A few thoughts combined today which saw me rapidly put together this initial idea for an iPhone weather app. It’s a hot day here in Melbourne so lots of folks have been checking the weather to see how hot it is and when a change is due. People can get pretty obsessed by the weather, certainly all the users I tested when working on White Pages loved to know what the forecast was and I must admit it’s the first thing I check in the morning so I know what to wear when I hop on the bike and head off to work.
Recently I saw a website that presented the days temperatures on a line graph and I really liked the concept, it’s much nicer to have the days temperature shown on a line graph so you can instantly see how it’s trending. I can’t remember what site I saw it on (I’ll update this post when I find it) but the execution of it wasn’t great. So I thought I’d design something similar for the iPhone (to add to all the weather apps out there) and here is my first draft:
iPhone Weather App Concept
I’ve got a few other ideas I’d like to try incorporating too, like:
Compressing the mornings and elongating the daylight hours – how many people care about the wee hours really. This would make the more relevant information prominent.
Adding the textual forecast information in one of the corners, e.g “Partly cloudy. Winds north to….”
Adding a tiny right-hand side column showing the forecast for the coming few days.
This to me is the ideal home screen for a weather app – all the information I want to know prioritised and presented in an easy to absorb way. What do you think – like it or not? Should I try and develop it? Got any suggestions?
This presentation from Steve Krug, author of the wonderful book “Don’t make me think“, is a concise and easy to follow overview of usability testing. Lots of simple, practical things in it for anyone building software/websites who want to create great user experiences. There are some things you would have no doubt heard before but there are a lot of thoughts and approaches that I found were new and valuable for me including:
Give up on validity – the usability problems will be so obvious that you won’t need numbers to validate them. Once you give up on validity then you don’t need to worry about questionnaires or surveys. This will save considerable time in the sessions.
Just give me one morning a month – I love this idea the most. I’ve often been in the situation where I just can’t seem to convince the client to do user testing so the idea of asking for one morning a month is great – who can refuse that!
Only communicate the top 3 problems to stakeholders, if you tell them everything they will be tempted to solve the low hanging fruit and not address the most important usability issues.
Twitter is often written off (by those who don’t use it) as a personal tool, a way to socialise with friends and mainly for the young kids. I’m 33, married with 2 kids and I use it predominantly as a professional tool. Sure I use it socially as well (who doesn’t want to know where to get the best coffee or a good cheap meal) but I predominantly use it to stay up-to-date on industry news, to ask my colleagues questions and to hear about what they are working on, struggling with etc.
I’m a huge advocate of user-centered design approaches and techniques and have been ever since I was introduced to them at The Hiser Group. So the recent article Discount Usability by the guru himself Jacob Nielson I think is timely reminder about some of these user centered design approaches and the value they offer. In the article Jacob reflects on the last 20 years in usability and design and how far it has come. Some quotes from it that I find particularly relevant in my day to day work include:
“Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristic evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design.”
“Discount usability often gives better results than deluxe usability because its methods drive an emphasis on early and rapid iteration with frequent usability input.”
“Most design teams still don’t believe in paper prototyping, preferring instead to spend considerable time creating elaborate design representations before they start collecting user feedback.”
I can’t emphasise enough how valuable it will be.
I found this short overview article about the Agile development process nicely written and a great summary of why Agile came about and what it’s focus is:
I’m working on a Register, Sign up, Join or whatever you think best to call it process for an online application. Where I’m at now (after deciding to go with “Join” by the way) is what’s the best process for those who have forgotten their password. As I currently see it (from testing some) there are three main ways to do it (please let me know if there are others worth considering) and these are:
Emailing the current password to the user,
Emailing a new password to the user and asking them to change this when they come back to the site, and
Emailing the user a link which they click on and then reset their password on the website.
Now my preference is for the easiest option, number 1, in that it is the easiest and simplest user experience. I do however realise it’s not the most secure but this is where it gets murky for me. I realise that emails are not very secure and can be easily intercepted but my feeling is that if someone can intercept an email then none of those proposed approaches is secure so go with the easiest for the user.
The only thing I can think of is that in options 2 and 3 the password is not actually known by the service – that it is somehow encrypted in the database and can not be pulled out and converted to text as such?
Your thoughts, preferences, views and expertise would be appreciated.
