Art director Marcus Brown and developer Aristide Benoist built this beautiful editorial style site that celebrates the history of Amsterdam Canals from the 17th century.
Design studio Studio Ayaskan designed the clock with the light sensitive liquid that gets activated with UV lasers, leaving ephemeral traces of colors projecting hours, minutes, and seconds.
At WWDC 2019, Apple came up with a seamless, yet secure way to let users sign in. This Sign In with Apple solution is now required for all app developers that uses other social sign-ins such as Facebook, Google and others. Adding Apple’s solution on top of existing options sounds like a UI design nightmare for most major services.
However, it turned out that a lot more users preferred Apple’s solution over others in the project I worked on. In this entry, I want to summarize the benefit of Apple’s solution, and highlights from the talk at WWDC 2019 about its implementation steps. Before moving into Apple’s solution, I want to recap what other third-party solutions do and what Apple is trying to solve.
A lot of Android users might have been making fun of iOS notifications until iOS12 was released, when the grouping function was introduced for notifications in WWDC 2018. With the release of iOS12, users also could easily customize the granular experience for how they would receive notifications.
Everything New with Notifications in iOS 12 on iPhone & iPad | AppleInsider
Notifications’ immense access to users’ attention has been one of the most valuable mechanics to bring users back to apps. According to Invesp, sending push notifications can boost app engagement by up to 88%, whereas 65% of users return to an app within 30 days when push notifications are enabled. Push notifications can contribute to app retention rates up to 10 times more than apps without them. (From Get Users Onboard with Your Push Notifications).
At the same time, more apps started to heavily rely on notifications for app retention, and this trend brought too many notifications for users. As too many notifications were sent, many of them began triggering users to delete apps. According to some studies, people are receiving an average of four times more notifications on their phones than what they want for. In fact, the initial intent of the notification design was to keep users away from looking at their phones all the time, instead of grabbing their attention all the time.
I was asked to challenge a design exercise, and I had four hours to complete it. I loved it. I love structuring design processes within time constraints, in which choosing the most efficient steps and articulating effective communication methods are part of the challenge. Here is my design exercise prompt:
Valentina leads business and sales development for a Fortune 500 company. She travels three out of four weeks in the month, and when she travels, it’s almost always international. Between her travel across many different time zones and a busy meeting schedule in numerous cities, Valentina finds it challenging to keep up with her calendar to show up to the right places at the right time. Design a calendar flow and interface that is smart enough to suggest meeting times, accounts for changing time zones, and is proactively working for Valentina to make sure she is always on time for her meetings.
Given this four hour constraint, I chose to spend at least 75% of my time exploring solutions and the rest, executing my presentation. Strategically, I chose the following steps to derive solutions in most effective way:
Defining problems
Competitive research–quick research on similar products (scheduling tools)
Inspirational research– quick research on other industries tackling similar pain points
Craft presentation– create designs and slides that effectively explain the concept in a short presentation
It is mysterious how birds fly together in groups, heading in unpredictable directions at the same time. This behavior of flocks is not the result of one leader passing instructions to others, nor is it a result of all the birds knowing where they are heading to- instead, it is the cumulation of each bird’s reaction to its own immediate neighbor. For instance, birds try in general to stay close to their neighbors to protect themselves from their predators. However, they, of course, try to avoid crashing into each other.
This rather emergent behavior is known as the flocking system. I have probably tried creating flocking systems over ten times in various coding languages throughout my career. However, I’ve never had the chance to document how a simple flocking system works and can be simulated. In this entry, I would like to document how the most simple flocking system can be recreated.