Thoughtful Design is all about understanding people, their goals, and their problems. If you've seen any good designs you like, please share here. Thanks!
Chatree
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
I’m always a big fan of mint.com. It’s fascinating that they make an online personal finance app, without established brand name, and people trust them enough to enter all their account information into mint.
What I like even more is they really do work hard on providing information beyond reporting the fact about how much money you have. It’s not hard to implement, but it’s a lot of work to figure out what’s matter. And I believe mint.com succeed because they are doing that well.
I had a chance to play with Alice app on iPad the other day. My impression was that they found a right balance of using the technology while not letting it get in a way of reading the story. When the iPad and other tablets are coming out, people are confused with what to do with readings. Many tries to mimic what book has to offer, like page flipping, on the screen. Alice app utilizes tilt controls and gorgeous illustrations to make the story more interesting but the main focus is still on the reading text itself.
Virgin America experience design
Virgin America did a fantastic job on experience design. My friend once tweeted about Trader Joe’s that it is like Apple store for grocery. I have to say Virgin America is up on par with those guys.
They make boring stuff like safety instructions and video to be fun, and that makes people want to pay attention to.
Google homepage fading effect. The page is originally loaded with just Google logo, search box, and buttons. If you start typing and hit enter, you wouldn’t see anything else. But if you move the cursor, all other links will appear on the page. Nice subtle way to remove all the distractions since they are not needed most of the time.
This is not nothing new but I still want to include it in this blog. MagSafe power adaptor for mac laptop is designed to snap on magnetically. When somebody trip a cord, the adaptor snaps off without dragging the laptop down with it.
Solar-powered trash compactor
Pizza box turns into disposable plates
Ever sent an email and forgot to attach the attachments? Gmail team came up with a clever idea to detect what you wrote in the message body and warn you if you might want to attach some files but haven’t done it yet. The solution is very easy to implement but it solves one major usability issue users have on sending email. Some people say this is “creepy stalker”, I say this is observant and conscientious.
