04.14.2008 by LukeW

Stephen Anderson’s Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design presentation at IA Summit 2008 provided suggestions for new sources for inspiration for interface designs.

* Check out Stephen’s slides from his presentation
* Default Thinking: look at competitor sites in a vertical for inspiration. But your customers visit sites outside of your industry, and bring those expectations to your site.
* Default Thinking: these are the tools I have to work with (Windows controls, etc.). There are other places for inspiration like consumer electronics, games, TVs, other digital interfaces.
* Today’s hardware changes make almost anything possible.
* Software changes: silverlight, android, adobe air. Lots of desktop and Web intersection.
* Natural behaviors are better than learned behaviors. Scrollbars requires us to move down to move something up. Except when learned behavior enables us to perform better.

Inspiration Examples

* Use model of Club Penguin to organize enterprise application. Look beyond the surface- look at structure of game.
* How to accommodate all levels of users & deep customization? Floating windows can bring up controls as users need them
* Think outside the UI box. Don’t need to be constrained by it
* How to accommodate multiple workspaces? iPhone button in tiered workspaces
* Design with less space. Songza: stepped radial menu on song list.
* Picnik: tabs replaced by contextual menu items. No need to remain visible at all times. Think about moments – do you need all the features all the time?
* In the new FireFox browser, back button it bigger than forward as it gets more use.
* Think in conversations. How do we communicate context?
* Make it visual – communicate context, information
* Jing: screen capture utility
* Cookthink: integrated tag cloud browsing
* Schematic: panning across different parts of site