O’Reilly Radar recently put it as “…is iOS then still to be judged primarily as a communications device platform? Or, as a low-end gaming disruptor to Microsoft Xbox or Nintendo Wii in the living room?”. And I agree, if we’re seeing a shift to a more casual gaming scenario where more and more people will pick up a game if it’s easy and natural what better platform then the one in your pocket? Or the one on your current laptop? This reduces the barrier of entry to gaming to zero, or at least .99.

“For One Quarter of Users, the iPad is a Game Machine”, which I again agree with. Not only is it capable of great visuals – it’s convenient, comparably inexpensive, and touching is a great way to interact with games “naturally” (like a Wii remote or the Xbox Kinetic). The article goes on to say “38% of iPad owners responding to the survey indicated that they had no desire to purchase a different mobile gaming device.” – and for some, I’m sure this is their only gaming device.

Gaming apps continue to take the top spots on mobile devices: “Gaming apps once again took the number one spot for and accounted for 41 percent of apps on the network in June” – this article also mentions iOS growing 36% to 56% of the total US smartphone mix.

Titles like “mobiles are the consoles of the future” are becoming more common, “by the end of this year, there will be 120 million iOS devices in circulation – only 20 million shy of the most popular console of all-time, the PS2, which has sold 140 million units.” – again, not everyone is playing games on their mobile devices, but with these numbers comes great potential!

Data from Resolve Market Research shows that after owning an iPad, you’re 38% more likely to NOT by a portable gaming device (like DS or PSP). Which makes iOS devices like iPad and iPhone prime targets for Nintendo and Sony (as if Sony isn’t already going after Apple).

I think the iOS devices have shown that they’re not just for Snake and Tetris. First person shooter games like Archetype, show how “console like” online mobile gaming can work. And Words with Friends, and other turn based games excel on mobile “go with you anywhere, always connected” devices.

When Google announced the Chrome App Store, a majority of the non-Google app were games. Even demoing “Lego Star Wars”, which is a pretty rich console game. While I don’t think it’s total clear yet, Google is moving to a web app strategy – and we’re already seeing HTML5 gaming engines – like Aves, show some promising demos. And games like Pie Guy have been out for awhile now, showing some basic HTML gaming on the iPhone.

What’s also interesting is Apple’s “here’s the platform, let’s see what people do” attitude – and people gamed, and now they’re releasing their “Game Center” hub that will better connect players to their games.

Personally I love gaming on the iPhone, and iPad – and just last week was excited about, and waiting for a game to come out – Star Wars: Battle for Hoth. But then happy finds, like Helsing’s Fire shows me innovation with touch based gameing is far from over!

A lot of these smaller, fun games also bring down the cost, from million dollar blockbusters to something that can be made in 72 hours, with a small team.

My 5yo also really enjoys games, and has recently been enjoying Monkey Island on the iPad, and Star Wars on the iPod. With a busy lifestyle – riding in the car, small chunks of time here and there, a mobile gaming device is perfect.

We have, and love the Xbox 360 (check my raptr account!), but our leisure time is being shifted from console, TV, movies, and more to mobile, and what we have on our devices.

So what does the future of gaming hold? Probably something in your hand.

I’m pretty much an RSS junkie. User Experience, mobile, technology, gaming – it all never stops. My passion for consuming news and feeds comes from my passion for what I do, and how it all relates with each other. Need a new icon for an iPhone app? I just starred that. What trends will shape the next five years? I’m sharing it right now. And I want to make finding these items easier for anyone who has a passion for these same topics…

I’ve been trying to keep up with everything everywhere (if only I could just download the internet ;-) for years, and luckily the tools have gotten better (have you seen the new reeder app for the iPad?- screen below), feeds better organized, and news – ever more abundant. Add to that the proliferation of twitter (etc..), and sharing these links has become a mainstream event in most people’s lives.

