Comments for two rivers flowing

Comment on OmniGraffle & the Application Map by Michael Carlucci

Michael Carlucci — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:16:22 +0000

Great talk at the Seattle UIEWMT Hagan!
Thanks for the wisdom, i am working on putting it to work.

Comment on OmniGraffle & the Application Map by Fitzgerald Steele

Fitzgerald Steele — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:18:07 +0000

Thanks for this, and thanks for the stencils! Looking forward to hearing more about this at UIE Web Masters in Minneapolis

Comment on Problems with trees & navigation by Eric Hammes

Eric Hammes — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:45:03 +0000

I love your posts. They are excellent…keep ‘em up!

Comment on The Minibar by Brian

Brian — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 11:48:01 +0000

Great article; the minibar is a great tool for meta navigation! Google’s minibar pops into my mind as the first one I ever saw. Comedy Central (the TV network) uses one to keep their political satire shows together, featuring the same minibar atop the three separate websites for the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, Indecision, the Insider Blog, and jokes.com. I’m actually using the “minibar” for a current project

Comment on Revive Double Click by Ward Poulos

Ward Poulos — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:14:34 +0000

Great post – also enjoyed your talk at UIE Web App Masters.

Zenfolio is an example of a site that uses double click well (in the photographer’s logged-in photo management interface to access the photo from the thumbnail page). I have grown to love this feature and the way they implemented it. I think Firewheel Design worked on this interface if I’m not mistaken.

Comment on OmniGraffle & the Application Map by Application Maps and Frameworks « Communicating Design

Application Maps and Frameworks « Communicating Design — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:45:40 +0000

[...] Masters Tour caught my eye. The speaker, Hagan Rivers, described a technique called “application maps.” From Hagan’s original blog post on it: When I look at an application I look for [...]

Comment on Disruptive design: TiVo & iPad by Peter Cook

Peter Cook — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 19:41:15 +0000

Excellent analogy. My original interest in the potential of the iPad leaned toward entertainment, but now is more towards its business applications. I almost see it as the birth of electronic paper. It is light, fast, flexible and has the power to go all day. Tie it into a central server and it becomes ideal for business meetings. Something that the laptop has been trying to do for years. All the demos seemed to gloss over the business apps. If the mainstream adopts this tech, how we work will change overnight.

I stumbled across your blog looking for discussions of how to tie an iPad into the Tivo, but your musings got me outside the box (forgive the tired cliché). Changes seem to happen so quickly, yet comparatively go by without much consideration. Thanks for the change in perspective.

Comment on Revive Double Click by Daniela Meleo

Daniela Meleo — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:19:23 +0000

Hi Hagan, I’m looking into a very similar interaction now for an enterprise app. The main benefit for us is the flexibility to include a variety of relevant actions for any given row in the table. As the app evolves, there may be additional actions we’ll add to the menus.
Actions can only be performed on one item at a time. (Our tables need to display a number of columns of data so we can’t take up column space user actions. ) The app will need a number of similar tables for different categories of items, all of which have associated actions, so I expect users will learn the interaction quickly as they’ll encounter it often.

The design I’m proposing displays a “hover action” icon as the user mouses over the table rows, indicating that something can be done with the row. The user clicks on the icon to see the row’s menu of actions. In our case most of the menu items will involve navigation to more detailed related content for that item.

Last fm uses this method in its Top Tracks sections e.g:
http://www.last.fm/music/Jim+White

I’d be interested to hear if anyone has encountered any usability issues with this approach..
ciao – Daniela

Comment on OmniGraffle & the Application Map by UI Design

UI Design — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 08:22:32 +0000

that’s really a fantastic post ! added to my favourite blogs list.. I have been reading your blog last couple of weeks and enjoy every bit. Thanks.

Comment on Before/After: Table cleanup by Justin Sinclair

Justin Sinclair — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:22:36 +0000

I like your version much better. But, I think it’s tough to redesign the table out of context. For example, your visual id for links is the colour blue. But, this isn’t necessarily clear. At first glance, I wasn’t sure whether “More Copies” was a link or a header for the button actions. My initial though was that the visual id for a link was bold text – like the item name or the top tabs. This would make it not a link. But then I noticed, bold is also used for form labels like “Sort by:” and the ever so helpful error message ” Warning: Unable to sort search results” – so my initial mental model breaks down.

Also, some other questions I would ask:
1) Are the numbers of the search result important? That is, for a given page does it matter whether you are looking at number 1 or 5, or 23 or 27? I think no. If that’s the case you could get rid of the numbers.
2) Is the medium the most important piece of information? Perhaps, and that is what you’re suggesting by placing it top left. I was thinking, because it’s a repeated glyph (i.e you look at it once to decode and then only glance at it again) that it could be smaller and placed at the start of the item name. Kind of like a doctype icon in a file-system. But this is arguable.
3) Are the three actions at the right of each search result equivalent? That is, are they all equally important? Also, are the outcomes of clicking them similar? Looking at the real site – “Add to my list” is a toggle which involves no page load. Whereas “Request item” takes you to another page (at least for users like me who aren’t logged in). If they invoke different sorts of responses, should they then be treated differently visually to hint at this?

Anyway, I’ve gone on for far too long now, and am probably reading way too much into it As I said at the top, I like your design much more than the original. It conveys more information in a smaller space and is easier to scan. So, much improved.