Apple's Jonathan Ive Knighted by Queen Elizabeth

"For services to design and enterprise" Apple's Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive has been made Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

I've been a huge fan of Apple's product design for decades; I'd mention that my first mac was an SE 30, but I'd be showing my age...

Read more about Ive's knighting over at CNET: Apple designer Ive becomes Sir Jony

So what's your favorite Apple product design?

For a look at Apple design through the decades, check out this infographic, "The Apple Tree" by Mike Vasilev.

A Guide to New Year's Resolutions

It's time to kick off another year! Here's a fun infographic over on Visual.ly breaking down the kinds of New Year's Resolutions people make, and their success keeping them (it's not good news...) Enjoy, and have a very safe and happy New Years.

Check out the complete infographic:
A Guide to New Year's Resolutions | Visual.ly

Decision Architecture: Designing for Decision-Making

Interesting article over on uxmag.com this week about decision architecture, and optimizing user experience for decision-making by utilizing various strategies to promote comparison.

Quoting from author Colleen Roller's summary:

A key aspect of designing for decision-making, then, is to design an environment in which comparisons can easily be made. This involves easing the inherent conflict within the goal of decision-making by:

• Providing a reference point so people can assess value and glean meaning
• Helping people determine the right things to focus on by making those salient
• Leveraging the visual design and page layout to eliminate clutter and enable easy scanning
• Providing the right information at the right time, while eliminating all unnecessary information

Read more:
Decision Architecture: Designing for Decision-Making | UX Magazine

User Interface Design in Modern Search Engines

Quick article looking at contemporary UI trends in search engines, including branding, auto-complete/auto-suggest, and personalized profiles.

The first comment also mentions that Lycos was just relaunched with a responsive web design, def check it out. Nicely done.

Read more:
User Interface Design in Modern Search Engines

Can your cottage talk to Twitter?

Some of my coworkers at Clearspring are into home automation and making media systems do things at their electronic bidding, so I thought of them when I saw this article.

Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, an engineer at IBM, placed hundreds of sensors in a 16th century cottage so his home can alert Twitter when a window opens or with the identity of a caller. Cool.

Read more:

Sensors Allow House To Tweet

Awesome High-Tech Holiday Easter Eggs

We techies love our easter eggs, and the holidays give website designers and devs an opportunity to sneak in some holiday cheer. Here are nine from Mashable:

9 Awesome High-Tech Holiday Easter Eggs

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the holiday illustration on the AddThis homepage above, which Jeff Wong put together using artwork from illustrator Josh Cleland.

User Interface/Interaction Design Position at Clearspring

Are you passionate about how people use online social media tools? Does the idea of having a mountain of data and research tools to help inform your next design project sound exciting? 
 
We're looking for an experienced user interface/interaction designer to help us grow Clearspring's behavioral advertising products, using data from the largest sharing platform in the world, AddThis. You'll work as part of a small, focused creative team developing interactive experiences used by millions of people all over the world. We value those with exceptional skills who want to work with others in a fun, challenging, and hard-charging environment, and make exciting things happen with technology.


Read more: 

User Interface/Interaction Designer Position

Can Twitter Measure Happiness?

Researchers at the University of Vermont studied Twitter data over three years and found that keyword analysis can indicate when Twitter users are happiest. They found that we tend to be most happy on Saturdays and in the early morning; January, Mondays, and late-nights not so much.

Another factor: Recently AddThis released an infographic for 2011 that showed how significant events like celebrity deaths can affect sharing; the researchers report that these kinds of events can also significantly affect our moods.

Check out the video above from Mashable that discusses the report, or if you'd like a deeper read for yourself, here's a link to the original study, Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.

Twitter’s Early Growth Was Fueled By Traditional Offline Networking

This study explores how an internationally popular company started first with just a few cities. Twitter's early growth began first in San Francisco, then Boston, moving from city to city.