I’ve found that most people who do what I do have similar interests. They’re interested in what I’m reading, and I’m interested in what they’re reading. So I wanted to make that easier, not only for RSS junkies like myself, but for people who possibly leapfrogged directly to twitter, or have other reasons for not consuming news via readers, feeds, “top sites”, or something forced on them, like Google Buzz.

So here you go – if you’re on twitter and interested in the following topics, follow me, and I’ll share what I find (details on this below):

• http://twitter.com/jeremyfeeds (@jeremyfeeds)- this is the mothership, taking directly from my Google Reader shared feed, and posting here. Be prepared for some heavy tweeting.
• http://twitter.com/mobilefeeds (@mobilefeeds) – this is segmented specifically for those interested in mobile technology: iPhone, iPad, Android, mobile usage, statistics, etc…
• http://twitter.com/trendingtravel (@trendingtravel) – travel news: hotels, travel sites, itinerary tools, destination guides, etc…
• http://twitter.com/touchtrends (@touchtrends) – keeping up with touch and multi-touch news and trends.
• http://twitter.com/gamerposts (@gamerposts) – news around the video game industry, new games, deals, new technologies, etc…
• http://twitter.com/jeremylikes (@jeremylikes) – this is a collection of things I favorite, like, and star on twitter, flickr, and tumblr.

And of course if you’re already using google reader – go straight to the source – my Google Reader account: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jeremyj or read them at your leisure on my Google Profile page: http://www.google.com/profiles/jeremyj

While this may seem daunting (updating all these accounts) – it’s actually really simple. I’m using a great little online tool called dlvr.it. This lets me take my feed (that I’m creating anyways) and split it using keywords across these different twitter accounts – automatically! It’s not perfect – a post about travel could leak over to @gamerposts if the article for some reason mentions “airlines”, but in general it works pretty well.

dlvr.it also keeps stats, and tracks the click-throughs, which is interesting, and if accurate shows how many people are just out there on twitter searching keywords. In a months time @jeremyfeeds got 10k clicks on just 700 posts (which it tells me is an average of 15 clicks per post).

More and more people are turning to twitter to find new and interesting news posts online – and I only see that as a trend that will continue to grow as twitter gains more and more mainstream popularity.

I hope by doing this, I can help people find out more information on what they’re passionate about, and in turn, will eventually share their own findings.

Feel free to also follow my personal account @jeremyjohnson, or my less serious @raisingrobots as well. See you online!

I remember B.i. (before iPhone) when applications on mobile devices were something only hardcore travelers, geeks, and gamers had tried. But now, you say mobile, and the nearest marketing person responds with “So when can I get my app”? For the first time, it’s easy, and really fun to download an app. I currently have 253 apps on my iPhone – I don’t think even Apple saw this coming.

We had Forrester come out to our $largecompany about a year or so before the iPhone, even then – people were trying to make the decision on what to do in mobile. This was before apps were easy to download and mobile browsers were converging on a standard. Forrester at the time said what pretty much everyone was saying, if you don’t REALLY need an app, STAY AWAY! It’s amazing how quickly things change in the mobile space.

With Apple’s desire to own the entire experience it’s no wonder they got it right. You can’t string together a series of unrelated things and expect them to work together. It takes owning the experience, which is something Apple excels at. But even with the success of the iTunes music store, when the first release of the iPhone OS – apps were nowhere in sight. The web app was enough. But when they finally opened up that SDK to create apps, wow did the iPhone get way more useful.

Again, I think Apple surprised themselves this time – and the interactions used to access these apps on the iPhone home screen show they didn’t think people would have more than 15-20 apps, if that. Someone like me with my 200+ apps, loose apps, forget about apps, and have a hard time finding some apps. And my 5 year old, once he fills his screens, he can’t really spell yet, so searching is out for him. It’s time to fix this, and I hope with iPhone OS 4 they will. But let’s think about how they could fix this problem… How do you make it easy to sift through 250+ apps?

