Flyosity: Mac & iPhone Interface Design Blog by Mike Rundle

This morning a good conversation broke out in Twitter, which is not the best medium for real-time conversation, but hey we take what we get. It was concerning this article where Lukas Mathis said that for people who design user experiences, knowing how to code is detrimental to your ability to produce quality, user-centric designs. I greatly disagreed with his article, and we then had a conversation on Twitter spanning many dozens of Tweets.

If you haven't already read his article please do so, then pop back here.

Designers Don't Just Make The Pretty

A user experience designer designs the user experience, obviously... but is it really that obvious? What's the user experiencing when we say "the user experience"? On the web, there are many things that contribute to the user's overall experience using the website or application:

• Look & feel of the application
• Ability of the user to accomplish the tasks they set out to accomplish
• The overall perceived speed of the website or web application
• Expectations being met. If a user thinks X will happen and it doesn't, there's a gulf of execution

These are just a small sampling. So what's part of a quality user experience? Everything is.

The user's experience with your website or application isn't just what the app looks like or what happens when a user clicks a button. It's not just the workflow they navigate through to execute a task. It's everything. Everything that the user does and experiences from the moment they load up your website or application to the moment they leave it is part of the overall user experience. A user experience designer's job is very important and requires having knowledge of many things in order to be effective.

What Should A User Experience Designer Know?

Designing the user's overall experience is not the same as designing the user interface, it's a lot more than that. In my mind, a user experience designer's job includes user interface design, includes designing the workflow to complete tasks and accomplish goals, includes being knowledgeable about usability testing, includes being knowledgeable about accessibility and users with special needs, and includes having knowledge about how the underlying application architecture works.

The best user experience designers are the ones that bring in knowledge from multiple disciplines (design, development, psychology) and put it all together so that the user benefits.

For example, in my Twitter conversation with Lukas, I gave the example of a UX designer needing to know how Ajax works in order to use it effectively. If you don't know how Ajax works or how web server requests work, how can you decide that in a particular situation Ajax would be best for the user's experience? Lukas replied with this tweet:

That's a perfect example of ignoring the code for a better user experience; page refresh would be easier and quicker to implement.

As I pointed out in my next tweet, what Lukas said is actually not true — in many circumstances an Ajax request is literally faster to execute than a full page refresh. Refreshing the full page makes more HTTP requests to the server (to pull CSS & Javascript files, images) however an Ajax request is only sending back a block of text in many circumstances, so it makes far fewer roundtrip requests to the web server. In most cases, an Ajax request to send data and get data back is faster than a full page refresh.

How do I know that? Because as someone who designs the user experience for web applications, I know how HTTP requests work and how Apache responds to a browser's request, I know about what happens at most places within the roundtrip to the server, and I know about what code is executing server-side when I make an Ajax request. I need to know about these things in order to make the call to use Ajax in a certain scenario over a page refresh. Most often when I decide to use Ajax it's because it will simply be faster and will make the application appear more responsive to the user. A big part of the overall user experience is how the user perceives the speed of the application, so I made a user-centered decision to use Ajax because I know it will enhance a user's experience.

If someone only knows how Ajax works from a superficial standpoint ("something happens without the page refreshing"), then when the choice is made to use Ajax instead of a page refresh, that decision is made without full knowledge of how Ajax works, what it's good for, what it's not good for, how it affects application performance, how it impacts application caching infrastructure, etc. It's a decision made without full knowledge of the consequences.

A Master Designer Knows His Tools

Architects don't just draw blueprints, they need to know what the ground is like under the building, what types of weather the region receives, and what building materials work best considering all the variables. They don't just draw, the craft the entire structure, and need a deep understanding of materials and processes in order to effectively do their job.

Chefs don't just put ingredients together and hope for a delicious dish, they have a deep knowledge of food and how things taste to people in certain situations.

Potters aren't just sculpting clay blocks into beautiful forms, but also firing the clay to keep it in its shape forever. They need to know about glazes and temperature and the science of firing in order to create their works of art.

User experience designers on the web need to know the environment and medium too, just like architects, chefs, and potters. A web designer is someone who designs for the web and knows the HTML & CSS needed to make their designs into real interfaces. If they don't know HTML & CSS, then they're not really designing for the web because they're not designing for the constraints of the medium. So what happens when someone who considers themselves a web designer doesn't have an in-depth knowledge of the medium? They make poor decisions. Decisions made without full knowledge of how their decision impacts the overall user experience. Here's a scenario:

Designer A hands HTML & CSS developer B a mockup of an interface. It's a complex interface and every single corner of every box in the design is rounded and has 3 different borders on it, plus a drop shadow. Every typeface in the mockup is a font the designer just bought, not any default web fonts that users will have.

