Apple’s new skin.
Will Apple’s Oct 20 Back to the Mac event finally herald the unification of its OSX app designs?
While updates to iTunes over the years have hinted at some long needed aesthetic changes (such as shifting away from the aqua scrollbars), there has been a general divergence between all the standard OSX apps. Even the promised Snow Leopard tuneup ignored aesthetic refinement.
Simplify checkout by detecting credit card types.
Following up on my post about simplifying checkout with streamlined addresses here’s another way you can shorten the checkout process on your website.
Visiting most e-commerce sites you’ll see a form like this on checkout:
It’s pretty straight-forward and simple, but we can refine it a little further by auto-detecting which credit card the user has entered, rather than asking them to specify it manually.
Simplify checkout with streamlined address entry.
It’s generally understood that the traditional way of to write out an address is as follows:
301 Front Street West
Toronto, Ontario M5V 2T6
Canada
This is all well and good when mailing a letter, but it presents a problem of hierarchy when used in a web form. The specific issue is with the order of the province, country and postal code.
Here’s how you’d generally find these fields organized in a standard checkout form.
So what’s the problem? For starters, every country has different regions (provinces, states, neither, etc.) but the user is being asked to specify which region they live in, before they’ve even decided what country they live in. This creates an issue where the user has to click or tab down past the region field, choose a country, then navigate back up to select their region.
The Startup Weekend experience.
When I walked into Startup Weekend Toronto on Friday evening, I had a simple goal - team up with some old & new friends, deny myself sleep, and build something cool. And that’s exactly what happened.
In 30 hours, Satish Kanwar, Nate Garvie, Brian Gilham, Tony Wallace, Darren Butcher & myself put together the foundation for Task Ave, an iPhone application that reminds you what you need to do when you’re in the area that you need to do it.
Pretty little subtleties: iTunes player views.
There are a lot of UX and aesthetic gripes that you could point out when discussing iTunes. A few items solved with iTunes 10 and a number of new ones introduced, but let’s focus on a nice little touch relating to iTunes player views.
Blackberry 6, better for users.
After struggling mightily with a Blackberry 8900 over the weekend (seriously, almost every aspect of the OS on that thing is broken - from email to Wifi to Web browsing. What a nightmare!), it’s nice to see that Blackberry is actually attempting to improve their user experience with Blackberry 6.