Via: Fast Company

For me it’s GAMES. I’m amazed the quality of games coming to the iPhone, they keep getting better and better – and both me and my 5 year old are big fans. In fact, when I asked my five year old if he was interested in a Nintendo DS or an iPod, he went with the (what he calls) “phone”. I’ve had gameboys, PSP, and other handhelds, but combine the fit and finish of Apple, with some really creative game designers, and you have the ultimate gaming device.

I also have a lot of useful apps that I’d say I use daily to weekly, and a large set for when I travel. Apple needs to devise a way for our pages to reflect the different contexts we’re in on a mobile device. When I’m around town, one screen set – when out of town a different set – and how bout a “lounging around” context? Maybe we need “sets” that we can flick up and down? Or use voice command to put the iPhone in a home/work mode? How about a category switcher using a little page curl at the bottom of the screen? I’m sure Apple will figure this out, but they need to do it soon… I can’t find my Plants vs. Zombies ;-)

Not that I knew it at the time, but going into User Experience turned out to be a great career move. I’ve always thought there would be job security with the number of new technologies and devices that will need designing – think of everything that will have a “screen” in the future. Who’s designing for these screens? Who’s creating the interactions, workflows, graphics? That would be us!

I often use an example of an interactive cereal box. What other aisle in the grocery store tries to communicate with you more! Let’s mix up a couple new technologies – like e-paper, RFID, and wireless power – and you have a talking, interactive cereal box. “Thanks for choosing Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, did you know we’re the #1 cereal for vitamin A?”, “Touch here to learn more”. We’re all set for years!

One of my first jobs was at an Ad Agency that had been around since the 1970′s and at one time had 70+ people working for it. WIth production conveniences, like desktop publishing, digital photography, etc… the number of people needed had been cut over the years. You didn’t need someone to run to the photo studio to check out the day’s photo shoot. You didn’t need multiple people hand setting an ad, etc…

I wonder if these jobs are now starting to come back. Not the same jobs obviously, but the number of jobs in the Design space. Where everything is getting an interface of some kind. Phones are more advanced, kiosks are more prevalent, having a screen is cheaper than having actual hardware buttons in some cases, and with that there is more work today for User Experience professionals then there has been in a long time.

UPA just released the 2009 salary survey – and the average salary of a UX professional is $85k, and it’s steadily climbing. These are people doing things like user research, heuristic reviews, interaction design, creating prototypes, usability testing, etc… There are many things that go into today’s interfaces. It’s not just a developer adding some fields and buttons on a screen anymore. People are taking User Experience seriously – and that means following the processes, doing the leg work, and going further than we’ve gone in the past.

Speaking of jobs ;-) – the company I work for currently has nine open UX related positions right now. And that says a lot, they’ve been very conservative about hiring in this economic climate, but they understand the need for User Experience across our organization.

If you’re interesting in working with me, or at the $largecompany I work for – let me know, here’s what they currently have posted:

User Experience Designer / Information Architect
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071X
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130840

User Experience Developer / Front-End Developer
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071Z
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130841

Web Design Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072M
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131240

Principal GUI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072I
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131180

Application Designer (User Experience)- Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 006VD
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=127080

Senior IA
United Kingdom
Job Posting:Sep 1, 2009-Job Number 0071F
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130560

Senior UI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Aug 25, 2009-Job Number 0071Q
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130740

Web Design Senior – Senior
GB-England-London
Job Posting:Aug 24, 2009-Job Number 006P6
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=123120

Web Developer
US-MD-Bethesda
Job Posting:Aug 5, 2009-Job Number 006J1
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=119000

And if my company isn’t for you, check out my older post on “Hiring on the Fringe” where you can find a list of sites that post UX type jobs.

(Above infographic by: http://www.good.is/)

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

Ever since 2007 Twitter has been the buzz. But why? Great company? Innovative technology? No, I think it’s because they didn’t really invent a new technology, they invented a new communication method. One that’s becoming as standard as using a phone, or a replacement to email. Twitter has the promise to be the next chapter in ways humans communicate. Twitter is the internet at its full potential.

