Archive for the ‘User Experience/User Interface’ Category

« Older Entries

Do you need a Responsive Site, Mobile Site or App?

Tuesday, May 8th, 2012

responsive vs mobile vs appThere’s no denying the impact that mobile has today on a business. A recent study by IDC predicts that mobile devices will outnumber laptops and desktops combined by 2015, and Forrester Research has stated that by 2014 mobile will influence more than 50% of retail transactions. Even with these figures, the majority of Canadian businesses don’t have a clear strategy of how they’ll address mobile.

Essentially there are three options for going mobile, you can make your current website optimized for mobile by implementing a responsive design, you can build a dedicated mobile website or you can create and deploy mobile applications. (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in General, Mobile, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

iPhone App for SOSgarde Now Available

Saturday, February 18th, 2012

SOSgarde iPhone App by INMEarlier this week we rolled out a new iPhone app that we built for SOSgarde, a popular website that connects parents with local babysitters, nannies, senior caregivers and pet sitters. We’ve had an ongoing partnership with Montreal-based SOSgarde (also known as SOSsitter across Canada) for several months now. We originally approached Paulina Podgorska, the company’s founder, about extending her services to the mobile space. Our plan was to build an app that would broaden the reach of her two sites to mobile parents. This would provide parents with on-the-go access to sitters directly from their iPhone.

We worked closely with Paulina to understand her users and how they leverage her sites. Designing a gesture-based mobile app involves different challenges such as dealing with limited on-screen real estate, and subtle considerations of context and ergonomics. In order to provide mobile users with the simple and efficient experience they expect from their handheld device, we storyboarded all interactions and came up with a progression of screens that allows users to contact a sitter in three steps. In order to make the interface easy to scan, we used appropriate icons and pulled only the essential info from the site. We integrated the standard phone and email features so parents could connect with sitters directly from within the application.

The French version of the application, SOSgarde, officially rolled out this week and is available as a free download in the App Store. The English version, SOSsitter, will be released shortly.

Do you have a mobile project that we can help with? If so, contact us.

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Mobile, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

Exploring Responsive Web Design

Friday, November 18th, 2011

As companies struggle today with their mobile presence, they are often faced with the requirement of offering a “one-size-fits-all” approach or are forced to tailor their site for a few select devices. One alternative that’s making waves recently is an approach pioneered by Ethan Marcotte, called responsive web design. In short, responsive web design enables organizations to create beautiful user experiences that are optimized for a wide range of devices, while minimizing the need for costly device-specific development iterations. This approach breaks the constraints of the physical page and encourages designers to create designs that are dynamic and can reflow depending on size of the viewer’s screen.

With responsive web design, designers and developers can embrace this inherent fluidity from the ground up. As the size of the browser window changes, the content can simply reflow, resize and re-position itself on a sliding scale from the smallest phone to the largest desktop computer.

Responsive web design example

An example of responsive design. The look of the site changes to fit the visitor's resolution.

My colleague, Kent Rahman, recently authored a great eGuide explaining this approach and providing some guidance around the topic. I would encourage you to download the eGuide today and read more about how you can create engaging experiences for the desktop, web and everything in between.

Check out our own INM.com website for a live example of a responsive design. Our site is built to work on virtually every device, from a mobile phone through to a desktop screen.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in User Experience/User Interface | 2 Comments »

Why Won’t IE6 Die?

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

Trashing IE6

A few weeks ago, WordPress announced that it was dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. For now, this will only affect blog writers and publishers, but this could soon affect viewers and readers of these blogs as well.

WordPress is definitely not the first to make this kind of announcement. Google announced that it will not support IE6 when it makes new improvements to its YouTube, Gmail Notifier and Google Docs services. Facebook, White Pages, Digg and many more sites are also on-board.

Microsoft, the maker of IE6, has been actively promoting its website http://www.ie6countdown.com to encourage and explain why people should move away from the browser. IE6 is two-months short of its tenth birthday, making it a real relic in a technology landscape where new browser versions are announced every 3-4 months. In fact, trying to load most websites on IE6 will bring up a very intrusive graphic encouraging the user to upgrade. (more…)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Trends and Technology, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

Delivering Web Experience Management

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Adobe Solution PartnerAs you may have heard, we officially became an Adobe Solutions Partner last month. As a long-time Adobe friend and partner, this was a logical next step for us. However, the real catalyst behind us joining this program was Adobe’s new Web Experience Management (WEM) platform, CQ5. Over the past few years, we’ve worked with a number of clients to build websites and help them create their digital presence. Until recently, we’ve mainly leveraged open source technology (such as Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress) as the foundation and built bridges to other solutions or we’ve done customizations to create the desired experience. For some of our clients, the open source web content management systems (CMSs) have been great and have met all their requirements. But for others, we started to run into some walls and barriers where we were stretching the technology to its limit.

This is where the Adobe CQ5 platform comes into play. The technology, acquired by Adobe last year from Day Software, is a robust, modular platform that encompasses web content management, digital asset management, and social collaboration. It is truly an enterprise caliber solution that delivers a balance of effectiveness, improved client experience and multi-channel optimization. 

What’s really impressive about CQ5 is the platform’s capability to deliver great user experiences at a reasonable cost. It natively supports rich content, and leverages standard components for organizations to easily craft rich experiences and deliver contextual content to different user profiles.