The researchers cite the geographic closeness of participants – essentially face-to-face networking – that resulted in what today millions of people can use to tell the world about their breakfast.

Read more:

Twitter’s Early Growth Was Fueled By Traditional Offline Networking [STUDY] - AllTwitter

Megatrends in Social Media

Forbes article looking at social media and business trends for 2012, including:

• role of "transmitter ecosystem" – essentially sharers on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere
• globalization of social media (check out the AddThis Service Directory to see globalization at work!)
• social media going vertical and local
• brand-driven social media

Megatrends in Social Media and Social Business - Forbes

New AddThis Live Analytics

Check out the live analytics we released this morning over on AddThis.com. The whole team worked incredibly hard to consolidate all of the live features that we've been working on separately this year. The result is one report where AddThis publishers and bloggers can watch content trend in real-time, all over the world.

We've also introduced several new data types, including search and copied keywords, to help viewers understand what is bringing their audience to their site, what interests them, and what keywords are then taking them away to search, email, IM, etc.

Read more in my blog post over on AddThis.com.

Can your iPhone make you coffee?

Yes, it has nothing to do with user experience design. But it's just so beautiful.

Understanding and Designing for Cognitive Styles

Are your users bottom-up analytical thinkers, or top-down holists? This article explores strategies to design experience for both, including:
   • designing for learnability
   • providing "information scent"
   • providing wayfinding

Read more:
Cognitive Styles | UX Magazine

P.S. for more on information scent and findability, check out Morville's most excellent book, "Ambient Findability"

It’s Here! Facebook Timeline Now Available To Users Worldwide

A bunch of us here at AddThis have had ours turned on for a while, but only now has Facebook enabled the much-discussed Facebook Timeline for the world, so now everyone (well, my friends) can enjoy the handsome mug of my hound mutt Whistlebritches.

Read more:
It’s Here! Facebook Timeline Now Available To Users Worldwide | TechCrunch

And a reminder to consider the privacy ramifications of this new view:
Facebook rolls out Timeline feature worldwide, it's time to untag some old photos

Creative and Unusual 404 Pages

Lots more:

50+ Most Creative and unusual 404 error Pages | Smashing Buzz

Online Sharing: The How, What and When of 2011

Our resident design wizard Jeff Wong's latest infographic got a write-up on the New York Times website. Nice!

Read more:
Online Sharing: The How, What and When of 2011 - NYTimes.com

The original infographic on the AddThis blog:
Sharing Trends in 2011

Clean Button Design – Tutorial

Download the source files:

Clean Button Design – Tutorial | Ui Parade – User Interface Inspiration

The New, New Twitter and What It Means to You and Your Business

Brian Solis reviews the Twitter's latest redesign:

The New, New Twitter and What It Means to You and Your Business - Brian Solis

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer

Solid strategies for making an impact on your organization – and the best part is, you don't have to be an executive to put these ideas to use:

• focus on the bright side
• change negatives to positives
• act and keep moving

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer via Harvard Business Review

Hat tip: Ramsey McGrory @nycmcg

Ui Parade: User Interface Inspiration

Nice site for interface design inspiration.

UI Parade – User Interface Inspiration

Designing for the Mind

Francisco Inchauste (@iamfinch) writes about the psychology of aesthetic experience.

Designing for the Mind - Design Informer | Design Informer

The Films of Bill Murray (Infographic)

The Films of Bill Murray, a tribute poster. (No, he's not dead.)

Check it out:
Bill Murray Tribute Poster

Nine Awesomely Geeky Spots Where You Must Check In

 

...if you like that sort of thing.

9 Awesomely Geeky Spots Where You Must Check In | Underwire | Wired.com

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

Profiles, timelines, search and more...

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

Five Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci | UX Magazine

Personally I'm pretty awful at drawing, so any help is welcome. This article from UX Magazine takes a page (ha!) from the master to improve sketching and paper prototyping skills:

5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci