I’ve finally found a website for testing the mobile performance of my blogs. In Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design I found a link to Mobitest, a site which simulates how long it takes for your website to load in Germany or in the US.
Archive for the ‘design’ Category
How Much Has The Web Really Changed? – a comment to a @smashingmag stellar article
Smashing Magazine ask the question in a recent blogpost. They state:
The Web actually did change in the last five years, with new devices, new browsers and many, many cool new features.
This is a wonderful article, going straight to the heart of what’s needed in a mobile world. I just wanted to collect the main points, in order to let it impact my work. I encourage you to read the whole article however. Later, my notes hopefully may also serve you too!
iA – the fathers of @iawriter, are thrue minimalists designers
I’ve seen a new star – and it’s iA – or Information Architects. It’s not completely new star however, as I’ve used their Writer app since last year. Coincidentally, I’ve just read two brilliant blogposts related to iA’s founder Oliver Reichenstein:
- Good design is invisible: an Verge interview with iA’s Oliver Reichenstein, is a shocking eye-opening review, where the foundations of good design is explained.
- Mountain Lion’s New File System, is a blogpost on iA’s blog, also by Reichenstein. Just as I thought I’d given an ok explanation in my blog on why people should upgrade to Mountain Lion, I saw that I forgot the Document Library. And following Oliver on his file in one level folders story, I saw that I had omitted the most important part of the OS X update. Here it is:
You should absolutely read the two articles. They take you into the inner circle of Apple style design, and if you are open and concentrated, you will not be the same afterwards.
I’m writing this blogpost in iA Writer and doing it in focus mode. Glad to be back after a half year with Byword. Byword has a feature that I lacked sorely in iA, namely preview. By just pressing some buttons, I could get a HTML view of my post, and a possibility to copy it to my blog.
Today I happened also to find the Marked app, which listen to a document, and does a HTML view of the markdown file automatically. With this third party included, I could return to the simplicity of iA again.
I will cite Oliver Reichenstein from the above blogpost:
The iCloud Document Library folders, restricted to one level, guide us to use a simple hierarchical system that mirrors our mental model.
Una aplicación que aprovecha todas las capacidades que el smartphone ofrece
Tengo la suerte de trabajar para un hombre extremadamente práctico en todos los sentidos. Si unimos a esto su pasión por la tecnología y la simplicidad, resulta fácil entender por qué iFacturas es la aplicación de facturación móvil más sencilla del mercado.
Como responsable de marketing de iFacturas, son incontables las aplicaciones financieras que he analizado dentro del App Store. La mayoría de ellas son aplicativos web mostrados en un iPhone, por lo que no aprovechan las oportunidades que el propio dispositivo móvil puede aportar al sistema de facturación. Y lo que es aún peor, al ser una aplicación exportada de la web al iPhone, todas las acciones resultan más complicadas que desde el ordenador y todo se muestra a un tamaño más reducido.
Hace un año, cuando empezamos con el desarrollo de iFacturas, teníamos claro que nuestra aplicación sería totalmente desarrollada y diseñada para iPhone y que aprovecharíamos todos aquellos elementos que el propio iPhon podía aportar para mejorar la calidad y rapidez en cuanto a la creación de una factura, como el GPS para localizar clientes cercanos o para dar de alta la dirección de un nuevo cliente “in situ” y sin necesidad de tener que escribirla manualmente; o la cámara de fotos para documentar mejor una factura con las imágenes capturadas en el momento del producto o servicio vendido.
Durante los últimos meses, Morten Jacobsen, Mortjac en las redes sociales, ha estado analizando en profundidad las opiniones de verdaderos gurús acerca de cómo crear una aplicación para iPhone perfecta desde el punto de vista del usuario. Este análisis le condujo a tomar la decisión de que debíamos reducir acciones y botones y aprovechar todo aquello que podemos hacer con los dedos en la propia pantalla (sin necesidad de pulsar botones).El resultado, que en breve podrán comprobar los autónomos y Pymes españoles, es que iFacturas aprovecha los gestos que el propio iPhone pone a nuestra disposición de cara a un funcionamiento más rápido e intuitivo.