In this scenario, because the designer isn't familiar with the constraints of the web, they are making design choices that negatively impact the quality of the user's overall experience. To execute rounded corners on a box — one that will expand with the content inside of it — you need additional HTML markup, CSS, and images to make it happen. Multiple borders and border styles? That's more markup and images. Drop shadows? That's a whole bunch of extra transparent PNGs. Custom fonts? You're either using a Flash image replacement method of dynamically-generated images for each one.

Tons of additional markup, images, Flash files, and Javascript just to execute an effect that doesn't make anything better or simpler for the user. Many more kilobytes of data needed to be loaded by the user before they can see the page as it was intended. Additional milliseconds or seconds of load time just because a designer with no knowledge of the web medium didn't design with the environment or constraints of the medium in mind.

Does this mean you can't execute a beautiful interface on the web? Of course not, look at how many beautiful websites and web applications are out there that also work beautifully, too. But a graphically heavy website or web application that is bulky and slow? That has visual effects that don't better the overall user experience? That's not so beautiful, and that's not how you design for the web.

You Don't Gotta Be An Expert

To understand how an Ajax request works you don't need to be able to write the Javascript needed for an Ajax request by hand off the top of your head, or wax technical on Apache process handling, but you do need to understand it fully enough so that you can make educated decisions about its usage. Architects don't choose one material over another just because one looks cooler, they make the decision based on many factors like structural rigidity, price, regional scarcity, etc. They know enough about the material to make an educated decision about whether to use it.

A user experience designer on the web needs to know enough about the environment and the web medium to make quality, user-centric decisions. If a UX designer wants to use a complicated interaction paradigm like drag-and-drop, then they should know the programatic constraints of its usage on the web. Drag-and-drop on the web isn't like drag-and-drop in a desktop app, so you have to know why it's different, how it's different, and how to correctly use drag-and-drop in order to effectively implement it. If you're obsessed with your application's speed then knowledge about how many kilobytes of Javascript it takes to implement DnD is important. You also have to be knowledgeable about how an impaired person uses the web and how to make a drag-and-drop experience still usable for them. You have to know how to handle a situation where a user has Javascript turned off.

Making what seems to simply be a "design decision" never is. It's a decision based on numerous factors encompassing design, development, architecture, usability, and accessibility. A user experience designer's job is to make decisions based on the entire scenario and environment in order to be as effective as possible. Benefiting a user's experience in one aspect, while negating that benefit in another, is the result of not being knowledgeable enough about what you're deciding.

...But It Helps To Be An Expert

Having sufficient knowledge to make a good, user-centric decision is great, but having a more in-depth, advanced knowledge is the best scenario. If you're a user experience designer and you want to use drag-and-drop in an interface, it helps if you can prototype the full interaction to get a feel for the timing and overall experience of the feature. There are some things you just can't know about until you're using a real, live interface, and it's extremely valuable to be able to build a prototype of a real interface to flush those things out early in the design process.

As Apple's operating systems have evolved, so too have their paradigms for user interaction. In Leopard and in many newer Apple applications, animations and advanced user interaction scenarios are used as part of the overall user experience. If a UX designer at Apple has no idea how CoreAnimation works at any level, and they can't use an application like Keynote or Flash to at least prototype an animation effect, then they can't truly express their vision for an interface. In fact, Visual Interface Designers at Apple are expected to know either Flash or Keynote in order to prototype their interfaces. Wait... an interface designer is expected to know how to code ActionScript in order to do their job? Yup, and if you don't, you can't be as effective as other interface designers on your team who do.

Take a look at the folks who are creating cutting-edge Mac and iPhone applications — they're designers with intimate knowledge of how their interfaces are implemented and developed. Designers who are learning Cocoa so they can prototype iPhone interfaces since the key component of good iPhone application design isn't just the visual design, but the interaction. These are the folks who are most successful on the iPhone — the ones who know both design and development and are intimately aware of the constraints of both. Look at the iPhone! It's tiny, low-powered, and doesn't have a keyboard. The entire device is one big constraint, so you have to know what these constraints are to be successful on the platform.

What's A User Experience Designer Mean To You?

There are so many titles for what people do on the web nowadays it's just ludicrous. You've got interface designers, interface engineers, visual interface designers, UI developers, information architects and user experience designers. Then you've got usability engineers, usability testers, web designers, and web developers. With so many titles, and so many people whose skills span a variety of these separate disciplines, where does one know where a UX designer stops and a UI developer begins?

