Category Archives: Interfaces

Safari 4 and a New Tabs Redesign

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Safari 4 Beta was released on February 24, 2009, with a huge amount of improvements (they really had a lot to fix). I have been following the web browser interfaces for some time but I would specially like to point out the use of tabs. 
 
In June 2008 Firefox 3 was released and with it a step back on design was achieved. Mozilla copied Safari’s interface without even analyzing if that UI design was the best one. (I wrote a full article about Firefox 3 and tabs).
 
 

Firefox 3 interface mimicking Safari 3, tabs are not attached to pages, they are "hanging" from bookmarks.

Firefox Tabs Design

 

 

 
On the other side, Apple recently noticed that the best and logical way to handle tabs is to place them on top of the window, attaching them to pages.  
 
 

Safari 4

Tabs on Safari

 

 

 
It’s true that most users will need to get used to this change on tabs design but at the end this is the most logical solution. There is a good reason for this… 
 
 

User comment about Safari 4 and tabs.
 
Attaching tabs to pages is a very old idea coming from the real (material) world, this is a very successful and simple design that people understand. So why not following user’s mental models?
 
 

Picture by Takashi

 

FromHere, an Application for Mobile Public Transport Information

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At Design vs Art we have been thinking for some time about how it would be to give users of public transportation the possibility of knowing in a fast way how to get from A to B in an extremly fast way. In this article I would like to give you some insights about the design of the fromhere application.

The Problem to Solve

Our agency is based in Munich, a city with a huge public transport network that takes people everywhere. The problem is that as the travelers get more options the network becomes more complex. Then, is very difficult for people to plan a journey without a computer with access to the online route planning system.

There are several services to check this information through a mobile phone but none takes advantage of the latest technology, like GPS.

The Solution

In the following video you can see a fast introduction to our design.


FromHere Application from Design vs Art on Vimeo.

 

We have been asking users of public transportation about the places they usually go. The answer was that most of them are regularly going to the same places, like work, gym and favorite cafeterias or bars.

So we decided to design an interface as simple as possible that makes the journey planning really fast, wherever the user is but going to those "standard" places. We decided to design our first solution for the iPhone as we realized that tapping on the destination would be the fastest way to do it. 

The Interface

The fromhere interface is clean, it loads fast and eliminates any distraction other applications could have. For us, designing an interface that is fast and easy to use was our main goal. 

The Technology

Thanks to GPS the telephone knows where the user is located. The application then connects to the server to translate coordinates to a real address, such as "Duesseldorfer Strasse 11, Munich".

In the next step the application requests the journey plan between departure and destination to the servers.

Contact Us

Please contact us if you need farther details about the application.

The official fromhere product information website is here: http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere 

Creative Commons

You can use the contents of this article and video under Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. Just link to http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

The iPhone Experience in Numbers

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Everybody loves the iPhone. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that this device is the beginning of a huge mobile information revolution. Others, including Apple it self, tried before to make the mobile experience nice, but this is the first device allowing us to make so many things in such a short time. 

I was using other smart phones before and none was bringing all that information on my palm in such a pleasant and fast way. The good thing about the iPhone is that this device is not only better than other smart phones, it is much better than other old time experiences. For example, going to the library, using an atlas or a dictionary and checking emails on a desktop computer (yes, that’s old style already!)

Using an iPhone is a pleasant experience but also, and very important, a fast one. Here some examples of things that now we do faster with an iPhone:

8 Seconds to find "Kuala Terengganu" on the map (bye-bye Atlas!)

3 Seconds to have a look at my calendar (and it is synchronize!)

4 Seconds to check my emails (and I don’t have to go to my computer!)

3 Seconds to call a contact stored in my favorites list (I hate to use the land line now!)

2 Seconds to check the weather forecast.

7 Seconds to translate a word from German into English.

28 Seconds to take a photo and mail it to a friend (nothing compare to this before).

16 Seconds to buy the last Björk album and start listening to it! (imposible to imagine this a few years ago).

Björk Volta Album Cover

9 Seconds to start reading the history of Italy on Wikipedia.

18 Seconds to find a list of nearby restaurants, with AroundMe app (totally imposible in the past, do you remember the Yellow Pages?)

19 Seconds to start listening my favorite Brazilian radio (selecting from a list of many others).

1 Second to listing to my digital music.  

iPod Icon

All these work because of a great interface that makes the whole user experience just fantastic. What do you do faster with it? Or maybe with another mobile device?