Hugo Schotman

Graphic design museum opened in The Netherlands

Perhaps of interest for my Graphic Designer friends:

www.graphicdesignmuseum.nl

Zeix user experience

Today I had a great visit to the office of Zeix in Zurich.

Zeix are very thorough in their approach of user centered design. They are not too academic but prove their solutions with proper user testing. They also seem to work fast and efficiently.

Over lunch I mentioned IDEO who are another great example of a company that gets user centered design. Here are some things that I'd like to share with Jacqueline, Ina and their colleagues:

Paul Bennett: Design is in the details

David Kelley: The future of design is human-centered

Yves Behar: Creating objects that tell stories

iPhone UI critique

Some day this year I'll be able to comment on this more. (The iPhone is not out in Switzerland yet and I am waiting for version 2 before I buy one, yadda, yadda, etc.)

For now, here's an interesting discussion about the iPhone user experience and the way its apps display information:

graphpaper.com - Edward Tufte’s iPhone

It will be interesting to see what kind of user experience third party apps will offer when the official SDK is released.

Flickr + tags + creative commons + maps + geotagging = mashup

Schmap Guides richly annotates online maps to create guides for a big number of travel destinations. They make a nice mashup with existing maps sites and scour flickr for relevant pictures to use (and link to) on their site. A creative-commons licensed picture of mine was found by the editors of Schnap and they asked for permission to include it. (Yes, of course.)

Most of the people whose pictures are featured will probably spread the word. Good marketing!

A User Experience workshop experience

Working on the Swisscom Labs project was an interesting experience.
My colleague Bryce wrote a short summary of the User Experience design part of it:
From requirements to a designed UI in 5 too-short days!

(My role on the project was: project manager, UX lead and front-end developer.)

Vaarwel, Au revoir, KLM Airfrance

20000 of my last Flying blue airmiles have just been spent. I only have a few left.
Good. Now I will probably not have to deal with KLM/ Airfrance and it's horrible online services for a while anymore.

Every visit to the site for the past 5+ years has been a surprise. There were always new errors, inconsistencies and usability annoyances to discover.
Today:
- Validation on a phone number field: I enter "5551234" (or similar), the site comes back with 'you can only use numbers in the phone field'.
- ZIP code/ post code validation, all the way at the end of the checkout process: field must contain 5 digits. I add a 0 in front of my valid, 4 digit swiss zip-code: same error. I enter '12345': it works!

Book over the phone instead? Right! Try to find the number for booking with award miles on the website.