Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it.

A team of researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition.

This video will show you simple methods for taking the idea for your next app, and getting it on paper. From there, you can utilize various software to make your prototype a reality. Adobe Illustrator ªªhttp://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator.html isºº one solution for this. Other tools used in the video are Balsamiq ªªhttp://www.balsamiq.com/ andºº Inkscape http://inkscape.org/.

Be sure to check out the Nokia Icon Toolkit ªªhttp://nokia.ly/Aj0pR8 forºº some ready-made icons you can use in your app. With the Visual design stencilsªªhttp://nokia.ly/w5hqIO youºº can easily sketch how your app would look like.

The desktop remains central to our everyday work and play, despite all the excitement around tablets, TV’s and phones. So it’s exciting for us to innovate in the desktop too, especially when we find ways to enhance the experience of both heavy “power” users and casual users at the same time. The desktop will be with us for a long time, and for those of us who spend hours every day using a wide diversity of applications, here is some very good news: 12.04 LTS will include the first step in a major new approach to application interfaces.

Welcome to Android Design, your place for learning how to design exceptional Android apps.

The Nokia N9 UI represents the next generation of platforms and mobile interactions. This section introduces the concepts and principles that have shaped the Nokia N9 UI framework

I love the magically mundane virtual real world of Google Streetview, and like others I’ve longed for my 15 frames of blurry low-res Street View fame. So I’ve been wondering, how can I get into Street View without having to stalk the car and chase it down? Actually, I don’t just want to appear in Street View, I want to play in it and add things to it too. And I want to be able to invite my friends to join me on the street. I want to use Street View for more than looking at a random piece of the past. I want to use Street View as a place to make alternative presents and possible futures.

Timeline is just one example of how companies can tap into the power of narrative to communicate with customers on a meaningful level. Recently, my team found inspiration in an unlikely source: health care. The USC Body Computing Conference 5.0 highlighted organizations that are blurring the lines between medicine and entertainment to change how consumers view their health. I asked Karten Design’s resident storyteller, Anne Ramallo, to expand on what our designers and researchers took away from the event.

Armchair interface-design critics like me love to kvetch about tablet apps that don't quite work perfectly. But UIs for medical devices have much higher stakes. Aïmago, a medical tablet developed at EPFL's Science Park, rises to the challenge of accurately diagnosing burn victims by imaging the wounds with a laser to generate a real-time map of tissue damage based on blood flow. To quote Aïmago's CEO, Michael Friedrich, "It works like radar for red blood cells."

Sorry if that's harsh, but I'm with John Gruber: These spit-polished masterpieces of magical thinking are the tech-elite version of LOLcat videos. They make you feel warm and fuzzy for a minute or two and...that's about it. As Gruber scathingly puts it, "We've seen Minority Report already. Imagine if [Microsoft] instead spent the effort that went into this movie on making something, you know, real, that you could actually go out and buy and use today."

On behalf of the team, I want to thank everyone for their active engagement on the Start screen blogs over this past week. We have been following all of the comments and responding as much as we can. We know major changes like this can be controversial and we are looking forward to continuing this dialog with you. I wanted to address some of the specific topics that have been brought up so far as they pertain to the design. I know this doesn’t address all of your questions, but rest assured that we are listening and will be continuing this ongoing conversation.

Collection of iOS UI patterns

Casey’s Contraptions came out for iPad only in May. Since then, you and your partner in crime have been working on making it run on the iPhone. That’s 3 months for those of you counting. So what has taken this long? Wasn’t it a straight port? Lots of shared code? Just shrink the images and go? Well…

Gamification is a polarizing and divisive topic with many proponents and vocal skeptics and cynics. But it is not bullshit. Gamification is real and its benefits are tangible. Gamification is here to stay.

My talk was on building an application that rescued princesses. The goal was to give interaction designers some insight into how game design might be applied to the domain of more utilitarian applications. The talk was recorded and should be up sometime this week. When it appears online, I'll link to the video from this post.

CJ from ZOMGitsCJ found a video on vimeo about Nokia’s 8 perspective on design.

Watch to see the processes that goes into designing a Nokia phone.

The formula for the perfect game may be an area of hot discussion, but most would argue that games that are easy to get into and difficult to put down goes along the right lines. Players' early experience of a game is critical: this is the period in which they're making up their minds whether to devote more time, and often money, to the rest of it. 

So how do we make games with a polished early experience? Let's take some lessons from a game which I think does it incredibly well, PopCap's Plants Vs Zombies. 

Games are made of verbs. Run, jump, punch, crouch. Hand held controllers are able to simulate the input of the player to use those verbs in a rather precise way, be it on/off or analog. And as developers, designing around verbs is a pretty straightforward affair which we have been doing since the first game was played. But when it gets to adverbs, the emotional variables of a verb, neither the controller or developer seems to be aware of what to do with them beyond pure visuals.

Enter motion controls. While initially it is the verbs we assign to the gestures, such as swing a sword, we quickly find out that they just don’t quite match up the crisply defined input of a controller.  Motion Controls also lack a tactile sense of feedback in many cases, making all those verbs feel hollow when we don’t feel the physical reaction. It is a fun gimmick, but we quickly grow tired of the theatrics and plug our plastic hands back into the machine.

So if verbs aren’t best used for motion controls, how can we use them as adverbs and adjectives?

Everything I ever needed to know about animation, I learned from watching Looney Tunes.

Seriously.

Sure, I went to school. I learned HOW to animate there and from other sources, but none of that taught me what I needed to know about animation as much as watching Bugs outsmart Elmer, Daffy play the second banana, Foghorn Leghorn fumble about, or Wile E. Coyote fall to yet another demise.

