JianArt by Jian Adornado - User Experience DesignerJianArt by Jian Adornado - User Experience Designer - Designing for interaction

App Icon Design: Timelapse

Jian Adornado — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:52:43 +0000

This is my latest design. You can also view this on my dribbble: http://drbl.in/datH
What you guys think?

Evernote and its updated UI

Jian Adornado — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 23:40:56 +0000

Evernote have updated their UI recently. I think the new design is much more simpler, easily scannable and much more cleaner to look at. It will be interesting to see how other users would react to this new update – mainly to the fact that the new UI have hide some of the fields such as date and url onto the “i” icon on the top right corner.

And the best UX approach on account cancellation goes to…Groupon!

Jian Adornado — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 04:01:51 +0000

This is actually pretty funny. Groupon makes users leave with a laugh by showing a video of an employee who apparently thought you would be interested in their service. They ask you if you’d like to punish derrick for adding you to their mailing list and then once you press “Punish Derrick” they do just that. A guy walks in with a cup of water and after criticizing Derrick he goes ahead and throws water in his face.

As you can see on the second screen there is this humorous guilt trip – possibly the most effective way to stop a user from leaving. Ha!

Here is the video:

Evidence and Intuition

Jian Adornado — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:30:23 +0000

Radical innovation requires both evidence and intuition: evidence to become informed, and intuition to inspire us in imagining and creating new and better possibilities.

- Jane Fulton Suri, IDEO

If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Business

Jian Adornado — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 23:55:55 +0000

The folks at the99percent.com uploaded this talk back in July and I thought it would be a great video to start the 2012. It is by Simon Sinek, where he talks about the importance of trust, meaning and authenticity. He argues that as individuals and companies, everything that we say and do is a symbol of who we are. And it is only when we communicate our beliefs authentically that we can attract others to our cause, and form the bonds that will empower us to achieve truly great things.

A good design is…

Jian Adornado — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:26:40 +0000

Is innovative

The possibilities for innovation in design are unlikely to be exhausted since technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. Innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology and can never be an end in and of itself.

Makes a product useful

A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.

Is aesthetic

Only well-executed objects can be beautiful. The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products used every day have an effect on people and their well-being.

Makes a product understandable

It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.

Is unobtrusive

Products and their design should be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression. Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools and are neither decorative objects nor works of art.

Is long-lasting

It should avoid being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even when the trend may be in favour for disposable products.

Is thorough down to the last detail

Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance in the design of a product since care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.

Is environmentally friendly

Good design should make an important contribution to the preservation of the environment by conserving resources and minimizing physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Is as little design as possible

The distinction between the common “Less is more” and the strongly advised “Less, but better” highlighting the fact that this approach focuses on the essential aspects thus, the products are not burdened with non-essentials. The desirable result would then be purer and simpler.

- Dieter Rams, Industrial Designer (considered to be the main influence on Jonthan Ive, Apple’s Senior VP of industrial design)

HTML5 and its impact to SEO

Jian Adornado — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 00:10:30 +0000

Normally when we code, we use divs and in search engine’s perspective divs are pretty much meaningless. Now with the emergence of HTML5, it add more meaningful tags such as header, footer, sections, article and aside, which in turn provides a better SEO. Different section can be easily distinguished from one another. The benefit of this is that it will allow search engines to easily crawl the website and skipping the sections such as footer and header and use them for different indexing purposes. With HTML 5, search engine indexing will be more efficient and meaningful.

Quick overview on how the new tags will affect SEO

Article tags allows you to indicate the main content of a web page. One potential change to search engine indexing is that search engines may put more weight on the content inside the article element.

Section tags identifies various sections on the page. This can give search engines a better understanding of how the web page is segmented and structured. The section element represents a generic section of a document or application, such as a chapter or headings.

Header tags gives the search engines a clue where the sitename and logo is on the web page as well as the primary navigation.

Footer tags could be used by search engine spiders to identify related items related to copyright, terms of use, privacy policies and sometimes social media profiles. Since footers contains auxiliary information, it will be possibly discounted in search engine algorithimns.

Navigation tags will provide indexing algorithms cues to the information architecture of your website – similar kind as to sitemaps.

Link Types

HTML5 also allows us to give links with meanings. This will provide search engines greater context for each link they encounter. The following link type can definitely influence seach engine indexing in the future:

alternate – links to an alternate presentation of the current page
author – links to a web page related to the author of the web page
external – linking to external domains
help – pointing to relevant help page
license – licensing terms of the current document
next – next web page
prev – previous web page

Media

Elements such as and can be properly indexed. We will eventually see video and audio being treated like images indexed such as in Google images.

Quick tips in creating multilingual web designs

Jian Adornado — Wed, 25 May 2011 00:00:16 +0000

When a website is launched, everyone can see it, we can say that it went “global”. You sometimes notice some of these sites have a drop down to change languages. When you get into these designs many modifications must be made to accommodate different languages, scripts, and geographic and cultural requirements. Here are a few quick tips in designing with the world in mind:

Mind the global template

Companies have been applying global design templates to present a consistent user experience across regional and country websites. Creating a global templates that works globally requires input from all local offices. Many global web design mistakes originate from the idea that a design that is popular with one country or region will necessarily be popular in other places. As a result, companies sometimes try to force the exact same design across all countries and regions without listening to people in the local offices.

