Watching our 2 year old navigate the iPad has been amazing. She has a huge capacity to figure it out, play her favorite songs, run her favorite apps, etc.
Of course she does a lot better when there are pictures. An icon, no matter how small, gives her tons more benefit than just a text label.
But it's about the Nouns
But the biggest concept I've learned is the idea of nouns vs. verbs.
When language starts developing, you see thousands of nouns appear, before verbs really show up at all.
And even for adults, the best interfaces are made of simple nouns. Apps are nouns. One of the big splits between an early "technology" for "professionals" and "consumer apps" seems to happen at the point a UI gets noun-ized. A photo, a song, a file.
It's not a "workflow" or a "write down these steps." It's, that app, or, that icon. It's when you become a noun that your software takes a leap in usability.
In real life, our most important tools do things, so software designers try to emulate that. But the best-loved tools are also nouns. And those tools, those nouns, can only do a few things. You start a sentence with a noun, and it limits which verbs apply. So your brain is just faster this way.
It's what toddlers do, and it's the same with people bigger than two years old.
Your users aren't so smart that they want a workflow or a wizard or an action.
Instead, you should try to start with nouns.
On Crossfading Properly
Since Adobe Revel just replicated the thing Google+ did, and they're both wrong, I thought I would say this:
If you have two images over a black background and you want to crossfade between them, please DO NOT fade out the first one as you fade in the second.
(Exception: you can fade the first one out, quickly, at the very end of your animation, if the aspect ratios are different.)
The reason is this: in the middle of your animation, if you do it the Google+/Adobe way, you will have:
- image A at 50%
- image B at 50%
=============
Total opacity: 75%
And you didn't really mean to have 25% of the background showing through there, did you?
Crossfading between two images this way will leave you with a 25% darker image in the middle of your very fast crossfade, and that's very distracting and looks bad.
You don't want intensity to change in a crossfade, unless it's very slow and fades to black on purpose.
If you have two images over a black background and you want to crossfade between them, please DO NOT fade out the first one as you fade in the second.
(Exception: you can fade the first one out, quickly, at the very end of your animation, if the aspect ratios are different.)
The reason is this: in the middle of your animation, if you do it the Google+/Adobe way, you will have:
- image A at 50%
- image B at 50%
=============
Total opacity: 75%
And you didn't really mean to have 25% of the background showing through there, did you?
Crossfading between two images this way will leave you with a 25% darker image in the middle of your very fast crossfade, and that's very distracting and looks bad.
You don't want intensity to change in a crossfade, unless it's very slow and fades to black on purpose.
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