Do you notice the difference? No? Good. Good design is when you do not notice it. You probably haven't recognized that the prompt icon has changed compared to the icon that was used for nearly a decade.

The former icon still had the original Sun purple on a beveled button (the latter a usability issue in its own, because there is nothing to click). And even though the Sun Ray 1 is still on duty at many sites, it has long been replaced by a couple of successor models. Hence the icon of the tilted thin client device is not appropriate anymore.

The new set of status icons will be part of the upcoming SRSS 4.2 release. The entire set is presented and explained at SRSS Troubleshooting Wiki.

Thanks to Jörg for the good cooperation, and welcome to the blogosphere.

When Peter approached me a few weeks ago to work on the UI design for the next release of Sweet, I had just started on twitter in order to understand what all the fuzz is about. Well, I cannot say I get it, but at least I got some interesting links that I had missed otherwise.

Now Sweet is our internal microblogging service, based on open source laconi.ca. You can try out laconica at identi.ca or take a look at the before state_

It is not possible to significantly change a project in mid air – but this is exactly what I did by tweaking the CSS and a few images to create a pleasant and inviting design for Sweet. Note the logo (done with creatr.cc), the color scheme, the layout, the text counter, the tabs, the font changes, and the tag cloud in the after image. BTW_ the bird in the tree indicates that a tweet is also visible to the public on twitter.

Paying attention to the 'design details' can even improve the usability of such a project. A professional design increases the perceived quality and therewith the user experience. Since the relaunch we have more users and we even figured out that there was another installation of laconica running inside Sun -- they are now planing the migration to Sweet.

All this took me less than a week. I learned a lot about dirty CSS hacks, and got in touch with 2 nice colleagues at Sun whom I never met in person. Peter was a kind of project lead, and Olof the engineer behind the curtain. And guess what, our main communication tool was... Sweet!

> internal URL: http://do.sfbay.sun.com/sweet/

Some time ago I've created a planet of all design, usability and accessibility blogs at Sun. That makes it easy to check and subscribe what's going on in this area. Now it was a snap to add Oracle's Usable Apps and Luke Kowalski's Blog as well.

Sun & Oracle User Experience Design

enjoy
Matthias

today and tomorrow is a cool blog that provides design, art and technology inspiration. Thanks Pieter, I love it.

That was quite a remarkable evening, Bill Verplank presenting at BayCHI on Sketching Metaphors. First of all his presentation style. He had an overhead camera connected to the projector in a way that the audience could follow all his actions on the desktop. This gave him the flexibility to simply point to images in a book, show his note cards, or develop (and explain on the way) something entirely from scratch. For example on the image above Bill describes the origin of the window scrollbar and the dead metaphor of an elevator for the thumb control in the bar to the right [metaphors in italics ;-) ]

In a closing section he provided an enlightening diagram on various computer paradigms.

The computer as a tool you can use, the computer as media for information sharing and communicating with each other, and the computer as an intelligent person to interact with. If you go a step further the tools become vehicles, media becomes fashion (take Apple's iPod as an fashion statement for example), and person becomes life – and ecosystem of self organizing systems.

Thank you Bill, for this framework of computer paradigms.

>> The entire photostream can be found at flickr.

Interaction Design Sketchbook by Bill Verplank

1. Keep it simple.
2. But not simpler.
3. Keep scalability in mind.
4. End users are not dumb.
5. Sysadmins are human beings, too.