A global template should be flexible enough to support different products or services in different markets, other elements can simply be swapped in and out when needed.

The global template should be thought of as an structural foundation for the web design. Culture-specific images should be avoided and navigation should be limited to the most global elements: “about us,” “products,” “services,” etc. Specific elements can then be rolled up into regional or divisional templates. But by beginning with a solid structure, each version will support the same look-and-feel.

Keep it loose

When text is translated into another language, the text rarely stays exactly the same size. The general rule is to plan for text expansion of up to 30% to 40% when going from English to German, which is one of the more extreme examples of text expansion. Going from English to Spanish or French will probably only result in a 10% to 20% expansion. To safely design for any target language, a goal of 35% expansion is a good guideline.

Keep it legible

Supporting different languages requires understanding different fonts and how they display in different sizes. One can’t assume that a given font size is equally legible across all fonts, particularly when working with Asian scripts. As a general rule, Asian scripts need to be displayed at a point or two larger than Latin-based fonts. Language-specific style sheets can easily support this type of localization. But be sure also to devote adequate testing resources.

Keep it text based

More and more people use machine translation engines such as Google Translate when they visit websites in languages they don’t speak. While the quality still leaves much room for improvement, it has gotten good enough to provide the gist of the content. Sites can benefit from Google Translate because it supports more than 40 languages.

Languages, scripts, geographic and cultural requirements are important things to consider when building a multilingual web designs. Just remember, your site needs to connect with your target audience. Hopefully these tips would help you on your next multilingual web project.

Microskypeft: Microsoft – Skype Deal Overview

Jian Adornado — Tue, 10 May 2011 23:59:23 +0000

Let’s put it in the books, Microsoft have purchased Skype for $8.5 billion – all-in cash. Facebook and Google were said to be the earlier companies that have an interest in purchasing Skype and now, Microsoft is walking away with it. This deal is an advantageous move for Microsoft mainly for the following reasons:

It would give Microsoft a boost in the collaboration market because of Skype’s voice, video and sharing capabilities.
It would give them a service that can help with adaptation of future versions of Windows Mobile OS.
It would support Windows Phone 7 and Nokia. Microsoft needs a competitive offering to Google Voice and Apples communication platform – “Facetime”.

Here are the winners of the deal:

Skype Investors – Skype’s investors bought in at a $2.5 billion valuation two years ago and are selling for $7 billion ($8.5 including debt)

Marc Andreessen – Marc Andreessen is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the investors in Skype. He sits on eBay’s board and was key in putting the deal together.

The Skype founders – Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are the founders of Skype. They got $1.19billion.

Skype executive team – Skype’s executive team is mostly made up of talent brought in from Cisco and other big companies by the new investors, only a couple years ago. They almost certainly won’t stick around for the Microsoft era and are probably already shopping for private islands and yachts.

Facebook – Instead of having to actually buy Skype to keep it off Google’s hands, its longtime partner and shareholder Microsoft did it on Facebook’s behalf. Skype would be a great potential partner for Facebook, giving them added video and voice chatting capabilities.

Nokia and Windows 7 – Google has Voice, Apple has FaceTime. Now Microsoft has Skype.

eBay – eBay gets 30% for its stake into the company.

…and here are the losers:

Cisco – Cisco will has a strong rival in enterprise conferencing. A big source of growth for Skype was always going to be business conferencing. It will take a hit on Cisco’s biggest and most successful acquisitions: WebEx, a video conferencing suite.

Google – Google was probably never really interested in buying Skype. But it was interesting in bidding up the price at one point. If Microsoft is smart about Skype, they can use it to compete better with Google.

Index Ventures and Mike Volpi – Index Ventures, the most prominent European VC firm and an original investor in Skype, was slated to invest in the Skype spinoff, but got pushed out by the Skype founders’ lawsuit. In particular Mike Volpi, a former top Cisco exec and CEO of Joost, the Skype founders’ next venture, was sued by the Skype founders and booted out.

The Payout Breakdown

Total sale: $8.5 billion

$4.76B (56%) – Silver Lake, Andreesen Horowitz, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

$2.55B (30%) – eBay

$1.18B (14%) – Noklas Zennstrom, Janus Friis (co-founders)

Write for your audience, not so much for search engines

Jian Adornado — Mon, 09 May 2011 23:28:33 +0000

It’s better to write for your audience than for search engines. Keyword stuffing may have worked before and probably still today, but if you have an actual reader come across your page only to find the word “usability” 20 times in 4 paragraphs, odds are they’re going to hit the back button and never visit your page again. Read your content out load and if it doesn’t sound like a natural conversation, rewrite it until it does. People will read your content and expect it to sound like something a real person would say, so make sure it sound that way.

You may ask, “But what about SEO?” So here is the thing, one of the factors Google focuses on is the length of time a person usually spends on your website. This is what you call “bounce rate” and this tells the online search engine a lot about your online site. So if people are spending just seconds and then leaving, Google will conclude that your site is not relevant and targeted for a specific keyword. Google is actually more prone to give you a great SEO rating if people are spending considerable time on your pages.

When you concentrate on your audience and delivering great content, traffic will follow and so as your page rankings.