All I can discuss is what's made me more successful in my career, and that's learning as much as possible about the medium in which I work. On the web that means I design workflows, interaction scenarios, interface design mockups, full HTML/CSS/Javascript prototypes, and occasionally implement these prototypes into the backend and hook it up to a database. I started out designing for the web and knowing HTML and Javascript, then I learned CSS, jQuery & Prototype libraries, then PHP, MySQL and some Ruby. I continued my education wherever possible because it's impossible to be too familiar with something when you're trying to make the most educated decision you possibly can. The more information you have access to, real-life experience you can fall back on, and in-depth knowledge you have the better your overall decisions are and the better and more user-friendly your websites and web applications are.

You can't be too knowledgeable when making an important, user-facing decision. The more knowledge you have the more likely it is that you'll see a decision from all possible sides.

Categories: Application Design

It's an interesting experience, diving head-first into the unknown, trying to soak up all the information you possibly can on the way down into the abyss of Mac application development. Everything is new, most of it is documented, and the rest can be learned by reading as much as possible and asking for help when you're lost.

I'm new to Objective-C, new to Cocoa, but have been a hardcore Mac aficionado since 1996 when I got my first Mac — a Performa 6200 — so I have "Apple-ness" running through my veins which is extremely helpful. Creating a beautiful and successful application for the Mac usually means that it looks as if the engineers at Apple could have created something similar, so the expectations are extremely high as far as interface polish is concerned. I'm learning just how much effort goes into a beautiful Cocoa app, and it sure is a lot.

As far as the development process is concerned, it's a big crap shoot. I worked on piecing together the user interface components early in the development process so I could get a better feel for how the app behaves, but making the interface actually function can't happen until X is written, which is dependent upon Y code, which I'm confused about until I do an hour or so of Googling, so it's a chicken and the egg problem. Fortunately, I've been working hard on a lot of the application glue code so that in the next few days I'll be hooking up the interface and giving things some real-world usage.

I've been coding for a long time, but have never really learned C, so initially writing Objective-C was difficult because not only did I have to learn ObjC's syntax, I also had to give myself a crash course on pointers, header files and memory management at the same time. After being absorbed in the Cocoa development world for a few months, I've realized that reading other people's code is the single greatest way for me to get acclimated to "how things are" when developing for the Mac. How to structure your classes, how to load NIBs, the best way to store user data, all these things I learned by pouring over open source Cocoa code I've found online or in Apple's example applications. Seeing how other people have conquered similar problems is probably the best shot in the arm out there.

Finding Other Developers

One thing that has made a huge impact in my ability to learn Cocoa is having a group of people I know can potentially help me if I get too confused along the way. Here's a short list of people who have helped tremendously:

• My buddy Ameir, developer of Guidance
• Matt Patenaude & Laurent Baumann, the developer-designer duo behind Bowtie
• Todd Ditchendorf, developer of Fluid
• Chris Hanson
• Brandon Walkin, UX Designer at Marketcircle
• Ben Barnett, developer of Base
• Andrew Wilkinson, designer of Logbook
• Jonatan Castro Fernández
• Ruben Bakker, developer of Mailplane

So how did I find all these people? Mainly through being a Mac application connoisseur — downloading everything that comes out — and then finding the brilliant people that created them. Twitter has been extremely helpful, in fact I follow every one of those people on Twitter so I can try to absorb their offhand tips and tricks. Emailing people is good too — you'd be surprised how helpful and friendly people are if you just send them a nice email. I've always made an effort to email people out of the blue and commend them on the work they've done, and my Mac development experience has been no different.

So What Am I Working On?

I don't really believe in nebulous descriptions of work-in-progress, written to pique curiosity. I'm working on my first Mac application, an application that I've had in my head (in some form or another) since 2005, and I'm building it mainly to fill my own needs, but I'm hoping that it fills the needs of others, too. Like most Mac applications, you'll be able to download and use it for free, but additional features/functionality will need to be paid for.

I'm working hard on it, and details will surely be coming soon, but for now I think I should shut my mouth and get back to work! Nothing is worse than vaporware.

Categories: Mac OS X

Apple's paradigm for indicating network connectivity is nicely-detailed globe icon with crisscrossing wires across it — you can see it in the System Preferences for Network settings. Wolfgang recently rejuvenated this UI analogy in his work on LittleSnapper's interface. I thought it'd be fun to do my version of this icon and step you through the process as I go.

