PJ recently took another stab at making gesture icons more comprehensible and released Cue under Creative Commons. It’s a proposed system for representing gestures more clearly that makes use of thumb like icons. He explains his motivation for the project in a blog post as well. The icons come in PNG (4 sizes), SVG, Omnigraffle and InDesign formats. Awesome. It’s always great to see explorations in visual language. Thanks PJ!

Here is how he puts it:

These gesture icons act as roadsigns to an app for interaction way-finding. As expected, there has been a significant collection of gesture icon sets that have been made available to fill this need. The current crop of icons succeed in clarity, but they lack the iconic qualities necessary to act as a standard representation of gestures. My goal is to help create a foundational set of icons that are flexible, clear and distilled to a point where they could become a standard visual system to build from – ultimately to be used within apps for when explicit communication is needed.

Credits: PJ Onori

Here comes InVision, a simple click-through prototype building app. The tool itself is pretty light (in a good way) in that you do not design the actual pages in InVision. Instead, the idea is to design your screens in your other weapons of choice (Fireworks, Illustrator, Balsamiq, Photoshop etc.) and then upload them into InVision. Once you upload your GIFs, PNGs, or JPGs, the tool then allows you to create hotspots and link pages together. When creating these hotspots, you also are provided with a very useful ability to save them into templates for easier reusability.

InVision also comes with a few standard collaboration features. You can easily share a full prototype or individual pages through easily accessible links, which then can be commented on by the viewers. You can also invite additional designers if you need multiple people to work on the prototype.

One thing which becomes immediately apparent when using this is that a good amount of effort has also been put into designing the sleek interface. All the little tiny details in terms of interactions and visual design have been fine tuned. As an example, the upload process is quite smooth as files are drag and dropped from your desktop to the web app. Overall, a simple yet clearly focused little application!

Give it a try.

Happy World Usability Day from the guys over at Optimal Workshop! An awesome bundle of online usability tools is up for grabs on World Usability Day up until this Thursday, November 10! This year a bunch of User Experience (UX) organizations have put together a basket of complementary training and tools for the World Usability Day Bundle. The bundle is only available for 48 hours and includes an incredible package of UX tools at more than 70% off the usual price.

This year’s World Usability Day Bundle is priced at $1,370 (pretty much the same as last year) and includes more than $5,000 worth of subscriptions. The individual components of the bundle are:

1. Usability Professionals’ Association: 4 video seminars and a live webinar.
2. OptimalSort: Remote card sorting.
3. Treejack: Test and validate your IA.
4. Loop11: Test the user-experience of any website.
5. OpenHallway: Record a/v screencasts of user testing sessions.
6. SnapEngage: Live chat with your site visitors and customers.
7. ConceptShare: Markup visual designs collaboratively
8. HotGloo: Rapid collaborative wireframing.

Johannes Tonollo’s thesis project explores a number of interesting user interface transitions, and how they can be used to create meaning by complementing static UIs. They have been segmented into six categories: Orientation, Spatial Extension, Awaking Controls, Highlight, Feedback and Feedforward. The site has a large number of examples or patterns for each category that are pure inspiration. Interesting stuff! Traditionally, UI designers have been reinforcing meaning by relying on gestalt principles using proximity, alignment, positioning and contrasts. Johannes shows that these could be extended with transitions and the element of time. With CSS animations getting more and more powerful, these transitions don’t seem so far fetched any longer. Thanks Michael (@konigi) for finding this!

Credits: Johannes Tonollo

The guys over at WitFlow recently put together an Axure Cheat Sheet (PDF). It comes loaded with a bunch of potentially useful little shortcuts for the Axure masters out there (or shall I say, Axure FU Masters to be). Thanks for compiling & sharing this. :)

Credits: @WitFlow