Chris Hanrath » UE Design

Yahoo! Pattern Library Relaunch

Chris — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:14:46 +0000

Last summer i worked at Yahoo! as an interaction design intern and my major summer project was to design the new Information Architecture for the Pattern Library. Today the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library was relaunched with a new face – more open and social. It includes 10 new Social Patterns, a reorganized category-structure, cleaner URLs for easier bookmarking and much more.

Come and check it out at http://design.yahoo.com

UX Pattern Explorer

Chris — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:53:01 +0000

Check out Quince a new ux pattern explorer by Infragistics.

There are no good tools that make these patterns usable, and there isn’t much community to speak of around them. We at Infragistics thought that we could help and fill the gap – helping to make UX design patterns more findable, more discoverable, more usable, and, we hope, more communal and social.

Product distribution visualization

Chris — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:14:32 +0000

Glimpse.com has a nice feature that visualizes the available product distribution in a price range to refine the search. When adjusting the slider, a pop-up immediately indicates an estimated number of remaining products for the refined price range. (See Example)

Windows 7 Tray Progress Bar

Chris — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:46:03 +0000

Windows 7 now visualizes progress right in the system tray even when the window is minimized. I like it!

Fashion your Firefox

Chris — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:48:55 +0000

Mozilla just put up a new website that let’s users discover more add-ons for Firefox. It’s an interesting way of helping users to identify extensions that are of interest to them by relating the suggestions to persona-style categories like these:

Finder and Seeker: “I want to make finding information on the Web simpler and more relevant to me.”
Rock Star: “Music and the Web go together like rock stars and leather — I love to listen while I surf, work, email or research online.”
News Junkie: “I want to know what’s happening in the world as it happens. And the weather helps me plan my week — temperature, please!“

Design Jam featured on Mozilla Labs Blog

Chris — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:25:16 +0000

I joined the SoCHI student group for Human-Computer Interaction just before the summer and since i came back from my internship this summer at Yahoo! we have had quite a few events this semester. One of the ideas we had was to facilitate Design Jams that would encourage students to get together to apply their skills to real life problems. We held two Design Jams sponsored by Mozilla to brainstorm and prototype ideas and designs for the browser of the future inspired by their Concept Series. We bloged about the fantastic results on our website and today we were featured on the Mozilla Labs Blog.

More pictures on Flickr

New LinkedIn App Feature

Chris — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:49:15 +0000

LinkedIn has added a new feature that allows users to add applications to their profiles and networks.

LinkedIn Applications enable you to enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective. Applications are added to your homepage and profile enabling you to control who gets access to what information.

I experimented this morning with the WordPress Blog feature, that is supposed to show your recent blog posts on your Profile page. From the Application gallery I was taken to the WordPress App Page, where i can choose to display it on my profile and LinkedIn Homepage.

This is where it stopped working for me… I went back to the WordPress App page and found a button to “update settings”, but the following page does not open. I will have to come back when it’s fixed …

Update: Now it works!

Yahoo! OpenID Usability Study

Chris — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:24:36 +0000

Tom Allen from Yahoo! Membership posted an article on the Yahoo! Developer Blog about the “OpenID: One Key, Many Doors” usability study that was conducted to uncover usability issues associated with enabling OpenID on 3rd party sites and using it for subsequent logins.

[ Found via 25hoursaday.com ]

IDEA 08

Chris — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:53:13 +0000

On October 7th Katie and I went to Chicago to attend the IDEA conference for two days. It was a great opportunity to meet and network with professionals from the User Experience domain. Most speakers were very interesting, thought provoking and inspired some great ideas for possible projects. I was very impressed by the talks of Dave Gray from XPLANE and Aradhana Goel from IDEO.

You should check out Katie’s blog where she has two great blog post about the conference (and our browser design jam for the mozilla concept series).

NY TimesPeople

Chris — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:09:00 +0000

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 ]