Hello. This is the weblog of Amrinder Sandhu
— a web and interaction designer from India; who runs a small design studio.

I’ve always loved reading good design books. I believe they are better and reliable source of information as compared to blogs as many great people put lot of hard work to get a single book out. In 2011, I bought 40 books and managed to read just 16 as of now.

Books I’ve read:

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To be read:

I’ve been working on PopSurvey—An awesome survey creation app powered by simplicity—for over an year now. The best part is the survey player (patent pending) where each slide carries just 1 question. We are also making the PopSurvey player compatible for iOS and other mobile platforms using media queries.

After designing the mockups for PopSurvey player, I was thinking of presenting them to my team in some better way and the best way would be to present them on iPhone itself. To achieve that I saved the files in dropbox folder, named them (see screenshot #2) so each mockup appears after one another as they’d in real survey on sliding i.e. First survey intro, then questions and at last thanks slide. It worked great for testing and presenting and team liked it. Do you guys like it too? or you use some other better way?

Following are the screenshots of mockups taken in the iPhone dropbox app.

I really love the simple and clean design of Readmill. The app. is awesome. Great design!

Yesterday while logging into the app. I encountered their sign in form and thought it could be little better.

Current Sign In Form at Readmill.com

Revised Sign In Form

Designer Richard Seymour explores our response to beauty and the surprising power of objects that exhibit it.

How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback

It turns out that answering our support calls has been an incredibly productive experience as well as potentially a profit center. When customers call, not only am I in a great position to help them as I understand the product inside and out, but their questions and feedback are essentially a free focus group. We always have a list of improvements we need to make to the product, but sometimes prioritizing can be a crapshoot. Vocal customers tell me quickly which work items need to move to the top of the list. I can only imagine how many customers of ours experience the same frustration as these callers but don’t bother picking up the phone.

All those who participate in design, from interaction designers, to usability engineers, to IA masters, fall victim to the same kinds of challenges when trying to bring good design into the world. From politics, to hubris, to downright incompetence, what can we learn by confessing to, and examining the causes of, our failures?
Scott Berkun explores why designers fail and offers advice on how to learn from and triumph in the face of these situations.

Why designers fail and what to do about it by Scott Berkun from Adaptive Path at MX 2009.

An electronic company were testing for a new boom box they hoped to start selling. Their research included focus groups where they showed the two colour options, yellow and black. The participants were in agreement that yellow was the best colour because it is a vibrant and energetic colour. At the end of the focus group they were each allowed to take a boom box home, and could choose yellow or black. They all chose black.

– Steve Mulder, author of The User is Always Right.

Now this is the best HTML/CSS framework till date. Something I’ve been waiting for quite a time now.

Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of webapps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.

Bootstrap is built with Less and was designed to work out of the gate with modern browsers in mind.

I like how Paul Boag thinks about using Media Queries to design better and overcome the limitations of the fold.

Having a technique like this at our disposal means that we can avoid a lot of the awkward conversations with the client where we try to explain how the fold does not really exist. It also enables us to have more freedom with our layouts and use of whitespace without being concerned over whether key messages will be missed at lower resolutions. In short it takes the sting out of the fold debate.

→ Read the article at Boagworld

Keith – lead designer at Forrst – has some interesting thoughts about the concept of “Getting Back to Zero” in design:

The ability to consistently look at a design as a new user while laying out elements and keeping the project goals in mind. Getting back to zero. An on-going back-and-forth between making design decisions, fleshing out ideas, and seeing them through a user’s eyes with their goals in mind.

These days I’m designing in browser instead of Fireworks for a live project —  Pixoto.com. Designing in browser has some solid advantages as it helps you launch quite early instead of hanging there in design revisions. Get a quick mockup together and start coding. Quick design, faster revisions and early deployment.

Dear fellow designers,

I hope you are having great time designing great stuff. You’ll be excited to know that I’ve 3 dribbble invites which I would like to give away to some really talented designers. So please leave your portfolio urls and your emails (in comments) where you would like me to send the invitation. The top 3 will be invited  by this weekend.

Looking forward to invite some great people to join dribbble next week.

UPDATE: After looking at all the comments intensively I’ve decided to invite:

1. Luke Smith — Portfolio
2. Joe Mercieri — Portfolio
3. Bek — Portfolio

My decision was based on quality of work. Congrats and happy dribbbling guys!

The part of the world using Latin script may have enough type designers. But for the Arab world or India it is very different. More designers are needed there.

— Gerard Unger, Type Designer quoted in his interview with MyFonts

Gerand might be referring to only type designers here but I strongly believe that India lacks all kind of good designers.

As usual Luke Wroblewski posted his invaluable notes for An Event Apart – Atlanta, GA 2011 talks. Following are the ones that concern me:

• Crafting the User Experience by Sarah Parmenter
• On Web Typographyby Jason Santa Maria
• Design Principlesby Jeremy Keith

Joshua Porter (Bokardo) explains how to identify best design problems and how to tackle them using UX principle:

Saying we have a problem is easy, but the real problems are the ones we get emotional about. Frustration is the first clue that people have a real problem on their hands. They might not know how to articulate the problem they have but if they are frustrated then a problem exists somewhere.

→ Read further

Couple of weeks back I received an email from Mark Grantham — a User Experience Recruiter @Google — about working with them.

Tom Preston-Werner cofounder of Github tells about his early (and some valuable) experiences with Github and 10 things he learnt on the way.

For me, 2008 was the year that I helped design, develop, and launch GitHub. Creating a new startup is an intense learning experience. Through screwups and triumphs, I have learned some valuable lessons this year. Here’s a few of them:

1. Start Early
2. Adapt to Your Customers
3. Have Fun
4. Pay attention to Twitter
5. Deploy at Will!
6. You Don’t Need an Office
7. Hire Through Open Source
8. Trust your Team
9. You Don’t Need Venture Capital
10. Open Source Whatever You Can

→ Read further

Tim Brown rightly states:

By using culturally relevant, historically pleasing ratios to create modular scales and basing the measurements in our compositions on values from those scales, we can achieve a visual harmony not found in layouts that use arbitrary, conventional, or easily divisible numbers.

→ Read the article at A List Apart

I highly recommend that. Reading books over blogs gives you an in-depth knowledge for a particular subject and that too by an expert. Unlike blogs where people like me share their thoughts and ideas which may or may not be logical while in books these are not just thoughts but tested, proved practices. Blogging is easy, free so everyone is doing it. But writing books require expertise and more than 1 person is involved. Blogs does the routine posting like 3-6 articles a week and there are hundreds out there causing information overload. So I find reading books more useful, valuable and convenient over blogs.

Image Source: 9GAG

Fundamental principles for designing effective User Interfaces.

Effective interfaces are visually apparent and forgiving, instilling in their users a sense of control. Users quickly see the breadth of their options, grasp how to achieve their goals, and do their work.

→ Read the article at asktog.com