Category Archives: Web

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

 

How to Create a Realistic Experience?

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The new TV spot of the Deutsche Telekom was filmed right at the streets without actors and creating a cheerful environment.

Producers of the spot threw "roses" from the ceilings of Buenos Aires, on people, and they started filming everyone and getting all those faces of surprise.

This is a technique that could be used for prototyping and product test. How to know how the user will react? How to capture the unique moment a real experience could offer? Well, just creating it.

Deutsche Telekom TV Spot "Blütenregen"

 

How Blütenregen was filmed

 

The Telekom uses the same shots for the G1 spot

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