CQ5 is like the Mercedes of web technology. It’s refined, finely engineered, robust, and economical to operate. Everyone would love to have the power and prestige it delivers, but it won’t be a fit for every client, or every project budget. But we with this in our toolbox, it does equip us to serve a broader range of clients on web projects and it will enable us to push the boundaries further for certain projects.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in General, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

The Economist Tackles the Internet of Things

Friday, November 19th, 2010

Internet of Things

Earlier this month, the Economist ran a special report on Smart Systems, otherwise known as the Internet of Things. The piece, entitled “It’s a Small World”, looked at the convergence of the real and digital worlds and the potential impact this has on us as a society.

If we think back, two decades ago the world was revolutionized by a similar type of network that provided people with a way to interact with each other – the Internet.  In the last decade the evolution of the Internet, defined as Web 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly in 2005, added user-generated content and created the concept of software applications engaging with each other directly. (more…)

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in General, Trends and Technology, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

Celebrating World Usability Day

Thursday, November 11th, 2010

World Usability Day

Today is World Usability Day, an international celebration marked by 144 different events in more than 43 countries. This year’s theme, “Making life easy!”, is focused on creating awareness for designs, products, and services that improve and facilitate communications.

In celebrating this event, it’s a good time to sit back and reflect on how our experience with software applications has changed over the years. Years ago, software was focused on features and capabilities -the more an application did, the better it was. The role of the user was to learn now to work within the constraints of an application. There were guides, training sessions and thick manuals for each application a user needed to master. If a user needed help, he could always hit F1 and filter through reams of text-based content to figure it out. (more…)

Tags: , ,
Posted in General, User Experience/User Interface | 1 Comment »

An Interactive Patient Kiosk for a Montreal Hospital

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

It’s been a busy few weeks for project releases here at INM. On April 16, 2010 we unveiled a new touch screen kiosk that we built for the McGill University Health Center (MUHC). The kiosks are deployed in the emergency rooms of two of their centers to provide patients with an easy way to find clinics and pharmacies in their area. Patients simply enter their postal code and are shown an interactive map with marked locations for nearby resources. The map displays the local transit routes and provides details about the locations, including contact info and hours of operation.

INM kiosks at the MUHC help patients find follow-up care

While this was a pretty simple project for us technically, it was an interesting one for us from a user experience design perspective. Creating a kiosk that will be used by people of all ages and skill levels, particularly when they are not feeling their best, is a challenge. We focused on creating a simple, clean interface with targeted functionality. The user’s interactions with the screen are clearly identified and the application uses movement and transitions to help orient the user.

The kiosks are powered by a custom-built rich internet application that uses Adobe AIR. The application also leverages Adobe Flex and Adobe Flash for animation and effects. The kiosks are designed to be completely self-contained to adhere to the hospital’s security policy that prohibits the use of an internet connection or network access.

To see a French demo video of the kiosk in action, visit the the Cyberpresse.ca website.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

The iPad is Promising to Save the Magazine Industry, But Can Anyone Afford to Build Content for It?

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Late last week VIV Mag released its video demo of a new style magazine built with the iPad in mind. While the demo is impressive and visually stunning, I really question how feasible it will be for already struggling magazine publishers to invest the kind of time and money necessary to create this level of interactive content. Estimates on the cost of producing this issue are in the $100,000 range. This is for a single issue of a niche publication. How many publishers can really afford to bring out 12 issues per year at this cost, regardless of the extra readership that the iPad is promising to deliver?

With the iPad, there are many new opportunities for publishers to reach users with their digital editions. That is after some re-tooling as many of today’s digital edition technologies leverage Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight for delivery of their content, neither of which the iPad supports. However, it doesn’t wipe the slate clean. The same challenges in the market still exist. Publishers have an oversupply of information, abundant ad space to sell, and intense competition for eyeballs. Plus Apple introduces some new revenue model issues with publishers too. If they add periodical sales to iTunes, then publishers will lose some of their most valuable data – subscriber information.

Tags: , ,
Posted in ePublishing, User Experience/User Interface | No Comments »

How Flash Builder 4 Changes the Designer-Developer Workflow and More

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

As you may have seen Adobe released Flash Builder 4 today, the successor of Flex Builder 3. Why the name switch? The change was designed to create a clear distinction between the free open-source Flex framework and commercial solution. Flash Builder 4 comes in two flavours, a Standard version and a Premium Version. This release is great for companies like us that develop rich internet applications with a strong user experience component, as it introduces significant enhancements in the way developers work.

The most obvious change in Flash Builder 4 is in the designer-developer workflow. In previous versions, the workflow was one-way – the designer would create a layout and hand it off to the developer for implementation. Now, this process has been opened up and there’s a two-way exchange. Designers can still work with the tools they know and love but now they can work in parallel with the developers. Designers can directly make modifications to the design of an application and implement them easily in the mxml files without breaking the logic a developer is working on, as the components are now separate. This makes it easier for designers and developers to deliver well-integrated applications that are driven more by the user experience than by technical requirements.

Another great feature that makes improves development with Flash Builder 4 is the new wizard-based connection for communications with the server. Before this version, developers needed to manually configure server connections based on the code returned from the server. This new pre-coding makes connections to a variety of different web servers and web services much faster and easier.

Handling text within an application is also greatly improved, as Flash Builder 4 leverages all the text enhancement features that came with Flash Player 10. The text rendering engine performs better and faster, and there’s now native support for anti-aliasing, so fonts no longer need to be embedded into the application. It also supports right to left text, a feature that’s been requested for several years now.

Flash Builder 4 also integrates Flex Unit, which was previously a separate tool used for unit testing. This integration makes it easier for those following Test Driven Development (TDD) methodologies.

The bottom-line is that Flash Builder 4 makes it easier to build quality, design-driven applications and opens up a new level of cooperation between developers and designers.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Software Engineering, User Experience/User Interface | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries