Rethinking the Common Receipt

One design team's take on redesigning a basic sales receipt, to provide additional features and richer information.

It's an interesting idea, although I'm not sure I want to know how bad the donut is that I just bought...

Can't help but wonder if this couldn't be much simpler... but, an elegant design.

And, a heck of lot more fun than the typical sales receipt. What do you think?

The UI Geniuses At Berg Rethink The Common Receipt

DC Metro Area: Looking for An Interaction Designer

As many of you know, I work at Clearspring Technologies, and lead the creative team working on AddThis.com, the largest sharing platform in the world.

We have the privilege of creating design work presented to over 1 billion people a month all over the world, on 9 million domains in over 70 languages.

We're looking for an excellent interaction designer to join our team, so if you're in the DC area and are interested, or know someone else who might be, let me know. Check out the job posting below and drop me a line at jim-at-clearspring-dot-com.

Here's the job post:

http://www.clearspring.com/about/careers/user-interface-interaction-designer

Looking forward to hearing from you!

P.S. the picture to the left is from a team outing to go karting. Good times!

Principles of Good Programming Applied to Interaction Design

The link below is a nice summary of programming best practices, and as I scanned the list it occurred to me that many of these are applicable to interaction design, particularly with regards to web applications.

For example:

• Don't repeat yourself: think about similar interactions and how you can streamline the experience to provide fewer choices to the user. Don't make the user learn multiple ways of doing more or less the same task.

• Don't surprise me: following the train of thought above, the user should be able to do similar or related things in consistent and predictable contexts. I shouldn't have to guess where to look for a setting or task, and interface elements should act as I expect them to. 

• KISS: Simplicity always wins, period. I've seen this in user testing and research over and over again. Understand your users, prioritize tasks, make smart decisions, and remove complexity and choices that aren't directly relevant to what the user is trying to do. 

• Don't add features until you need them: Design for "now", measure everything, fail (or succeed!) quickly, and iterate. A coworker of mine at a previous startup had a favorite saying, "Don't build a cathedral when an alter will do."

There are lots of other great interaction design best practice parallels in the article below:

The Principles of Good Programming