The Big Short By Michael Lewis

The Big Short By Michael Lewis is a great read. I became a fan after reading the book, Boomerang and watching the movie Money Ball. I thought people in the software business are clueless. Wall Street is worse.

Little Bets By Peter Sims

I checked out the book, The Little Bets by Peter Sims from the library. I heard about the incremental approach the author suggests. I believe in it. No one can predict the future. But one can experiment without losing it all.

iPad Design Guidelines I Keep In Mind While Designing Career OnDemand Apps

Design for touch: Don’t try to replicate web UI design paradigms in your iOS app. Instead, get familiar with the UI elements and patterns of iOS and use them to showcase your content. Web elements you’ll need to re-examine include menus, interactions initiated by hovering, and links.

Let people scroll: Most websites take care to display the most important information in the top half of the page where it is seen first (“above the fold”), because people sometimes leave a page when they don’t find what they’re looking for near the top. But on iOS-based devices, scrolling is an easy, expected part of the experience. If you reduce font size or squeeze controls to fit your content into the space of a single device screen, you’re likely to end up with unreadable content and an unusable layout.

Focus your app: Websites often greet visitors with a large number of tasks and options from which they can choose, but this type of experience does not translate well to iOS apps. iOS users expect an app to do what it advertises, and they want to see useful content immediately.  The above guidelines are from the iOS Human Interface Guide.

Some other guidelines I follow are

Use Content for navigation : Downplay application UI so that the focus is on content; present content in beautiful ways. Let's users touch the content and interact with it. I'll add more in the coming days and weeks... 

iPad User Interface Guidelines

I read about the iPad user inerface guidelines in Luke W's web site.  Some of these guidelines need explanation. I wonder if anyone has elaborated on this somewhere. I plan to poke around. The iPad user experience guidelines are © 2010 Apple Inc.

• Support All Orientations
• Enhance Interactivity (Don’t Just Add Features)
• Flatten Your Information Hierarchy
• Reduce Full-Screen Transitions
• Enable Collaboration and Connectedness
• Add Physicality and Heightened Realism
• Delight People with Stunning Graphics
• De-emphasize User Interface Controls
• This means less buttons on the screen. Content is the interface
• Minimize Modality
• Rethink Your Lists
• I wonder what this means. Some examples might help.
• Consider Multifinger Gestures
• Consider Popovers for Some Modal Tasks
• Restrict Complexity in Modal Tasks
• Downplay File-Handling Operations
• Ask People to Save Only When Necessary
• Start Instantly
• Always Be Prepared to Stop

Simulating a Scroll In an iPad App Built using @AxureRP

Almost all iPad apps have a  panel with content that you can scroll up and down. You can simulate that functionality very well using the Axure prototyping tool. The video below explains how. Special thanks to @enricgili who taught me how to do this.

Building panels with scroll functionality can help you covey the user experience in a much more meaningful way to your customers, colleagues, partners and analysts.