Style guides are a great way to ensure user experience consistency when developing an application and a way to communicate user experience standards across an organization. They can be application specific, platform specific, and may encompass enterprise-wide standards. A style guide can help make the development of user interfaces more efficient and help ensure good user interface design practices. … »

Design patterns are among the most underrated tools in the world of interaction designers. And that’s not because they are difficult to apply, but mainly due to the fact that designer are stubborn. We want to come up with all the solutions ourselves. But why? If you use patterns you save time and money, and you are more sure that your product will be understood by it’s users. Fortunately there are still believers, and they even wrote a book for us. … »

In the wake of the ever increasing popularity of gestural interfaces, Dan Saffer wrote his newest book: Designing Gestural Interfaces. In this publication by O’Reilly he tries to give us some valuable insights. But did he succeed? … »

Chris Harrison and Scott Hudson (Carnegie Mellon University) came up with a way to use any flat surface as a gesture based input device (Scratch input). An absolute breakthrough which makes extraordinary interactions, like for example controlling your television or music player with your wooden kitchen table, possible. … »

In an attempt to save the planet (and sell more cars in the proces) Ford is working on a new type of dashboard. The company came up with the idea that drivers will become eco-drivers when they are shown what the results of their driving style is. Unfortunately they completely missed the purpose of a dashboard in the process. … »

It has been around since 2005, but is still interesting: the Nissan Pivo Concept Car. This weird looking vehicle owns some nifty technologies, changing the way we interact with the car. One of them is the ability to turn the cabin around in the direction you are driving, making parking a pleasure. And yes, the car can drive sideways. … »

While using several of our senses in day-to-day life, we’re still limited by at-most one or two in our digital life… but behind the scenes researchers are working on the answer: multimodal interaction. Multimodal interaction gives user the liberty to interact with a system via more than a single human sense (touch, speech gesture etc). It is very much different from the traditional uni-modal interface where the interaction happens through one channel throughout. Multi-modal interaction has spread its wings to accommodate a wide gamut of users with a wide variety of profiles comprising of various ages. It has also addressed the issue of accessibility and universal use. The question now remains are how far have we come and where do we go now from here. … »

Who isn’t hanging over his desk to read a text or view a picture on his computer screen? -to be honost… I’m doing it right now- The movement that you make as a result is almost exclusive for this reason (viewing details). And in a world where gesture-based interfaces are top notch, we could have expected some interesting experiments. … »

Not only games are a healthy source for innovative interface design. Hollywood also always tries to look into the future and create impressive interfaces in their sci-fi and action movies. Most of the times the interfaces only have to look cool, and any professional would immediately spot the errors. But sometimes they are really impressive and cause jealous interaction designers, like in The Island and Majority Minority Report. A lot of these interfaces where designed by Mark Coleran. Check out what he creates … »