Thank you Sebastien & Thibaut for your help and patience. Big thanks to the team!

“The world doesn’t need another search engine, it needs a better decision engine” (just too funny not to reproduce)

When it comes to arhitecture there are some tools out there but I was never happy with any of them.

Visio makes the mockups look ancient

Omnigraffle has came out of that business in their latest version (have no idea where they hidden the software UI library)

Axure doesn’t justify the price. The wireframes don’t end up looking far from Visio’s end result

Gliffy is buggy buggy

Now whenever I hear about a new tool I go ahead and try it. I want to see if I’m missing a better alternative to the Fireworks that gives me a hard time. Not because it’s hard to use but because it’s hard not to design when you’re in the process and you have so many tools under your hands

That’s how I came to Balsamiq Mock-ups. I played with the online version but it was hard to get a gut feeling for it. I couldn’t really play with the interfaces I wanted to design since I couldn’t save it afterwards. But it looked like fun

So I decided to buy it. But lucky me I could get it for free if I would write about it on my blog

So I tried it on my latest mock-up.  A product page in an e-commerce site

(You can tell, by the looks of it, that it was fun creating it)

So here are the pros and the cons:

PROS:

1. HAPPY: The product icon, all the great shapes make the work much more enjoyable

2.Doesn’t take too much ram, just the same amount as the father firefox (I  switched to Chrome because of that but that’s another story)

3.Love the double text button for the speaking navigation

4. Cool linking feature for navigation elements

5. Neat presentation feature. Too bad can’t use it with clients unless I do screensharing. It can not be published like a intaractive entity - at least from what I know of

CONS:

As if someone presents me a beautiful building, ties me and covers my eyes to discover what’s inside. It’s so dark and confusing! And I get the same frustration from anyone who tries open source for the first time. Developers, clients, project managers. All have the same first time impression, but they all appreciate the power they have over their system in about two months on average

Even the most simple operations seem a burden, and you just prefer to stay away and have someone else take care of it

I tried: skinning the back-end templates, adding the most common operations as big and and as detailed as possible but no css trick seem to do the job. It’s the structure that needs to be cracked. One at a time

First to get out from this seems to be Drupal. Two nice guys from Acquia took the matter in their hands and started a initiative that’s going to change this open source CMS forever, or at least we hope so.

First round of testing has began, later than planned but still in shape to crack some problems from the root. More info you can find on Drupal7 UX  Project Page

I already started my first round of testing, let me know if you want me to test it on you too, it takes less than 15 minutes

Here are some ways I tested successfully:

1.Friends Feeds on Social Networks

One of the reasons I visit Facebook so often is because I can’t wait to see the latest events around my circle of friends. And they do profit as much as they can from this natural tendency. Now social networks and websites copy this type of “friends feeds” on user pages to increase their page visits. And it works

2.Make things simple

The behavior of your application has to be predictable and correspond to your users expectations, leading them to trust the navigation and their own way of working with it. This is important to make the visitors curious to explore more

Example from the design I did for  Frogtek Android App

Don’t you just want to open the store?

3.Persuasive labels

How many times did you click on a link that says “Help”? Let’s admit it, we don’t need any help, we’re smart enough

But here’s how Google makes its users click on the help link

It’s so well dressed up it doesn’t even cross my mind it’s the help button

4.Visual Cues

No matter how much we rationalize and read, we are still turned on much more by visual clues then we are by text.

Photo- Example on Flickr and its side strips. How many times you haven’t clicked on those?

Movies - Youtube, Boxee and many more under this category make our life more enjoyable providing social videos that make you explore. But movies on websites are just getting cooler and cooler

Here’s how Sokoz presents itself. Don’t you just want them to launch already?

“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Dorothy Parker

It just brightens my day to receive emails like this one

It’s called Join the Hunt and the target seems pretty obvious - kids in love with the little colorful chocolate pills

I bet by the traffic and the experience I had entering the site, that their money were wasted.

Here’s why:

1. The key message, why the site is in place and what you need to do to join the hunt and win prizes loads with snail speed

2. The whole flash app breaks my computer, I already restarted it and trust me, on my computer i do tons of imaging and rendering, so I’m not talking about a granny computer here

3. To login you have to fill a form that doesn’t look like the form. But that’s not even a quarter of the problem. I was motivated to fill it to see what’s behind the site. But I bet users leave in the middle of it:

While you click on the fields with the personal data, the info disappears. Hence you have no idea what you need to fill in the boxes

4. The games fail to play, and the instructions are quite hard to read (at least in the pool game, the boat sits still and there’s not much I can do)

And all these things are packaged in such nice animations and nice concepts. It’s a shame nobody paid any attention to usability, loading time or at least getting the message across

And bake their potatoes, cook their dinner, wash their laundry for a month for this price

If you hear or see people in the same situation as the City Council have them call me please

I’m so proud of my baby!

Now spot it on the home page: