceed.

Still I guess it’s a tough job redesigning these sorts of elements under the gaze of millions of users and it’s hardly going to stop me buying lots of stuff from Amazon and appreciating all the awesome data widgets.

EDIT: Erm, I’ve been known to be rather slow before, has it been like this ages? Yup, it seems I am just very slow given there are blog posts about this from the beginning of last month.

EDIT 2: Ok, maybe I get it now - a surf around some other blogs and it seems this might be an international redesign also being trialled on Amazon.com that has been showing up intermittently for a while for various people. Which actually makes the issues I’ve mentioned more major if this has been decided upon as the future direction for (presumably) all of Amazon’s regional sites.

We’re overhauling our login and registation process in work this month. It’s a little overdue a revisit so I’ve been trawling the world of Web 2.0 for some inspiration. I collected them together into a Flickr set:

Registration & Login @ Flickr

It’s a little bit of a random jaunt around some of the nicer (and not so nice) registration forms that the web has to offer.

My personal favourite has to be the Wordpress form - there’s something about some nice big form fields that almost compels you to fill them with your personal details with gay abandon - indeed, I think there might be a whole new angle for phishing sites - big fields = big likelihood of completion = big money. The lack of a captcha is always nice as well, it’s almost like a vision of the internet the way it would be in a perfect world - although maybe that’s a little unambitious.

I’ll update with where we get to with our new registration and login process, it should be far superior to our current one and hopefully approaching the smooth experience that some of the featured sites provide.