Chris Hanrath

The New York Times online, uses a bar at the top of the page that allows people log-in to their social platform to follow friends, co-workers and other readers as well as share content and comment on it.

The bar is very subtle, but offers more details in form of a pop-up once the user clicks on the “What’s this” link.

After signing up for the service, another wizard opens and offers to search for other people, import contacts or check suggested users.

The bar stays visible at the top throughout the user’s visit on nytimes.com and offers access to the timespeople page where the user can access newsfeeds, activity history, recommended content and his social network.

[Found via nytimes.com and timespeople.nytimes.com ]

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Yesterday i attended a presentation of Expedia on the University of Michigan Campus. They came to recruit Software designers and Project Managers. I was positively surprised to see how much they focus on usability and user-centered design to improve the user experience of their website. The presenter showed the audience a very interesting and promising take on booking your next vacation using expedia. Instead of using the traditional “day, time, destination” input, she showed us a very interesting wizard that selects vacation packages using other inputs such as an interactive map and vacation activities.

Unfortunately this is only visible to random users visiting Expedia.com who fall into the right category of the bucket test. But you can get an idea of Expedia’s attempts to improve the user experience at labs.expedia.com

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I was calling Verizon 411 the other day, they connected me to the desired phone number and as it has happened before nobody picked up the phone… So i repeated to call 411 to get the number once again. This time i was positively surprised, because as soon as i dialed, i was asked if i want to be reconnected to the last number. Great! This is what i call user experience.

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A sweet new user interface for any kind of search request.

Welcome to a new kind of search bar! Wundrbar is a next generation
search bar that lets you control your personal accounts and launch any
kind of web search. For example, you can manage your online calendar,
start a flight search, update your twitter status, and much more. And
you can do it all from the same search bar.

[ wundrbar.com ]

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Using svg, vml and css this technique implements rounded corners cross browser compatible:

http://elv1s.ru/files/html+css/vector-corners.html

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Part of my current Job at Yahoo is to work on the redesign of the Pattern Library. This is a great resource for designers and web developers where interaction design patterns are illustrated that exist on the web. Looking beyond just our library there are other libraries on the web that attempt to build similar collections. It seems there are two categories of libraries emerging: Galleries and Libraries.

Galleries provide a broad overview using visual examples for patterns on the web.

• Pattern Tap
• Design_Elements
• Flickr Pattern Collection
• Konigi

Libraries go further and try to describe the interaction and suggest solutions.

• Yahoo! Design Patterns
• Welie Patterns in Interaction
• UI-Patterns
• UC Berkley Web Patterns
• Information Visualization Patterns
• Tidwell: Designing Interfaces
• ui pattern factory

In addition there are Collections that identify implementation patterns

• Ajax patterns
• Mobile Design Patterns

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