Our iPhone web app for TV Listings made Apple's Staff pick! Check it out: http://www.apple.com/webapps/

Much thanks to the creative team behind this one: Mike Costantino, Amzed Hussain, John Kilpatrick and a host of others. Read more about their app here: http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/aoltvlistingsforiphone.html

The TV listings app is the latest in a series of apps we've been working on. There are a bunch more to follow, and I'll be sharing them here with you as we get through them.

Next up is AOL Money and Finance's Quotes app. Check it out on your iPhone at iphone.money.aol.com.

Please let me know if you think of something that you think would make a great iPhone app-- maybe we'll make it happen...

Last week a few of us headed to the IxDA conference in Savannah. It was a great time and now that I'm back, I will be sharing some of the happenings with you. The first session we attended was a pre-conference workshop on Agile methods, given by Jeff Patton (at AgileProductDesign.com) and Josh Evnin of ThoughtWorks.

It was a very basic primer on Agile, and included information on other methods of process, such as the waterfall method and the snowman method. You can read about all things agile at Jeff's site (link above). Much emphasis was on speed to market, and how Agile methods can support a faster turnaround on product completion.

We did a "real" agile project, where teams had to work with a "User" to define and develop a product end to end, splitting up tasks appropriately. The products were cars, and they were drawn on a puzzle board so each person could take a piece and then put it together at the end. We were of course terrified of the Homer Simpson factor, an incredibly accurate depiction of what you may end up with if you rely completely on what users think they "want" without reality checks.

The Homer Car:

After a meeting with our "user" (confession, it was me), the team went to work and the "user" got to sit around and wait for the finished product...

It's old news now that House & Garden magazine will no longer be published, the December issue is the last. As far as the website goes, I'm not sure of its fate - but on that site is a page I refer to almost weekly:

Go ahead. Check it out. I'll wait...

Sites We Love


Back yet? See what I mean?

All that design.
One Page.
Possibly about to be killed.
So terrifying.

Get out your bookmarks folders and copy and paste like mad!

Does anyone know what will become of the site?

There's a lot of talk out there right now about Amazon's new device, called Kindle. I love me some gadgets, so I was really excited to check it out and read the reviews.

You see, media storage is a big problem in my life. Those CDs took up too much physical space, along came the iPod and I got rid of those horrible plastic boxes. Much celebration ensued. Books, well, some I want to keep and hold and refer to time and time again, but most of them I don't want to keep. I read it and pass it on to a family member or friend. The promise of not having to get rid of a book after reading it is very tempting to me. I really wanted to love Kindle so much that I could justify the $400 price tag...

When I published my little article on Boxes and Arrows back in ...June? July? (well, a long time ago anyway), I had no idea folks would still be talking about it in November. I've been interviewed twice in the past few weeks about issues around user's scrolling behaviors--it's been alot of fun!

One was recorded for a Boxes and Arrows podcast and can be heard here: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of16

And the other was for this article written by Terry Heaton of AR&D about the evolution of News as a product and how companies should integrate news into their content strategy: News is a Process, Not a Finished Product


I'm enjoying the debate, so keep those opposing thoughts coming...

The third ad in the Sony Bravia color series is out!

I've been a huge fan of the Sony Bravia ad series since Rubberballs first made the rounds. Not only is the song Heartbeats one of my faves, I just remember being stunned by the beauty of all those superballs. I was so psyched that they were real and not computer generated. That simple 2+ minute commerical totally sparked my memory and the memory was sensory complete - I could remember playing with them as a kid, I could feel them in my hands, remember the particular force of their bounce, and their rubbery plastic smell.

God, I'm such a geek.

The second ad in the series is one of my daughter's favorites - I've had to play that thing over and over again. Exploding barrels of paint! Perfection, in mess form.

Anyway, the latest Bravia ad has been released. It's all plasticine bunnies, hopping through Manhattan. An amazing feat of stop-motion animation - it took over 40 animators 3 weeks to film.

Overall, I have such respect for Sony for these ads. They are a celebration of color, not just shots of their TVs on the wall. I could go on and on talking about how the elements of chaos in each one supports the wildness of color, but I dont want to bore you with my analysis. (You're welcome.) I just wanted to share a little beauty in an otherwise tough week. Enjoy:

Play-Doh


Oh, and download the rubberballs ad - it's much better to play it locally. You should probably play it every day. I'm just saying.

Hi folks-- I just wanted to point you over to Boxes and Arrows, where a few months back I published an article about the myth that users don't scroll past the fold line on web pages.

As designers we need to be completely educated about the user behaviors around scrolling in order to save the products we are trying to get people to use. I still hear that folks are trying to cram an insane amount of content above an arbitrary pixel height. (I say arbitrary because it's important to note that the fold itself cant really be accurately pinpointed.) I use some tracking and performance data from AOL sites, TMZ, and a great study done by ClickTale to bolster the case against worrying too much about the fold.

You'll see some really great comments from the design community. I was overwhelmed with the responses because they truly demonstrate what a universal issue this is for designers, and how hard it has been to break through and get clients to believe that users will scroll if the page is designed well and the content is worth it. I hope the article along with the data from ClickTale provides you with some firepower.

And please, add your thoughts to the conversation as well, either here or there.

The other day (week?) someone was in my office talking about a change in design strategy for a product. The reason for the change was that research had shown that their users were parents with limited attention spans due to the distractions of very young children around them.

This conversation stuck in my head and I began to be bothered by it. The reason? I think everything should be designed with this strategy in mind. There isn't anything I can think of that shouldn't be so easy to use that you can't successfully complete your task while being pulled on, jumped on, spilled on, or otherwise tormented by a small child. We can't necessarily know what form the distraction will take because children are cunning little things and will adapt their distraction methods like viruses. But we must design our products with these distractions in mind.

The distractions you design for do not have to be related in any way to actual children of course, but keeping the mindset of just how distracted and busy our users are is what is important. Think about what you are doing right now. You're not just reading this post, you probably have your email up, a couple IM conversations going on, random folks stopping by your office, feeling waves of betrayal over the iPhone price drop, etc. You are thoroughly distracted. While we like to think of ourselves as accomplished multi-taskers, our brains don't actually work that way. We are serial-focusers. We exert micro amounts of focus to all of our activities, one after the other in a rapid-fire manner. When a user is trying to accomplish a task in an environment of distractions, we need to make sure that we present them with a product that is crystal clear when we get that span of micro focus.

This translates to cleaner interfaces, smaller feature sets, and rock solid usability. Nothing new for sure, but remembering to design for distractions shouldn't require a change in design strategy. It should be a given.