New Year’s Resolution (Pt. 1)

1024 x 768 *

(* please excuse this lame pun but visting relatives abroad, a new job and looking for a new flat is currently keeping me from updating on a regular basis)

The early bird catches the bandwidth

Webmontag Köln aus der zu spät zugeschalteten Perspektive (Flickr)

Originally uploaded by halfman.halfpixel.

10 Best Application UIs of 2008 announced on useit

The winners of the above mentioned competition were announced on Jakob Nielsen’s website today.

Being used to some terrible user interfaces from work I found most of the winners really well designed, with a contemporary feel & clever concept to them.

What usability sifu Nielsen did not include are the direct URLs for the winners (as he for some reason tends not to do quite often- except for links to his reports which you have to pay for that is…)

Ah well, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it… So here goes, as far as I am concerned in no particular order other than alphabetical:

Campaign Monitor

CMS Box

FotoFlexer

Océ PRISMAprepare

SQL Diagnostic Manager

SugarSync (My personal favourite)

SuperSaas

Wufoo

Xero

Actually that’s a top 9, I didn’t list the Magellan Network’s Seating Management up there as I found their website rather disappointing and not very informative.

What’s Design Mean to You? Interview with Andy Budd by Matt Balara

Matt Balara has asked some of the “top faces” in webdesign to come up with clever answers to the question “What’s design mean to you?”

Below please find what Andy Budd has to say – I find it remarkable and somewhat re-assuring that he is stressing design to be first and foremost about problem solving which is exactly what was rammed down my throat during my degree and emphasized in Bob Gill’s lecture in Leeds quite some time ago.

Designing the User Experience Curve

Great presentation held at the web directions south conference by Andy Budd. Many of his thoughts have already crossed my mind before, too.

Best open the podcast of the talk here while flicking through the presentation in full screen on slideshare:

The whole notion of looking at best practices off the web is something I try to subscribe to myself and am actually aiming to compile good/bad examples from life outside the web on here in the future.