Blog

A love for experimenting with technology, a strong aesthetic viewpoint and a mind for the realities of business.

Event review: SF Interaction Design Meetup

07/20/15

Featuring David Merril

Pros:

  • Showcase of a unique design challenges with Sifteo, now 3DRobotics
  • People all over the world have tested Sifteo
  • Interacting with them is a unique experience
  • This TED talk goes into more detail

Cons:

  • More detailed information on the creation of Sifteo would have been helpful
  • How much more does this experience improve people's lives. Would people rather play games on their devices
event review

Event review: PayPal

Guest speakers from PayPal included: Darwin Lui, Damon Bakun, Tony Amidei, Francesco Foo - visual designer and Emma Hoare - interaction designer

Pros:

  • Themes focused on nature (water, bees, flowers) and delightful experiences
  • Be disruptive in non-disruptive ways
  • Rethink products and the product experience
  • Nature can be applied in unique ways, the symbol of growth and underlying design opportunities
  • Don't go right to the computer, take things apart, sketch, take time and effort for these exercises

Cons:

  • Concerns around performance with the elegant animations
  • It would have been nice to see more of the design process
event review

Brand review: eBay

Pros:

  • Thoughtful & innovative campaign: eBay For The Win
  • Beautiful category concept segments
  • Interesting product highlighting

Cons:

  • Lack of consistency:
  • Use of system-oriented terms could confuse users

Summary: eBay should hire me to help improve the user experience with an improved interaction design.

brand

App review: Human

Pros:

  • Beautiful aesthetic
  • Consistent round branding
  • Color cues for different types of activities

Cons:

  • Incorrect data
  • Difficult interaction getting to the activities feed
  • Too many notifications
app review

Event review: User Experience Awards

September 2014: San Francisco, CA

  • Pro: All projects were currently live
  • Pro: Seeing the different take on design problems
  • Pro: Each speaker had a different presentation style and different stories
  • A fair amount of the entries were redesigns

My top 5 favorite presentations

  1. Very clean design, robust and beautiful: Google Material Design
  2. Great flow between tasks, nice animation: Virgin America's redesign
  3. Interesting navigation, reframing the car shopping concept: The new VW.com
  4. Nice identity and storytelling experience: Zone Smart Watch & App
  5. Case study was thoughtful, compelling visual design: Vibin
event

App review: DB (Deutsche Bahn)

Background:

  • DB is the Germany Train app to use abroad
  • A scheduling app listing train stops and types of trains

Pros:

  • Easy to use and reliable train information
  • Simple interface

Cons:

  • Disconnect between the app and the DB terminal kiosk
  • Listing the station stops could be more clear
  • Information for train reservations should be specific
app review

Book review: Microinteractions

Pros:

  • Concepts for simplifying user interaction
  • Making the user experience more enjoyable
  • Great examples of good and bad experiences
  • Solidifies the importance of the details
  • Use of logic diagrams is a great procedure

Cons:

  • More examples for the different types of rules
  • Show a diagram of mutiple microinteractions fitting together
mind map

Website review: Marvel

Pros:

  • Allows users to create interactions between screenshots
  • Test the interaction of the project
  • Helps visualize the user experience and find user flow issues
  • Utilization of Dropbox
  • Great for group collaboration

Cons:

  • Only using dropbox is inconvenient
  • User Experience issues with the way you edit a project
mindmap

Event review: IxDA SF

June 2014: Trulia, San Francisco

  • Event: Hiring into the right interaction design job

Pros:

  • Sharon Cardinal: shared insights in her role as designer and hiring manager at Trulia
  • Danielle Arvanitis: explored his experience associated with hiring into a UX team and making sure it's the right team
  • Nick Cawthon: presented great solid concepts for being successful in the field

Cons:

  • Would be nice to know specific skillsets that are in demand
  • Understanding an organization's UX literacy could be quite difficult
event

Product review: Sketch3

Pros:

  • Good interface except a couple minor items
  • Great color, pattern library
  • Very easy to get design thoughts out
  • Compatible extentions such as framerjs and fontawesome
  • Useful for both a Photoshop and Illustrator replacement
  • Fixes Adobe's common tool panel configuration issues

Cons:

  • Selecting items can be problematic at times and an effective organizational flow is key
  • Exporting function was difficult to understand at first
product

App review: Elevate

Pros:

  • Beautiful, simple interface for daily training
  • Different daily challenges
  • Quick enough to complete brain training in a few minutes
  • Broken up in three different lessons
  • Tracks lesson history

Cons:

  • In-app keyboard letter vicinity could be improved
  • Certain games need to be refined
app

App review: Breeze

Pros:

  • Beautiful, simple interface
  • Innovative and inspiring to use

Cons:

  • Uses quite a bit of battery with location services turned on
  • Too many push notifications
app

App review: Netflix TV redesign

Pros:

  • Improved placement of information and imagery
  • Hierarchy of elements helps the experience

Cons:

  • Points of navigation may not be intuitive for all users
  • Sizing of images are too large in places
app

Event review: Creative Mornings SF

July 2014: AirBNB, San Francisco

Speaker: Helena Price

Pros:

  • Interesting points on the freedom theme
  • Great insight on not getting distracted by what other designers are doing
  • "Don't get distracted" helps motivate me to stay focused on my goals

Cons:

  • More insight into how she transitioned between companies
  • Specifics on small steps to achievements would have been interesting
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