Karl's Blog

If you were hired to improve cars’ designs, with what aspect would you start? My first thoughts would be:

1. Performance
2. Fuel efficiency
3. Entertainment system?

I think I could go on for a while before I could even think about the car’s door. Recently I stumbled upon this video of an innovative way to design a car’s door. The majority of the cars use the same door’s design since 1897. Seriously, 1897! There might be some other systems out there, you could even consider lamborghini’s scissors doors, but they are insignificant compared with the amount of “normal” doors out there.

This interesting video made me think about how we innovate on the web. How many web “normal doors” are out there that we are forgetting to innovate? Sometimes you don’t know innovation is needed until you see it. Because after today I think all cars doors are lame and I want one of those!

It is/was well known that Apple is the king of UX/UI, their UI designs are awesome and you can see that UX is big deal from the moment you unpack your Apple product. But I believe that’s about to change, Apple will keep their great UX/UI, the point is that Microsoft will provide even a greater UX to their users (I never thought I would never say this words). It’s clear that Microsoft is investing a lot on the UX of their products and I believe the results are about to come, and this is why: (more…)

A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making on Amazon.com

Strongly recommended for anyone in the field, specially if you’re starting your career on UX or even development, it will put you on the right tracks.

The book is really detailed about every step of a project related with UX design (any software out there). It even gives you a guide on creating proposals for clients, but a lot of that knowledge can be used if you’re part of an internal team.

I mostly enjoyed Chapter 4 and 5, “Project Objectives and Approach” and “Business Requirements”, it’s a great guide for what I believe can be the hardest part of a project.

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability on Amazon.com

I really liked this book because it gave me really good insights on the best ways to build forms. I shows what to do, what not to do and why.

The structure makes it really easy to read and follow the main ideas. The book is separated in 3 parts: relationship, conversation and appearance.

One thing that I thought it was interesting was how important (talking ux, not design bs) it can be that your forms have good appearance, how much that can affect the efficiency of the form.