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

As we design for more devices, considerations for more responsive layouts which scale gracefully across varying screen sizes could be gaining in importance. Warren here has shared one such quick wireframe that tries to accommodate just this. It basically shows 3 wires side by side each other with some placeholders as well as how they would all vary across a few predefined screen widths. It’s a pretty straightforward, yet clear way of conveying more flexible layout concepts.

That same week, as I was asking around for a few additional “responsive layout” samples, Martin also pointed me to Media Queries – which is an awesome gallery and collection of layouts that scale beautifully on various screens (it’s actually also a CSS extension recommendation). Have a look.

Credits: Warren Anthony

It took a while, but here are some results from what people submitted for the Feedback Note call for samples:

Dedicated Note Spaces

Craig’s preferred method of capturing feedback is on the wireframes themselves within a dedicated notes section. After printing out the full set of wires on a large piece of paper he then takes notes and sketches on top of what is already there. Looking more closely, a lot of the feedback in this particular wireframe is written in a question or task format – as in: “How would the user do this or that”. I think it’s an interesting way of testing the interface with additional sub cases which should be eventually accounted for.

Credits: Craig Kistler

Saving Whiteboards with Evernote

For Anirban, what works is jotting down everything on a whiteboard, and taking it as a snap using the Evernote app. Apparently, with Evernote he can capture the progression of the artifact and then play it out as a sequence as it occurred. In this way, the physical and the virtual can be easily bridged and stored for later.

Credits: Anirban Majumdar

Capturing Sign Off with Checkmarks

When it comes down to my own approach for collecting feedback, I often write all over the wireframes in a different colour on a separate layer. Recently however I’ve began trying to capture sign offs or some form of collective agreement in the wireframes. Sometimes when working with a larger group, team members wish to know and store what has been agreed upon, and what needs additional work. Extending my personal sketching style, I started using two basic circle like symbols of a checkmark as well as a “x” to denote just that. These little symbols I drop throughout the wireframes as needed, and then update a copy of the document in a shared folder (usually Dropbox).

Credits: Jakub Linowski

Thoughts? Comments? Or have other ways of collecting feedback? Please share.

A persona template has just been shared by the folks over at Orange Bus. Perhaps what might be interesting about this particular one is that it invites quick and dirty hand drawing or writing. A lot of the other personas out there, from what I’ve seen in the past, look pretty well polished. This one on the other hand is a lot more doodle compatible. It comes with fill in the blank spaces for basic naming, portrait, a back story, motivations, frustrations, their ideal experience, and a summary quote. Nice!

Credits: Joanne Richardson

The gesture library from gestureworks has been recently expanded to contain a total of 200 illustrations. The library now contains multi-touch as well as stroke gestures in a variety of bitmap and scalable formats. It’s loaded with swipes, drags, flicks, holds, scrolls, taps, and even 3D gestures. For showing stroke direction, they’ve come up with an interesting way of starting off each stroke with a blue circle and ending with a red one. Pretty cool and inspirational ways of showing off user actions.

Credits: gestureworks

Austin recently came up with a sitemap or site architecture OmniGraffle stencil that makes room for some extra description. In the stencil, beside each page title there is now a little space for an explanation of what the page is about. He shared the downloadable stencil which can be obtained right from his site. Awesome. Thanks!

In his own words:

I’ve used EightShapes’s brilliant Unify deliverable system for about four years. It’s excellent.

Out of the box, Unify is designed for use with Adobe InDesign. Lately, however, I’ve been site mapping in sweet, luscious OmniGraffle, and I created a Unify-inspired OmniGraffle stencil for making site maps.

But, there’s one problem with lots of site maps.

In your typical site map, you show the page’s title adjacent to the little box for that page. Unfortunately, clients and developers and designers don’t always know what kind of page the page will be. In other words, if you have a page titled, “Orders”, it’s not clear if that’s a dashboard, a list of orders, or even a form form for adding an order.

So I added a line for every page on the site map where you can offer a very brief description of the page.

Credits: Austin Govella

Here is an interesting example of a highly abstracted wireframe, labelled as a WireMolecule. Both the position and size of the represented elements within this example no longer represent what the interface will really look like. Instead, the focus has been shifted to showing relationships between elements as denoted by their proximity to each other. The size I also believe represents the importance of each element and not the actual size either (as also seen here and here). Definitely something a little different from a traditional wireframe. Andreas writes:

Traditional wire frames are misleading as they look too much like finished designs. Clients and designers alike run the risk of taking their direction too literally. And yet, despite all this, wire frames are invaluable tools in the start of any website design project.

And defines a WireMolecule as:

A chart giving an overview of relationships between components and features of a website. Wire molecules are developed during the Website Discovery phase and they provide instructions to designers, developers, and clients for how pages will look and behave.

Credits: Andreas Holmer

GestureWorks has released 20 something gesture icons for their Flash and Flex development environment. Although their multitouch library is geared at developers, the icons still look interesting in their own right. A lot of the interactions supported include two handed, as well as multi finger gestures. The downloadable library comes in various formats (PNG, PDF and EPS). Enjoy.

Also, I just created the gestures tag to keep track of all these related posts.

Credits: GestureWorks

The academic group over at Hochschule Luzern (Competence Center) in Switzerland have recently explored a visual representation that captures the interaction of various people across multiple services or touch points. Done in the context of a service design assignment, the Blueprint project portrays the flow of time horizontally and captures multiple actors vertically. More so, the visualization also layers additional data underneath and contains such things as fail lines, emotions and costs, while at the same time leaving more room for additional variables. In some way, the deliverable shares some resemblance to the Experience Maps posted earlier.

As an additional note, Blueprint+ is still a work in progress and will be turned into a toolkit in the future. Stay tuned. :)

Credits: CC Explanations and Services, Hochschule Luzern (Andy Polaine, Roman Aebersold, Robert Bossart and Andrea Mettler)

Usability testing is a pretty standard practice and I assume most of us here have done or might do a few of these evaluations in their design careers. Last month, I had the chance to spend some time with end users on a software project and I thought of sharing some of the documentation which resulted from the activity.

Right after doing such a test, we’re often faced with the challenge on how to capture and convey some of the interesting findings to others on the team or even ourselves. Some people try video, while others overlay the identified problems on top of screen captured images. In this round of testing I was aiming for something slightly different. Essentially, I wanted to a capture the core notes per each user on a single piece of 8.5×11 paper (perhaps in a persona like fashion?). Each page would have starting points of what the user has initially done with the use of red text, followed by dark grey notes as the actions unfolded. The findings were then tagged accordingly as: ideas (light bulb symbol), confusions (question mark) or positive remarks (happy face). Further more, the sample also makes use of subtle informal sketches through out the page to help convey the issues somewhat visually.

Perhaps to someone who lacks context of the project or products being tested, a deliverable such as this might not be adequate enough at conveying the issues. On the other hand, for those who have participated in the test as observers, the following usability test snapshot might act as an inspiration piece for the design work ahead.

Please post as a comment (or submit) ideas of your own on how to best convey, remember or prioritize findings from design research.

Credits: Jakub Linowski