What can you do in 30 seconds? Well, according to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, one thing you can do is lose a potential user of your application. If your application doesn't grab the interest of a potential user in 30 seconds, they may move on. It’s the user experience that generates that crucial emotional reaction to your software, not the other pieces.

Have you ever wondered why graphical user interfaces (GUIs) have been the primary interface to computing? Why not use aural (sound), or haptic (touch) and gesture? A simple answer might be that technological evolution drove us in the direction of GUIs; where cathode-ray tubes CRTs met typewriters and never looked back.  It also seems intuitively obvious. All of us want to see something first in order to touch it or move it with a gesture.

Summer is rolling right along, and so are the attempts to simulate some of Tony Stark’s lifestyle here at ICS.  A while back, I wrote about trying to create our own version of Jarvis here at ICS.  We got a fair distance and demonstrated our results during the ICS QuickStarts earlier in the year.  Jarvis was a bit twitchy even so, overall he performed well.

Imagine for a moment that you are working on a project that has a virtually unlimited budget, like the iPhone or Android OS projects. You have the luxury of running 10 design teams simultaneously, seeing what brilliant new ideas they can come up with. You also can run 10 development teams with loose direction, just to see what amazing feats of engineering they can produce that could be worked back into some future version of your project. Sounds pretty good, right?

Even though user experience (UX) design must accommodate the needs of the user, which seem on the surface to be idiosyncratic, UX designs are built using user interface patterns, which are highly rule-based. It’s confusing and annoying to live in a world with no rules or inconsistent rules. Dreams are like that; you go through a door but are back in the same room or you run but you stay in the same place. The rules of physics define the behavior of the physical world.

June is usually one of my favorite months.  Summer is starting, the bugs are clearing out and vacations are upon us; it’s a generally nice time of year.  This year however, apparently several of my electronic devices are in collusion to change that.

There are numerous blogs arguing for consistency in a UX design mostly for soft reasons, such as "it's good for company branding," "it’s just good design," and “it’s easier to learn.” Here is the most important reason for UX design consistency, based on how the brain works: Lack of consistency in a UX design leads to added “cognitive load” for the user and breaks the “transparent to task” effect.

Here is a piece of advice for both developers and designers that come from the words of Wilfred Hansen: Know Thy User. Many developers make the critical mistake of thinking they are developing for the user, when in fact they are developing for themselves. Does your target customer share your technical or cultural background? What about their demographics – Are they the same age and gender? Do they share your goals and motivations? If you cannot answer these basic questions, you may very well be creating the wrong product for your customer!

I’m an advocate of UX + Agile but it has led to some “can’t-see-the-work-for-the-methodology” blindness. People are wrapped-up in doggedly following the mechanics of the methodology and lose sight of essential common sense about how best to get the work done that initially inspired the creation of the methodology. This not very thoughtful behavior tends to dumb-down the value of the methodology, diminishing the promised gains in project efficiency… bad for any company.

A physical demonstration of a touch enabled coverflow drag on an ICS kiosk.