As part of iPhone creative minds this week along with Apple’s WWDC, post-it can be used for iPhone paper prototype in a fashionable way!

There is a post-it design contest around it too! Have fun designing with paper!

Tags: creative post-it, design, design contest, iphone, iphone app, iphone prototype, paper prototype, post-it

One true and beautful thing about working on the websites is that you can let your imagination fly and do a lot of possible crazy or cute things.  I was reading Nokia Lab’s articles and found one page interesting enough to share with you.

Business Case: Nokia Lab has a beta database that failed one time. The situation impacted a lot of users who were using that database. Of course, that was a very bad experience and definitely bad impact on Nokia’s brand.

How Nokia reacted to this: They published one article about the problem the next day explaining the cause of the problem and they apologized. The article’s title stated clearly “my deepest and most sincere apologies”.

How they communicated this out: let a sorry dog tell visitors how sincerely they apologized

Result: The comments on this page show a strong positive feedback. This is how you can handle a bad situation with creative idea and even turn it into a good experience. Well done!

Tags: communication, creative, design, nokia

To continue the theme of 2009 trends, I want to share some of the web design trends that interest me.

Out-of-the-box layouts: it’s an old trend. Being unique and innovation always win. The hard part of having a out-of-the-box layout is how the uniqueness of one particular design can be tied with the business success as well. You can have a great and very different design, which might not generate any business results (if it’s a business oriented website :).

More white space than ever: as people understand more about web layout, people should value the white space more. It’s the “breathing” space, that gives your own design enough space to express the main idea. It also gives customers enough space to navigate freely and comfortably.

Social design elements: more buttons or links (like Twitter, Dig, Facebook…) to help people share and communicate with friends within their existing page flow.

Speaking navigation: this technique helps to make the navigation more meaningful to users by explicitly explaining what one particular navigation section is about. In stead of having a navigation button as “works”, it can be “See what other projects we have done”.

Dynamic tabs: the more meaningful interaction with the user, the better a site can serve the user need. Once a user moves mouse over a tab, it expands to have more content/actions. It’s basically “interaction on-demand”.

Author icons: not sure since when, but having a real person’s image next to some content seems to be more trust worthy. And it also adds more social & human factors into the page.

When it comes to real one web site design, it’s the fun and challenge to put some or all of these things together to make it work.

See orginal post from SmashMagzine

Tags: design, trend

When business gets crazy and serious, don’t forget to have some fun when ever you can. StumbleUpon had this cute error message page. It turned my bad experience (error message page) to a smile and a good story to tell my friends. What a small cute idea!

Tags: design, web marketing

It’s intesreting to see how company’s logos have evolved to 3D in the Web 2.0 world.

The original post can be found here.

Tags: logo

It is very helpful to understand online best practices before creating anything new for your website.

Smashing Magazine created a series of interesting posts to share the best practices around different topics. Take a look for your next web project:

• Pricing tables
• Navigation menus
• Web forms
• Quotes
• Footers
• Pagination
• Tag clouds
• Shopping carts

Let me know if you have other best practices to share!

Tags: best practices

I saw these V4 Frerrari concept pictures on one blog, and they keep coming back to my mind. Which style do you like? or which style you belong to?

The difference between these two styles can be seen not only on Ferrari, but also every where. Web design approach, communication style, fashion, archetec, food…

So, which style do you like? or which style you belong to?

Tags: design

I have been thinking about “design concept” a lot recently. I ran into something interesting today, and it is one educational presentation “THIRST” that won SlideShare’s best presentation contest. I like the slides:

• message is better delivered and remembered as a story: this presentation did what a story telling does
• one image is worth thousands of words: utilizing image wisely grabs people’s eyes and make the story easy to be understood and memorized
• make the connection between your message and the audience: people only are interested in the things that matter to “me”

When I went to the creator of this presentation’s website, I found one more interesting thing on their contact page. It’s pretty funny.

Tags: design

Everyone is doing web redesign. I commented on the Mint redesign couple weeks ago. (Maybe corporate sites should have something similar to WordPress’s Themes, so they could keep change the web site skins)

The real topic that I want to talk about today is: web redesign is not a done deal. It is actually only one part of your web site’s iterative testing. Collecting feedback and doing usability after redesign open a door for the further improvement. You can also look at web redesign as a long tail effect:

• the redesign itself is a big head - lots of things have changed on the site
• the continuous refining after the redesign - move some content around, enlarge a button, get rid of some useless steps - all these little things might add up to big impact and better enhancement to the overall web site improvement. This could be the long tail

Look at TechCrunch’s redesign blog and LOOK at the 6-page long comments on this blog. These are free and first hand user feedback on their redesign. No matter how the redesign itself did, better or worse, if TechCrunch really listen to their users voice and act upon those feedback, I’m sure that their site will be eventually be better. It’s a win-win situation: better site and happy users!

My advice is: redesign is not the end of the game:

• take it as the start of your iterative optimization opportunity
• ask your audience how you did, what they liked and not
• React on their feedback.

This is the best way to get your redesign money paid off

Update:

Another example is jQuery’s redesign post & user feedback.

One more TechCruch redesign comment

Tags: redesign, social media, techcrunch, user generated content, web redesign