The craftsmanship of design: Things
Things iPhone App [by Cultured Code]
I've been using the Things app from Cultured Code for the past several months now and have really found it useful. After moving my team away from MS Exchange Server and on to Google Apps for email et al, I find it much more useful for organizing my day/tasks than Outlook or Entourage ever did (especially the 2008 version...I hated the My Day widget).
But this wasn't meant to be a promotional post for Things. What I wanted to call your attention to were these photos from their blog post about their coming-soon iPhone app. How incredibly refreshing and what a sense of real craftsmanship in seeing that they develop (what appears to be) screen progressions with pen, cardboard templates and paper. Feels a little like a lost art being re-captured.
Who else works through design issues like this? Got a photo to share? The ones below (I think) are beautiful...
Ben Carey on June 21st, 2008
We certainly take this approach at work and it is very, very refreshing. This is mostly driven by our User Experience team (consisting of Interaction Designers, Graphic Designers, Usability Specialists, and Human Factors Engineers). Unfortunately, I don't have anything that I can share that is close to me right now.
There are a couple of books that are wonderful on working this way... #1 is Sketching User Experience by Bill Buxton (great book) and #2 is Paper Prototyping by Carolyn Snyder. The book on sketching gives some great insights into the parallels between Industrial Design and how it applies to both sketching in general and sketching with software. The paper prototyping book offers some real and tactical examples on how to compose software with lightweight design alternatives.