Spheric Realism

Before getting into the tutorial's steps I thought it'd be good to go over some key techniques for creating a realistic sphere.

Designing a nice, shiny ball has many applications and is a nice skill to have in your back pocket. When designing a ball that's meant to look as round as possible here are some things to keep in mind:

• What material is it? Glass, plastic, anodized aluminum? The material of an object is its most important attribute as that defines how it is supposed to reflect and transmit light in the real world. Most textures on shiny spheres are semi-reflective glass or metal, rarely do you see a rough metal used as the material.
• It reflects light inside too. Not only do you have to worry about the global OS light but you have to keep in mind that light gets reflected inside the sphere as well, bouncing around the walls. Depending on the type of material of your sphere and the transmittance properties it will look different. Opaque material lets no light pass through so there will be no internal reflections.
• Is it totally round? Designing a perfectly spherical ball is not necessary all the time, sometimes all you want is a mostly-rounded button or disk. These have similar properties as spheres but the edges will have light reflections and shadows rather than the top or bottom of the ball. Spheres don't really have edges to catch the light since, um, they're spheres!

Lots to think about! Don't remember high school physics and how a material's refractive index changes light passing through it? Don't worry, just follow along and we'll have you building spheres in no time.

Step 1: Draw Your Base Circles

To make the globe look three-dimensional, it'll take more than one crack at Photoshop's Layer Styles which means a little onion-skinning will be necessary.

We're designing our icon at 256px so get your new document open and use the Ellipse Tool to make a circle sized so that it allows for a shadow underneath it. We're applying two layer styles — Gradient Overlay and Inner Shadow — in order to get the basic lighting in place. The Gradient Overlay is radial and I used the mouse to move it down to the bottom of the sphere representing the light passing through the top of the sphere, reflecting off the bottom. The Inner Shadow was also positioned at the top to give it some initial radial shading.

I need to apply some additional effects to the base circle so I duplicated my previous circle, turned the Fill to 0%, and re-opened my Layer Styles. I gave this second circle an Inner Glow with Multiply blending (half opacity) and an additional Inner Shadow positioned only at the top with Soft Light blending.

Step 2: Lay Your Shadows

Before we add the final lighting to our sphere, let's position its shadow first.

I drew a small ellipse at the bottom of the sphere and filled it black. Next I converted it to a Smart Object and applied a 73px horizontal Motion Blur and a 12.5px Gaussian Blur. To darken the center a bit more since that's where the sphere is "touching" the surface I duplicate my previous shadow and shrink it down a bit.

Step 3: Circular Highlights

Realistic lighting and highlights can't be fully reproduced using Layer Styles, you'll need to draw some more ovals.

Draw a circle about 3/4 the height of your previous ones and align it a few pixels from the top of the main circle. Make sure it has a 0% Fill and give it a Radial Gradient layer style from white to transparent with the white directly on top.

Now convert it to a Smart Object and give it a 3.9px Guassian Blur to soften it a bit. This represents the main OS light hitting the top of our sphere. (Note: Others may have a different preference regarding how blurred they want their top highlight. Some people won't want to blur it at all. Do whatever you think looks best.)

To make the center of our top highlight a little brighter, let's duplicate the layer and shrink it down proportionally. Now we have two ovals at the top of the sphere representing our top-down lighting.

For the bottom-up lighting, duplicate your larger highlight you created, flip it vertically, and move it down to the bottom of the sphere. Change the Blending to Soft Light. Here's what it looks like:

At this point we're done with our sphere but we still have the lines to draw, so let's get to it.

Step 4: Draw The Network Lines & Hubs

The network lines proved to be a little tricky to get just right. Here's how I did them:

1. Use the Ellipse Tool to draw a circle that is approximately the same size as your main sphere.
2. Free Transform your circle to flatten it out a bit.
3. Rotate it a bit on its center axis, make it look like a hula hoop wrapped around your globe.

I hopped into the Layer Styles and gave it a 2px white stroke with Blend Mode of Overlay. I also gave it 4px Inner & Outer Glows both white. Doesn't look like much yet, but here's what we've got at this stage:

I'm going to use this loop as both a foreground and background network line, so I duplicated the layer and hid the second one for now.

I used my Eraser Tool with a big brush that's fluffy on the edges so I can keep the edges of the loop anti-aliased as it hits the sides of our sphere. On your foreground loop, erase the left side completely, and erase just enough right at the top and bottom of your loop so that it fades into the sides of the sphere. ow for the background loop, erase the right side and use the same technique for the top and bottom edges.