Around 1996 I was working at a Barnes & Nobles while going to school. I was stationed in the software/computer part of the store, and every so often our community director would bring in someone on a given topic to present.

With the internet being pretty new, she got someone to come in to talk about the internet. Again this was 1996. I can’t remember who she got, at the time I thought he was way too technical – but now, I think he was from the future.

During his presentation to a group of about 10 or so customers, he described how the internet works, drawing a large cloud (and calling it that) on a whiteboard, showing connected computers. This is my fist piece of evidence he was from the future, basically describing cloud computing ;-)

What I really remember from this talk in 1996 is the question and answer session at the end where someone asked “where do I go to find something on the internet?”. This was before Google, so the common answer would be something like Altavista, or Yahoo – but this traveler from the future said “You just post a question to the community and you’ll get an answer” – “what a idiot” I thought. Now, I’ll concede that he was really talking about usernet groups at the time, but today you’d hear that same answer from many of our most influential speakers.

I know it’s pretty much what I do today, I’ll DM someone, post a question, or search twitter to see how the community is handling a given topic. I have twitter results injected in my Google results via Grease Monkey – and often find the realtime results more valuable.

Twitter is the internet. It’s a communication medium like no other. It’s what I believe the internet was intended to be. A collective social “thing” that allows us to harness humanity (a triumph really). When the internet, er twitter went down last month it was a big deal, as big as if AT&T went down (or when AT&T was down at SXSW this year, twitter was a alternative way to communicate).

I was on a twitter panel at work a while back (with a PACKED audience), and the question of “can twitter go out of fashion” came up. In my opinion, it can’t because it’s the internet. It’s not a place that can get old (like MySpace), it’s a communication medium. I guess it could go out of fashion like the pager, but only when a better form of communication emerges, not JUST a better pager.

The internet is a collection of objects (not tubes): text, video, audio, etc… today we find many of those objects through a system (Google), but in the near future can Google keep up with millions of people? Can Google index, and rank faster than an international community of millions?

How is twitter going to evolve? I think it will become a shared non-corporate communication medium. I’m hoping someone (Google) buys it and makes it free, portable, and reliable. It’s a snapshot of humanity, a moment in time where we can look back and see the biggest thing on this date is: Google Voice, Harry Potter, and #bringbackrachelle. Unlike past communication mediums, it’s public, and easily recordable for all time. Think if twitter was around when JFK was shot, instant recordable international reaction for all time.

How about when all the OpenID/Social Connect/Facebook Connect/OAuth gets settled, you can login via any number of tools, and then communicate on a single platform. Or maybe it’s multiple platforms that are all connected – where a Plurk and a twit will show up just as if they were from the same source.

Twitter is a new form of communication that has never really existed before, a critical mass of shared information – building on it’s predecessors: roads, telegraph, telephone, pagers, email, texting, and now twitter. This is only possible at this point and time with the technology we have today, this is the potential of the internet.

I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?

The first step is defining what you’re going to use this prototype for. Is it to drum out business requirements? Demo to clients before they write the big check? Or get something as close as possible to the real thing, so you can start the User Centered Design process and test your ideas on actual people that will be using your product.

Obviously I enjoy prototyping for the latter, getting real feedback that our team’s ideas were dead on, or widely off-base (never!). To do this, you really want to build the prototype in the technology you’re going to create the finished product in (usually HTML or Flex for web based software). This solves two problems: one, this truly is as close to the real thing as you can get. By using the actual UI technology you’ll be creating the final product in, you’ll know what can and can’t be done, users will get a real feeling for the responsiveness, animations, and interactions. It’s real, sans the months of backend development needed to power this prototype. And two, you can pass this finished front-end code off to the development team, taking pressure off backend developers who may not be well versed in front-end development.

Microsoft when working on Office 2007 did this very thing:

“if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product.”

In the past when I’ve run prototyping projects, the teams usually consist of just one designer/IA, one developer, and a small amount of a backend developers time (to get some fake system data up and running). Depending on the maturity of your front-end development group, you may have sets of UI widgets and code ready to go, this will help speed up the overall process.

