As winter sets in, I am reminded of an all-too-familiar frustration with owning a touchscreen phone: no matter how hard I mash away at the screen, I can’t...
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I ride cabs every now and then. More often now with the weather getting colder and my bike just doesn’t cut it at 20 degrees. When credit card machines first arrived a few years ago in the NYC Taxis, I almost always still paid with cash. I wasn’t used to using a credit card in this way and I felt guilty for some reason since I had heard all these stories about the cab drivers not loving them. Fast forward to 2010 and I’ve changed the way I pay for my chauffeured ride across town. A few blocks from where I plan to get out, I’ll start slipping my American Express out of my wallet. Once the meter stops, I start the process. And now here is where I begin my frustrations. As an interactive designer, I’m always looking at how digital pieces are designed. ATM machines, the check out at Gristedes, refilling my Metro Card, unlocking the Zip Car from my iPhone, we’re constantly seeing interactive design from great to pretty terrible. I can go on about interactive pieces I think are great but no, this blog entry is about the User Interface in New York Taxi Cab credit card devices. It’s among what I would classify under pretty terrible UI design. Let me take you through the scenario:
- How would you like to pay?
I tap “Credit...
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Anyone who’s anyone in the world of mobile technology has either experienced the Apple Review Process as a developer or as a consumer and both experiences are equally as frustrating. From a developers perspective you need to get your app just perfect, because if there is one single solitary bug when it hits the App Store you are looking at a 5-7 day turn around (minimum) to get a fix in place (assuming the fix can be developed immediately). Now while that is a normal amount of bureaucracy for a large business, a small business like ours, which drives a large number of application downloads for Apple is left out in the wind per say. Our customers require our applications to stay relevant all the time, which means that our development cycles are nearly the same length as the review processes and in some cases shorter.
From the...
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As we’re interviewing designers for our ever expanding team, Danika and I seem to come across the same thing time and time again - bad portfolios. Especially - bad student portfolios. The first thing I look at when someone e-mail’s their resume is their work. Its the most important factor for me when looking at a candidate. For a student fresh out of design school, I can appreciate various levels or experience and recognize when someone has potential. But if I can’t see their work, I can’t see their work.
When I was in design school one of the only web or interaction design class I had was an online portfolio class, where the teachers encouraged students to make a “creative” brand to pitch themselves online, and to build the whole site themselves. This often produced ill coded flash based...
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Not only do we have a new look and feel to our website, but our office has transformed in just a few short weeks as well! 547 West 27th Street, Suite 308 has doubled in size!
May 10
May 6