UX@UW

We haven’t been very good about the blog this month, but we’ve just made a big list of the next month’s worth of posts, plus a schedule for harassing the authors if the posts aren’t forthcoming, so we hope to get back on track. I’m kicking off our newfound resolve to blog with the May links roundup!

• The entertaining UX Drinking Game found and followed us on Twitter (we’re @ux_uw — follow us!).
• The Scale of the Universe is a really cool visualization of the relative sizes of things. It loads a bit slowly, but it’s worth it.
• Admittedly with very little relevance, other than it being cool, Jason alerted us to the AC/DC exhibit currently at the EMP, through September 29.
• Early in the month I asked if anyone had “come across any research or theories about how users feel about scrolling on long pages on their phones,” and various links and comments trickled in over the next few days.
  • Charlon summarized some thoughts from a Josh Clark workshop at BDConf: “scrolling is natural (don’t fear the fold) especially on a mobile device; it’s all about how we design in a way to make it discoverable and usable for users; the classic example always given is how twitter handles their scroll.. and probably facebook too … main point is that people want to “discover” things on their devices… and scrolling is a primary method of discovery for users. users will scroll to the bottom of a page… just to see if there is more things to see. it’s almost a disappointment if you get to the bottom and nothing happens.
  • I found this StackExchange thread about scrolling vs clicking, though it is a year old (which is like decades in mobile-land), and Why Scrolling is the New Click from UXMovement.

  Based on the above, I concluded that scrolling vs clicking seems (for now) like a philosophical stance and/or a decision based on your users’ tasks. If anyone has data on this, however, I’d love to see it! (For the specific question I was trying to answer, I ended up going with scrolling a longer list of options rather than breaking them into 2-3 pages.)

• Another non-design-related link from Jason: a cool talk at the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies about the IWW timber strike of 1937. As usual, none of us could make it.
• I was briefly suckered by HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS, which I shared with the note “I’m not sure I understand what this is, but it sounds exciting,” before figuring out a few seconds later that it is a joke.
• Diego pointed out designer Frank Chimero‘s new book The Shape of Design. Has anyone read it?
• Jason went to WebVisions and also attended this workshop. He owes a blog post (*ahem*) summarizing his trip to the conference, so I’ll leave it to him to describe it.
• Char found a useful site demonstrating a responsively-designed site in several different formats and resolutions.
• Jason checked in from the conference to chat briefly. He said this guy gave the best 45-minute presentation that Jason has ever seen — it was on data visualization.
• Out of Print Clothing has awesome t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, etc. featuring cover art from old versions of classic books.
• Ammy found the Mobile HCI 2012 conference, held in San Francisco in September. Of course we have all already met our conference quotas for the year, unfortunately.
• They posted the schedule from the MobileUX Unconference that I attended. It was fun! I owe (*ahem*) a write-up of that.
• Lou Rosenfeld has an article in Smashing: “Stop Redesigning and Start Tuning Your Site Instead”. It’s a good read (and the illustrations are lovely). Thanks Jason.
• UW Design 2012 is the site for the School of Art’s Bachelor of Design and Master of Design graduating students, including ACA’s own Sergei Larionov! Great work!
• An IxD friend on Facebook recommended the Apple Magic Trackpad. I recently learned that iPad styluses (styla?) work on the regular trackpad, so I wondered if they would also work on these larger trackpads, and therefore let us do some sketching. Does anyone know?
• Our former colleague Kevin wrote a blog post for his new gig that’s super helpful: How to Publish your Mobile App to the Google Play and Apple App Stores. It includes lots of useful tables describing how Apple and Google want things in different resolutions, or with different character limits on descriptions, etc.

That’s all for this month. What have you been thinking and chatting about? What UX questions or puzzles are you pondering?