Cooper Journal: Bringing sanity to swat-team design projects

cooper.com: "In a perfect world, interaction design would begin when a product was still just a twinkle in a venture capitalist’s eye. In reality, many software products make it all the way through the development cycle with little thought to the users’ experience, and when executives, sales people, or QA testers finally get their hands on the functioning product and start sounding the alarm bells, interaction designers are brought in to clean up the mess. With increasing demand for design “swat teams” to rescue fully developed but flawed software that is scheduled to ship within months or even weeks, the critical question becomes: how can you avoid getting caught up in the chaos that frequently permeates “crisis-mode” engagements?..."

This is an excellent article from an authoritative source. Read the full article...

Amazon finally eliminates tabs in favor of menus

It's the end of an era. Tabs are gone, long live drop-menus! Amazon has launched a redesign that more appropriately organizes their store sections into primary left-hand navigation with sub-menus. This is a vast improvement to the lonely few tabs that had been up at the top for a while now. That single giant drop menu is thankfully gone as well. Amazon was the dot com tab innovator, so it must've been hard to let got. But hey, there aren't any more white iPods anymore either. So, I guess if you have a site with white tabs, you are really behind the times now? ;-P

Icon Design: Anti-Aliasing

This is a great how-to article covering the process for tweaking vector art in pixel-preview mode so that the 16x16 versions of the icons do not suffer in quality compared to the larger sizes you may be targeting.

Cover Flow and the scrolling horizontal subnav at the new Apple.com

37signals has a thoughtful post on the proliferation of the Coverflow UI metaphor: "As the world gets iPhonified and Leopardized, get ready for more Cover Flow (video), the scrolling interface with forward/backward arrows that mimics a CD collection or jukebox selection..." As they point out how aspects of the horizontal scrolling UI have been incorporated into the new Apple.com, they summarize it all well: "At least there’s more conventional text links in the footer."



I think that is an important takeaway. Coverflow is one of many 'views' that you can choose to enable within iTunes. As variations on these newer navigation models start to hit the web, it will continue be important to offer multiple ways to get to the same content. And IMHO, the Coverflow interface as demonstrated in the iPhone port is the most usable version I've seen. It skips the file list below the images, and allows you to interact directly with the thumbnails, flipping albums over to see their contents. Until iTunes can do this too, I will fully understand why Coverflow gets slammed so much.

read more | digg story

Google Analytics launches new reporting interface design

The new UI looks nice. Here are some highlights: It takes advantage of full browser width; it has a customizable dashboard; larger cleaner graphs; and the ability to email and export reports. I'm looking forward to digging deeper into this upgrade.

UPDATE: mashable.com has just posted a very in-depth look at the new UI complete with many screen shots.