Por ejemplo, si nos equivocamos creando una factura proforma, simplemente agitando el iPhone, podremos eliminarla. Evitamos pues el tener que ir al botón de acciones, escoger eliminar, volver a confirmar la acción…
Otro ejemplo claro del aprovechamiento de la experiencia de usuario es que para moverse entre distintas facturas proforma o facturas finales, sólo tendrán que desplazarse a izquierda o derecha con el dedo.
Además, cuando un usuario de iFacturas esté interesado en ver el detalle de los conceptos de facturación (líneas), sólo tendrá que hacer el gesto de expandir con dos dedos y esto le llevará a dichos detalles para poder ver, modificar o eliminar la información.
Como podéis ver, parece que estamos yendo en el camino correcto de cara a la consecución de una aplicación extra intuitiva y ágil para nuestros usuarios. Una aplicación que les proporcione verdadera movilidad y autonomía.
Os aviso en cuanto esté disponible para España. Un saludo a tod@s!
Design is Epic
A really good motivation speech of one of the founders of Twitter.
A post from techcrunch.com by Erick Schonfeld has the whole story. Here is a part:
…
Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.
So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful — to this point — Keith, two minutes before I was supposed to start this Town Square, told me, stop. I’ve got a mistake in my slides, I forgot to capitalize an “S”. I swear. That level of perfection is what we wanna achieve, because if we achieve that level of perfection — it’s gonna take a long time to do that, a lot of hours — but then our users see it immediately, without thinking. And that’s the important part. That’s what design is.
…
Designing For The Future Web – Which BTW Is Portable
I admit I did change the title, by adding the portable part. But that really cover this eminent story better. The story begins by trying ot define that the future web is – portable. It support that with some numbers, which impress me a lot. Specially when considering @Asymco 2010 data of 5.5B mobile subscribtions of which 960M are 3G.
…growing 3G coverage around the globe (around 21% by the end of 2010 according to Morgan Stanley).
That makes 1.4B 3G subscribitions out of a population of 7B.
Below you see the part of the definitions. But the main story is about designing for it. Read the whole, it’s good!
A post from Smashing Magazine Feed by James Gardner has the whole story. Here is a part:
What Is The Future Web?
Back in the old days: analogous Google queries would have taken 30 days. Image:dullhunk The one word that I hear more than any other at the moment is mobile. Mobile websites, mobile devices, mobile apps: the list seems to go on and on. In fact, a large swell of opinion says that the future Web is mobile.
But despite all this, focusing just on mobile isn’t the answer.
The way we access the Internet is changing, of that we can be certain. And in the short term, this does mean more mobile devices. But in the long term, we have to look a little wider. Thomas Husson, senior analyst for Forrester, summed it up nicely in his 2011 Mobile Trendsreport when he said, “The term mobile will mean a lot more than mobile phones.” In the long term, the word we should use instead of mobile is portable.
Why Portable? How Has the Internet Changed to Make It So?
First, the physical infrastructure of the Internet is spreading rapidly, so that our ability to access the Internet wherever we are grows daily. In the last 10 years, the number of Internet users has grown by 444.8% and now includes 28.7% of the population. That’s nearly 2 billion people, the majority of whom are in Asia. This growth is fuelled by investment in the underlying hardware that gives us access to the Internet: millions and millions of computers, millions of miles of cables, hundreds of thousands of wireless hotspots and, on top of all this, growing 3G coverage around the globe (around 21% by the end of 2010 according to Morgan Stanley).
Secondly, the way we use the Internet is changing. We are increasingly orienting our online experience around services rather than search engines. Services such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are becoming the hub for our online life, and we are blending them to create our own unique Web of content: Facebook for our social life, LinkedIn for our professional life, Spotify for music, Netflix for television and film. We’re seeing a very different form of information consumption here, one in which we expect information to be pushed to us through our social circle, the people whom we trust. We’re moving away from the old paradigm of information retrieval, in which we are expected to seek information using search engines and links.