Taken from: Sketching Interfaces Workshop - Interactions12 (Dublin)

 

Link to Article here

Beautiful and elegant minimalist design created by http://www.movingbrands.com/ that may not be implemented...

Read the full article here: A New HP: So Close, Yet So Far Away

 

This is a great collection but my favourite - and most important one - is the last one 'Keeping it Real' by Kim Goodwin:

 

For the full article on A List Apart look here: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/what-i-learned-about-the-web-in-2011/

Really interesting article on the Kano model for designers by Jared Spool (Jan 2011): 
http://www.uie.com/articles/kano_model

Image Credit: Understanding the Kano Model - A Tool for Sophisticated Designers / Jared Spool / UIE.com

London's 'Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme' rolls out officially next week and we caught a glimpse of one of the new docking stations where you can pick up or drop off your bicycle on St John Street near City University London. There are similar schemes in Paris, Barcelona, Shanghai, and Copenhagen. A map of the hire zones is available here and the Zone 1 area covered can be seen above.

Six thousand matching black, silver and blue bicycles are about to hit the streets of London as the city joins others around the world in launching a public bike sharing scheme. The Barclays Cycle Hire scheme will go live on July 30 allowing commuters and tourists to take bikes from 400 docking stations, spaced at 300 yard intervals, for short journeys around central London.

For an access fee of £1 a day or £45 a year, cyclists will be able to use the bikes for free for the first half hour, with a rising fee for longer periods. Users can return for further free half hours as often as they like within a day.

We want these bikes to become icons of London, just like red buses and black cabs.
-- Kulveer Ranger, Mayor of London's Transport Adviser

Link to CNN Article: London Gears up for bike share launch

The bikes themsleves are robust in design and have been built to withstand possible vandalism, and have also been designed to adapt to the London weather with additional mudguards. All 6,000 of London’s bikes have been built at Devinci Cycles in Bagotville, Quebec - which also made the bikes for Montreal. The name Barclays, the official sponsors of the scheme, will appear in three places on each bike.

From a design and usability point of view it will be interesting to see how user friendly the process of hiring and returning a bike will be - and it'll be interesting to see how quickly it will adopted by Londoners in the next coming months. Being summer the timing of rolling out this scheme is perfect.

There is a clearly marked information point at the docking station which names the location of the docking station, reveals contextual information on a map, shows its location in relation to neighbouring docking stations in the area, and includes a payment processing point in order to choose a subscription or membership service. The main information point uses the familiar London Underground sign which can be seen from afar - this sign is now light blue in colour with 'Cycle Hire'  clearly labeled in white against a dark blue background. There is a screen which will enable the user to choose a subscription for either £1 for the day, £5 for a week, or £45 for the year - plus £3 for a time-saving "access key". There is a credit card processing machine with a physical keypad enabling the transaction to take place once the user has selected a subscription period.

The cycle points themselves have a simple interface which use universally accepted patterns with a red dot or light indicating the the cycle is not available, a yellow dot or light indicating that information is being processed, and a green dot or light indicating that the bicycle has been successfully released for hire, or docked if it is being returned instead. In addition to the use of the colours red, yellow, and green - the three step process is supported by visual cues with the numbers 1 - 2 - 3 indicating the stages of the process and the use of icons such as the 'no entry' icon (indicating that the cycle is not available), clock / time icon (indicating that information is being processed), and a tick icon (indicating that the cycle is either available or has been returned safely). If the cycle is damaged there is a clearly marked button at the top left of the cycle point marked in red.  This process will be initiated by the use of the 'membership key or 'access key' which will have to be purchased from the main information point at the docking station first. Let's see if the scheme rolls out smoothly at the end of the month and how Londoners respond...

35mm from Pascal Monaco on Vimeo.

Really interesting movie with 35 popular films captured and expressed in their simplest form.

Found this great collection of iPad design resources for uxers, designers, developers - put together by iPad Atelier :

Sections include:

Emulator
Getting Started
GUI Templates
Icons
Layout
Fonts and Typography
Usability
Touch Screen
CSS Hacks
HTML5
JS and PHP
Video Demos
App Gallery
and Goodies

iPad Design Resources Link

 

Let's start a list of others:

Sarah Parmenter's iPad Wireframe

iPad UI Conventions by Fraser Spears on Flickr - Article in TechCrunch

iPad UI PSD

Do you know any great resources that are missing? Feel free to add any links you've found.

 

Looking at the site redesign, the design and layout of the article pages appears odd with an excessive use of white space (180px +)  in the middle of the page - the main text is aligned to the left while the images, pull-quotes, tables, and other information areas are aligned to the right.  More importantly, this breaks the natural flow of the text on the page in terms of readability and means that valuable space for content has been wasted.  The overall layout itself does not look cohesive and although I generally like the use of white space, in this instance the 'gap' is too large and feels like a 'missing area' in the design. What are your thoughts regarding the article pages?