Punchcut Visual Design Director, Christian Robertson co-presented these multi-screen design insights alongside Adobe XD designer, Ali Ivmark at Adobe MAX in Los Angeles. Enjoy.

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A lot of Wired’s premises are spot on, regarding the trends and the emerging ways users will consume “print-centric” media on digital devices. The notion of print design as storytelling is also compelling, and one reason why print still feels manicured and curated, versus many online publishing outlets where content is merely poured into a content block. Our friends at Adobe should be congratulated for the richness of the Wired tablet UI. Like the New York Times Reader app (another of Adobe’s collaborations), it succeeds at considering content in the post-browser internet (or, if you prefer, the splinternet).

I’m sure a major consideration in this Wired/Adobe solution is the print-centric nature of magazine design. Layouts appear to be adapted from print and ported to the digital screen, which is compelling for now. Where this model succeeds is that it’s much more compelling than pouring content into a “page” rendered by a browser, and may be precisely why readers still want to engage with a publication where each story is curated and designed. Continue Reading »

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Image: Flickr user TheGiantVermin

Are you designing a promotion experience or a product experience?

App-vertising is emerging as a means for brands to engage with consumers through downloadable mobile apps. Marketing and advertising professionals herald the growing app trend as a more sure entrance into the elusive mobile landscape. The fragmented mobile device and mobile OS landscape confined marketing to the lowest common denominators: which meant WAP sites and SMS campaigns.

That landscape has shifted significantly and is primed for brands to connect more deeply with consumers. Four key reasons the opportunity is real:

1. Smart phones are capable of delivering rich applications (not just games and wallpapers);
2. A critical mass of mainstream consumers now have smart devices in hand;
3. Users have a voracious appetite for app downloads (and not just for iPhone, Android, Palm, Nokia all have app stores in play)
4. Brands can stand alone in app stores and are no longer constrained by carrier’s walled gardens

Yet, slow down a little before throwing your budget at an iPhone app. I’d like to offer insights on the approach that will make the difference between mobile experiences that get adopted – and therefore extend brands – versus those that provide merely a flash in the pan.
Continue Reading »

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A Call for more sensitivity to hierarchy, space, and scale in user interface design.

Typographers have been organizing complex sets of information for hundreds of years. In that process they rarely rely on boxes to convey hierarchy and organization. Why do interface designers feel a need to draw a box around every element in a user interface? What is it about nested boxes, even three or four levels deep, on one screen? In this article I hope to lay out some basic tools perfected by typographers, that apply to interface design.

Continue Reading »

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IPTV USER INTERFACE, COPYRIGHT PUNCHCUT

ADOBE MAX 2009, LOS ANGELES - Christian Robertson, Design Director at Punchcut will present “Design Considerations for Contextually Aware Solutions” at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles. He will speak alongside Ali Ivmark, Design Manager on the Adobe XD team. They will discuss the design process for successfully creating multi-screen user experiences that adapt to changing contexts of use. They will include key process, prototyping and publishing insights for designing mobile and multi-screen user interfaces.

Session Title: Design Considerations for Contextually Aware Solutions
Presentation Time: 3:30pm Wednesday, October 7, 2009; Room: 510
Attendees can register for the session with the Adobe MAX Scheduler.

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The August issue of Communication Arts includes the feature “Don’t Call it a Phone“, which highlights emerging mobile trends. Columnist Sam MacMillan sought input from Punchcut’s deep mobile experience in informing the direction of the piece.

SELECT QUOTES

“Mobile is not a device, it’s a lifestyle. Life is mobile, media is mobile; your mobile is the ultimate social networking tool. The information and the tools built into the virtual world of mobile provide the ideal way to meet up in the real world.” — Jared Benson, Executive Creative Director, Punchcut

“[clients] are increasingly asking for embedded social networking aspects across device experiences. Our handset and carrier customers want to give users ubiquitous access to the people users care about. Users want to see their address book paired with location, so they can view their friends in the context of who is nearby.” — Joe Pemberton, Brand and Marketing Director, Punchcut

“We begin by asking, ‘How can we use a mobile device to help us connect in the real world? What contexts do we include, and what tasks do we want to perform?’ Consider how social networking can be combined with a mobile handset to supplement the physical experience of shopping. The mobile phone can enhance real experience by including maps to find friends …The virtual device adds to the experience.” — Shilpa Shah, Associate Director of Interaction Design, Punchcut

ABOUT COMMUNICATION ARTS

The magazine is in its 40th year and has a very strong reputation in the visual design and marketing communications fields and boasts a worldwide distribution of 60M.

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The user interface designers at Cisco have an excellent example of ways mobile applications are enhancing user experiences. Rather than merely replicate the desktop Webex experience on a smartphone, they’ve addressed the unique ways a mobile device can extend application functionality; accounting for the impressive strengths and the inherent weaknesses of the mobile device.

Watch this piece demonstrating Cisco’s Webex app for enterprise iPhone users.

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This is what you get when you add a compass to a data and GPS-enabled handheld device that has a camera – an extremely useful concoction of sci-fi proportions. Leave it to Yelp to deploy this type of AR to the iPhone first.

I’m not sure why Mashable is calling this an Easter Egg. Probably because “shake-to-activate-super-cool-feature” is not intuitive to discover at all. (I’m also not sure why Mashable suggests Yelp snuck this one past Apple.)

Puzzles abound. Nonetheless, enjoy the video.

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It’s that time of year when SXSW Interactive puts all the approved talk submissions up for public vote. We hope you’ll take a moment and vote for these mobile and device user experience sessions. Voting ends September 4th.

1 // “Convergence: Already Here, and Gosh It’s a Mess!“
Speaker: Gabriel White, Punchcut
Convergence is here and it’s a big mess. People are using services and media within hacked-together ecosystems; systems without neat connections or beautiful symmetries. Punchcut will share the user insights and design principles needed to create applications and services that integrate into emerging digital lifestyles and convergent ecosystems.

2 // “It’s Slow, Ugly and Not What I Designed: How to Ship Good Design”
Speakers: Patricia Slechta & Christian Robertson, Punchcut

Has your user experience ever been lost in translation? You see the mobile device in the marketplace and you hardly recognize it? Punchcut will share insights and explore organizational principles that bridge design and the go-to-market reality. We will discuss ways to prevent user experiences from being lost in translation.
Continue Reading »

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The Carnival of the Mobilists aims to showcase some of the best mobile-focused blog posts from the mobile blogging community and Punchcut is delighted to host edition #184 here at Idlemode. Our team has authored several articles featured in past Carnival editions, but if you don’t know us, we’re a San Francisco-based UI design company focused on strategy, user experience design and development for the digital lifestyle.

Contributions this week cover a breadth of topics from Tomi Ahonen, Dennis Bournique, Judy Breck, Tam Hanna, Volker Hirsch, Holly Kolman, Sanjeet Matharu, C. Enrique Ortiz, Howard Rheingold, and Peggy Anne Salz. Continue Reading »

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