Texts are important parts of most user interfaces, be it, e.g., as form field labels or longer help texts. This article is aimed at providing a common introduction to the topic „choosing the right font”. It contains some hints an pointers that simplify the search for the right typeface.

To our great delight and surprise, our animated Facility Manager Prototype and respective Blog article was used as demonstration and reference material at UXCamp Europe 2011. In regard of the apparent interest in the topic this article picks up the issue yet again, focusing on scientific considerations of the past years.
Indeed, animations have become an integral part in today’s modern applications, especially the iPhone and Co. Having this said, it astonishes that scientific efforts are still in fledgling stages and that the few existing approaches vaguely draw upon techniques and rules used for cartoon movies. At the same time however, choosing the wrong animation will literally paralyze a User Interface.

The first part of the article dealt with potential causes for wrong expectations regarding usability, that lead to perceptions of “usability as a product” that can be acquired right off the shelf and then implemented into a user interface. This part describes how the UX designer can cope with these challenges in order to create realistic expectations and conduct a successful UX design project.

Sometimes, prospective clients request user experience designers to “bring along some ideas” for a first meeting. The thought behind such a request can, e.g., be the desire to get some inspiration regarding the look of user interfaces, which is legitimate.

The problems start when the request is made with the expectation for the user experience designer to bring along ready-made solutions that can more or less directly be used to optimize an existing user interface – a “usability catalog” from which the client can choose the right solution, which can then be provided without much delay.

This article deals with the question why this kind of “off the shelf usability” does not exist and which causes can potentially lead to these expectations.

In recent years, so called “natural user interfaces” (NUI) have grown in popularity. More and more often, interaction via touch and gestures is employed instead of using mouse and keyboard. The iPhone was greeted with great enthusiasm and played a major part in spreading touch screen system in the consumer market while also introduced gesture-based interaction in a playful way. There should be hardly any touch screen user who is not familiar with the pinch gesture that is used to resize or zoom images on the iPhone.

As described in January’s post, animations can fulfill essential purposes in user interface design. This article provides some insight into a study that has been conducted with the goal of exploring the effects of animations regarding user experience.

A prototypical sequence in user interface design proceeds from wireframes to interaction design and finally to visual design. The user interface is successively refined, starting with abstract statics, then specifying the basic dynamic aspects until finally visual specifics are added. This is compatible with the view that visual aspects of a user interface are more or less the icing on the cake – details that should only be taken care of after the foundations for a user-friendly have been laid. But this view may be flawed.

Red is not always red, green is not always green. For quite a large amount of people it is not easy to distinguish between red and green hues. About 6% of all males have the same difficulties to tell orange from olive-green as unaffected people have to distinguish between burgundy and ruby-red – oftentimes, it is impossible. This most common kind of color vision deficiency is called Deuteranomaly, also known as “green weakness”. The following article will deal with the question of how this wide-spread impairment impacts the production process of high quality icons.