The Nokia N9 UI represents the next generation of platforms and mobile interactions. This section introduces the concepts and principles that have shaped the Nokia N9 UI framework.

Just like we did with the original MeeGo handset UI deep dive back in June in last year, we’re back again with an up close and personal look at the user interface and usage paradigm running on the lovely N9. For the curious among us, Nokia have provided an extensive consumer facing page to demo the N9 over at swipe.nokia.com and a more technical/developer focused page for those that care for a little more detail and less “shiny”.

MMOs are games where you play combat primarily in the user interface rather than the game world.
I think this is best realised in the classic ‘standing in the fire’ error of new raiders: essentially people stand in the fire because it is an element of playing in the game world, where levelling-up has trained those players to instead play in the interface. Combat is in the cooldowns; you watch timers, health bars, debuff bars, and only when you get to raiding or the more ambitious small group dungeons do you need to start looking into the game world too, in order to step out of the fire, dodge the laser beam, jump over the furious shrew of ruin.

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

Originally a waterfall shop, we transitioned to Agile development about two years ago. We entered the process largely blind and have had to feel our way in the dark until we found processes that worked for each team (you can read more about our transition here). Now entering our third year with Agile we’re continually trying to improve the efficiency, productivity and velocity of the various teams. Levels of Agile adoption span the full spectrum across our 6 Scrum teams. Some teams are still working to get beyond the gated approach of various phases and approval cycles while other teams are beginning to break down the silos of roles and focus on team-wide problem solving and velocity.

During Lift 11 in Geneva, researchers from Nokia Research Center Lausanne organized a co-creation workshop with a small group of conference participants.

The session focused on understanding how the contextual insights of users could contribute to the evolution of the mobile user experience

My son Eli has been using iPad apps since he was one and we have about 50 toddler apps. With the big caveat that this post is based off essentially a sample size of one, here are some toddler app user interface guidelines.

Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.

You must be living under the rock to not to have noticed something called CES (Consumer Electronics Show) is happening in Las Vegas right now and something that has the bloggers sphere excited about is Android 3.0 aka “honeycomb” the tablet version of Android. It certainly is impressive from the videos we have seen. We instantly thought about the MeeGo tablet UI and started comparing. So what we where curious about was what you preferred and why. Of course the MeeGo UI is pre- alpha and the Android 3.0 is only a sneak peak. But we are still interested what your first impressions are when comparing the two.

If you check out this link you’ll see a flash presentation of a MeeGo tablet UI from Evolve III Maestro’s Slate, you” see something quite beautiful.

The MeeGo Maestro Slate from Evolve III has an interactive panoramic homescreens full of non-restricted widgets, Swipe up for apps, Swipe down for multitasking/notifications. There’s also album art cover flow style, and very neat photo viewing options with normal thumbnail, perspective and bottom bar thumbnails.

What I’ll be showing you is how to have perfect working web forms with stunning visuals to produce the desired form for you every time!

I’ll be taking you through the core principles, and making your web forms stand out from the rest! At the end of it all you can see many examples of stunning web forms across the net.

As I've said before, good UI and readable, maintainable code don't mix. But lately I've been inspired to revisit this topic, because it's an idea that has been popping up in other venues as well

Kinect is a new video game system that is fully controlled by bodily movements. It's vaguely similar to the Wii, but doesn't use a controller (and doesn't have the associated risk of banging up your living room if you lose your grip on the Wii wand during an aggressive tennis swing).

Kinect observes users through a video camera and recognizes gestures they make with different body parts, including hands, arms, legs, and general posture. The fitness program, for example, is fond of telling me to "do deeper squats," which it can do because it knows how my entire body is moving. Analyzing body movements in such detail far exceeds the Wii's capabilities, though it's still not going to put my trainer down at the gym out of work.

The men’s lifestyle publication Thrillist has rolled out a new site design. Thrillist’s design team put its 12 million-user website under the microscope for nearly a year before unveiling the new look.

A complete redesign can be high stakes for a large site. Digg 4 earlier this year showed what can go wrong in the rollout of a new user experience (in Digg’s case, a noisy uproar and traffic dive). Twitter, on the other hand, this year launched a redesign that enhanced user experience with few snags.

Mashable got a sneak peek at Thrillist’s new design, along with the scoop on what the inside of a massive art project looks like. Read on for the anatomy of this full web makeover.

Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching

The goal of a software product is to serve human beings. A good software product caters to the user’s whims, even if it means doing something hard and technically complicated just to save the user one click while he is watching pictures of lolcats. The way a good software product treats the user is kind of like the way a butler treats his master

First, the paper magazine was crammed into the little iPad frame. In form of a PNG slide show. To compensate for the lack of interactive logic, this pretty package was provided with a fruity navigation. In the end it was spiced with in-app links, plucked with a couple of movies and salted with audio files (”interactive”). Then it was off to marketing. And it sold 24,000 copies. Dammit. It’s the Nineties all over again.

Over the last two months we have been working on several iPad projects: Two news applications, a social network and a word processor. We worked on iPad projects without ever having touched an iPad. One client asked us to “start working on that tablet thing” even before we knew whether the iPad was real. The question Are we designing desktop programs, web sites or something entirely new? has been torturing us until that express package from New York finally crossed our door sill. A quick write up of design insights before and after the appearance of the iPad at our office.

Schnelles Prototyping durch Drag&Drop, komplett klickbare Wireframes, Usability Testing und effiziente Kommunikation im Team - das sind die Möglichkeiten von pidoco°!