Dave Cronin from Cooper recently wrote an article titled “Industry trends in prototyping” – which I agree with about everything in the article – he lists out four reasons for creating prototypes: prototypes make your designs better, help facilitate communication, enable user input and usability assessment, and help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time. He’s also a fan of creating “real” prototypes where it makes sense.

I love this comment from Philip Fierlinger:

Prototypes, on the other hand, let people feel the flow and experience the relationships. Building prototypes allows architects and interaction designers to quickly identify broken pathways and iterate quickly to find better flows – by feeling the experience, rather than thinking about it in the abstract. Developers, designers and clients also get a much more tangible sense of what the end product will be.

Again, I can’t stress enough how a “real” prototype will give you the best feedback for the effort. We’ve also used these prototypes to help sell ideas to business groups. Imagine trying to sell an idea for a mobile app by letting your VP access it directly on their phone. This will beat out any PowerPoint presentation.

Garrett wrote on this topic years ago, and the technology is now easier to use than ever before. There are frameworks, open source systems, and reusable icon sets ready to be molded into your own prototype.

Using wireframes or paper for low-fedility prototyping is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe your just testing internally, or you’re limited with your technology skills. There are discussions about what fidelity wireframes should be (both form and function). There are many tools at your disposal for creating wireframes and prototypes, and they’ve really just recently gotten easy to use. No longer are you stuck with Visio – here’s a list of some tools, ranging from very expensive to free with varying sets of features:

• Axure
• Pencil Project
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Adobe Flash Catalyst
• iRise
• OmniGraffle
• Lovely Charts
• Rapidrabb.it
• iplotz.com
• Prototype Composer
• fluidIA
• WireframeSketcher
• MockupScreens

Boxes and Arrows has an article from 2006 written by Scott McDowell, that goes over some of these options, but what’s really interesting are the comments below the article where designers talk from real world experience. And Russell Wilson from Dexo Design compares 16 prototyping tools (2008) and again, the comments are interesting.

I tend to use wireframes to quickly get across ideas and interactions. Something that could possibly be thrown away, or will be changed a number of times. Once the idea seems to stick, I move to high fidelity mock-ups, sometimes merging the mock-ups together in a slide-by-slide presentation showing the page flow with faked interactions.

GUUUI posted some links to videos showing lo-fidelity prototypes in action. Again, this can work to help guide overall concepts, but to get true feedback – you really need to have a higher level of fidelity.

If you’re in a good situation where you’re ahead of the product timeline, prototyping is your next step. Just like how a architect moves to a model, build out your prototype and test, iterate, improve, and in the end launch a successful product!

(additions)
Great post over at Adaptive Path: Rapid Prototyping Tools

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

In the below presentation I try to run the gamut of what’s new in User Experience, and Interaction Design – scouting ahead for what’s changing the landscape. As someone who is passionate about these topics, I love discovering new interaction patterns, and better ways to do something that was thought adequate before. And by consuming all these new patterns, you can blend them into current projects, and even synthesize something new.

What’s going on in Game Design? What are some of the newest UI trends? How is information design contributing to the interaction design practice? How are we bringing the real world into applications? These are just some of the questions I explore below:

Download PDF

At the end of the presentation I featured the recently revealed Adaptive Path Aurora concept “browser”. I was actually mostly done with this presentation when Aurora was revealed, and thought it was the perfect closing to my presentation. Why? Because it is the product of many of these emerging patterns we see in other areas of product and interaction design. You could say the design is somewhat reminiscent of the Sugar UI in the OLPC computer, or that having things fade away into the distance is bringing the real world into the experience. The way you can quickly type in a search, or the contextual menu that pops-up to reveal more actions. These are all things we’ve seen before, just not together in this new and innovative idea.

While you could of lived in a cave for the past couple of years and had the same ideas, I theorize that by observing these trends you are “building on the shoulders of giants” and can better combine, iterate, test, and innovate.