To make the lines look as if they're sitting on top of the globe more, I duplicated each layer, gave it a slight Gaussian Blur, and then nudged it a few pixels away from its twin. I could've achieved this look with an Inner Glow, but hey, there's different ways of doing what you want in Photoshop.

I've now done this a few more times (foreground and background loops) and we're done with this step.

Final Step: Adding The Network Nodes

At this stage I think it looks pretty good, but we're not quite finished yet. Where our network lines cross we need some glowing network nodes. Fortunately, these are really easy. Take your Ellipse Tool, draw the node, fill it white, convert to Smart Object. Then, give it a little Gaussian Blur and change the blending and opacity appropriately. We're done!

Our final icon is on the left. On the right is a slightly tweaked example showing what you can do by changing some Blending Modes just for kicks.

Download The PSD

Reading about Layer Styles isn't that appealing, so if you want to check out exactly how the objects look, download the PSD all zipped up right here: you're free to do whatever you want with it.

Categories: Icons Tutorial

The newest product in the Realmac Software stable is LittleSnapper, their all-in-one screenshot and image organization utility, aka, their answer to Skitch's dominance in the screenshot annotation market. Wait, there's a market for that? Apparently there is!

Realmac makes some of the nicest Mac software around, and you have to look no further than RapidWeaver to see the effort they take in crafting their application's interfaces and icons.

I recently downloaded the app and pulled out some of the beautiful, high-resolution icons they use within the application. I love the network globe icon as it's subtly different than the standard Mac OS X version, as well as the Flickr icon they put together.

Update! I'm not sure how I missed this one, but the icons and UI work for LittleSnapper was done by my very talented friend Wolfgang Bartelme. He's also got a new iPhone game out called Dashball that looks fantastic.

Categories: Icons

One of the most anticipated web-based applications of this past year was the debut of 280 Slides, a presentation application whose interface matches or rivals Apple Keynote. Beyond it having a beautiful (and desktop-like) interface was the architecture that powered the app. It wasn't written like other web applications, it was written using Cappuccino, an open source application framework that marries the elegance and sophistication of Cocoa programming using Objective-C with Javascript allowing Cocoa programmers to create web-based applications the same way they'd write normal desktop apps.

The 280 Slides interface isn't like normal web applications — it's designed to look like a desktop-class Mac application with typical Mac-like interface stylings, and more specifically, it was designed so that Keynote users would feel at home.

The extremely talented Miles Ponson designed the 280 Slides application icon as well as the entire user interface and was kind enough to answer a few questions I had regarding his work with the 280 North team.

Me: So Miles, how'd you get hooked up with the 280 North guys?

Miles: Well, almost a year ago, I got an email from John Hering about a UI project to design for developers who worked with the iPhone team. I didn't know a lot until I had a video conference with Francisco and Ross. and then I got really interested in designing the User Interface for 280Slides.

Me: For the application's interface, it sounds like it was important to make it look as "Mac-like" as possible, as if a Mac application suddenly landed in your browser. Have you worked on the UI for Mac software in the past? How did the process of designing a browser-based "desktop" application work compared to normal web-based design projects?

Miles: I started to design icons for desktop customization a few years ago, just for fun, and I really loved it. I enjoyed drawing my ideas and then share the shiny icon with everyone to enjoy. And then I started working more seriously for software developers, and open-source such as OpenOffice project.

I did not find any huge difference between a desktop and web-based app, simply because 280Slides is built on a powerful foundation, Cappuccino, that makes 280Slides amazingly behave and work the same way as a desktop class Mac application and therefore, makes the task of designing UI elements natural, as if it would be for a regular app. It worked the same for me. The toolbar icons are in 32 pixels, the buttons in 3 elements, etc... It's just great!

Me: When it came time to integrate it into the application, what was that like? Did you hand over PNGs or any HTML/CSS? How did you have to slice up the various UI widgets, if at all?

Miles: When the time has come to integrate everything, you have to slice the pizza, the buttons must be in 3 elements, left corner, right corner and 1 pixel wide middle, the HUD window was in 7 elements, the top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right corners, bottom-center and top center part, and body middle part. When it comes to slice all the elements, I got some sweat on the forehead and a load of tiny 1x30 windows open everywhere in Photoshop. The hardest is to keep track of all the elements, put them in assigned folders and make sure that you did not forgot a piece of the puzzle, hehe. I did not hand any kind of code over though. The 280 North team made an incredible job at coding everything.

Me: Thanks Miles!

(See more of Miles' work at Californian Design or follow him on Twitter.)

Categories: Apple Icons Interview