Posts Tagged ‘Blend’
Windows Phone 7 Pie Menu Design StudyAugust 31st, 2010 by David Patrizi
In one of our previous blog articles we talked about the use of pie menus in touch screen interfaces and discussed pros and cons of this kind of interaction. In this article, we are going to show a concrete example of how a pie menu can be used. 
Resurrecting UI Prototypes (Without Creating Zombies) – Part 2: Prototyping with Expression BlendMay 26th, 2010 by Thomas Immich
Keeping the background information of the previous article in mind, assume you want to make use of Blend to design a NUI based on Silverlight or WPF that lets you easily manipulate items on the screen. In the beginning, you won’t even touch the tool at all – you “invent” whatever gesture you think is intuitive to perform this operation. Most likely you do this in your head or on the whiteboard. You discuss and refine the design with your team mates or with potential users. At this stage everything is still low-fidelity and throwing away things isn’t costly yet. As soon as you have a good-enough feeling about the rough design, you start prototyping with higher fidelity. This is to be really sure your idea works. To provoke the intended interaction experience, caring about every single detail is exceptionally important in later prototyping stages.
Resurrecting User Interface Prototypes (Without Creating Zombies) – Part 1: Prototyping Natural User InterfacesMay 20th, 2010 by Thomas Immich
Every user interface designer is familiar with the procedure to some extent: To find out what a user interface needs to look and behave like it’s certainly a good idea to create a prototype and evaluate it with potential users. Users will tell you what’s still nagging them and therefore should be improved before coding starts. So, in the beginning of any UI design process everything is about change – you create a prototype and already expect it to require modifications in order to work alright. As you – and most likely your client, too – want changes to be as cost-efficient as possible, you are better off taking a change-friendly prototyping method or tool. This is especially true in early stages of the project your ideas of potential solutions are rather vague. In this early phase, most often you don’t even know the exact problem for which you are in hunt of a solution. You are still analyzing more than you are designing.
Modern User Interface Design Tools – Part 3: Expression Blend vs. Flex BuilderJune 26th, 2009 by David Patrizi
In the previous part I took a closer look at how and to what extent Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder offer pixel-graphics and vector-graphics tools to enable GUI designers to create modern user interfaces. In addition I outlined the concept of 9-Slice-Scaling, a method to make pixel graphics scalable without any quality loss. In this last part of the series I’m going to give a short example of how the concept is implemented in both tools and finally provide an overall comparison of the two tools to point out their strengths and weaknesses.
Modern User Interface Design Tools – Part 1: Design Marries DevelopmentApril 16th, 2009 by David Patrizi
This series of blog articles deals with the use of GUI development tools by designers and developers, with a particular focus on Microsoft Expression Blend and Adobe Flex Builder. In the first part, I will have a look at the cooperation between designers and developers during GUI creation, describe some issues that can affect their collaboration and point out how GUI design tools can improve the overall design and development workflow. |
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