I did want to mention a combination I’ve had in my head for awhile :-) on page 30 I have a shot of the Prius fuel consumption screen. I think by using game design and comparing this to other drivers (not just Prius, but all cars) people would instinctively want to “win” by having the best gas mileage. If we could get a mandate for all car companies to include a version of this, with a way to transmit “scores” to a central database, I think we could be off foreign oil in no time! The elevator pitch would be “It’s like Nike+ for fuel consumption” ;-)

via: http://flickr.com/photos/88262773@N00/2525850407

Last, things change fast. Since presenting this we’ve seen new patterns in Google’s Chrome browser, and Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Remember to keep up, stay informed, and absorb as much as you can.

Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc… and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year my co-presenter was Dustin Askins of Travelocity, and we gave the presentation internally to our UX groups, and just this week at the Dallas UPA Chapter.

Why SXSWi? I think it’s really good for getting a pulse of what’s going on in the User Experience field. You get to meet with a wide verity of people from different practices, and hear from some of the top web professionals. An while there are many great conferences (like UIE, IA Summit, UX Week, etc…) SXSWi is consistent on it’s wide ranging topics (great for “T-Shaped” People).

When looking at trends across technology, marketing, UX, and business you start to see patterns of what the leaders in their respective groups are expecting for 2008 and beyond. Things I keep seeing rise to the top: Mobile, Open Platforms, Data Control, Mixing Virtual and Reality, Semantic Web, Interoperability, and Location Based tools (see slide 33). None of these are unexpected, I sure we’d all agree these are hot items that will effect multiple areas.

I’ve never posted these presentations before, so I have 2005, 2006, and 2007 to post along with 2008. So if you’re new to the web and User Experience, now is your chance to catch up on a couple years worth of knowledge.

So say hello to 2008:

| View | Upload your own

2007 On SlideShare

2006 On SlideShare

2005 On SlideShare

I also have most of this presentation in a podcast (I think my recorder battery went dead…), so listen in. Hopefully I will continue to keep this trend of my own, it’s always interesting to look back…

[EDIT 05/12/08]
Here’s some video from our UPA talk:

Me & Dustin speaking @ Dallas UPA from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

As a Designer, I sometimes need to evaluate different technologies and platforms from a Designer’s perspective. Why is it important to get a Designer’s view? As Designers we can quickly be boxed in with inflexible UI layers, unusable sets of standard patterns, and the inability to create a great experience. By reviewing and testing, we can determine the pros and cons of a given technology solution. In honor of Eclipsecon 2008 ;-) I’ve put together a presentation on a popular application platform – the Eclipse RCP.

Eclipse has it’s roots as a development IDE, and while that’s very efficient for developers, for non-developers it’s not very user-friendly. For this particular technology I broke up the potential problems into four groups: Visual Style, Structure, Usability, and Focus. These were four areas where Eclipse had problems, when looking across a large number of Eclipse based applications.

The Designers View of Eclipse:

| View | Upload your own

To be fair, they are trying to fix these issues, and some very smart developer/designers are creating good applications using Eclipse. But, projects without proper UI layer specialists (Designers and Developers) will default to the problems listed out above. From a Designer’s view, it’s not easy to get a great application out of Eclipse.

One great presentation out of Eclipsecon 2008 is from Morten Moeller, titled: “Designing Business and Technical User Interfaces in Eclipse RCP Applications” which basically states current Eclipse User Interfaces could use some work, and how to made them better – with technical examples of how the presentation layer works.

This is not to say that Eclipse, as a platform is not capable of great things, but just that current popular Eclipse patterns that seem to be prevalent across most Eclipse based applications are not great from a Design/usability perspective

Remember, while the Designer’s view is very important (after all I’m a Designer ;-) there are other business needs that weigh the overall solution. Such as: development time, current skill set, scalability, etc…

With experience becoming an important factor in differentiating products, having a flexible UI layer is becoming a major factor when choosing a technology to base your product on, so if you’re part of a team evaluating different technologies, make sure your team takes into account the Designer’s view.