Creative Perspectives

A collection of links by the team at Creative Perspectives.

Wired: While today there’d be a lot more interactive training, NASA went to some pretty amazing lengths to make sure that Apollo’s astronauts had practiced every second of every mission. OK, it’s 42 year-old news, but still impressive. — Tom McCrystal

UX Movement: A look at reasons why form tips should open with a mouse hover, rather than opening new windows. — Davis Murphy

TL Advisor Blog: How and when to use all the various flavors of social media. — Tom McCrystal (h/t to Susan Fisher @ Explore Learning.)

TechCrunch Europe: “How long it took Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to reach 10 million users“. Scary. — Tom McCrystal

CSS Tricks: A look into the difference between a user’s screen resolution, vs. the size of their browser window. — Davis Murphy

Electronista: “Adobe closes AIR Marketplace, InMarket stores“. We love Flash as a development tool, but here’s more evidence that Adobe doesn’t really have a clue about where they’re taking the platform.

The Navy Times reports:

According to the Navy, all it took was a technical glitch and an errant keystroke to initiate the self-destruct sequence in an MQ-8B Fire Scout earlier this year.

Earlier this year, as one of the Navy’s new MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopters was flying a mission, the wire on the operator’s headset pressed down the space bar on his keyboard and and initiated the self-destruct sequence!

Seriously, what were the people who designed the control software thinking?

Over the years, we’ve been asked many time what goes into “UI” and “UX” design. (That’s User Interface and User Experience design for the uninitiated.)

The common perception is that UI and UX design is about pretty pictures and button layout, but there’s a lot more that goes into it than that. In a nutshell, one of the major issues is making sure that, metaphorically, reaching for your coffee shouldn’t cause something as catastrophic as self-destruction of a twelve and a half million dollar vehicle.

It’s not rocket surgery, but IS all-to-often missed. Nor is it a new concept – way back in 1985, Apple’s user interface guidelines embraced what might be called “safe interfaces”:

“The most dangerous commands should be at the bottom of the menu, preferably isolated from the frequently used commands.” (Inside Macintosh, Volume I, p. 51.)

At Creative Perspectives, we spend a considerable amount of time sweating the details of User Experience Design for every project. Internally, the process can become quite adversarial, as in “Ellen, prove to me we need that extra mouse click!”, or “Tom, why is the path to feature X so hard to find?” Our clients rarely if ever see the process, but what they get are applications that work as well as they look.

And seriously, we’ve never almost blown up a twelve and a half million dollar unmanned helicopter.

(Fox News is also covering the story.)

A collection of links by the team at Creative Perspectives.

A List Apart: I’ve always believed nailing down the details of a creative project should happen in the context of a collaborative relationship rather than as simply a response to a punch list of “requirements”. In “RFPs: The Least Creative Way to Hire People”, Greg Hoy talks about how “the lack of meaningful dialogue makes this [RFPs] little more than a game of roulette”. — Ellen White

Edward Tufte: Meet the “Slopegraph”. It’s pretty amazing how a few simple lines can add a tremendous amount of meaning to a table of data. Tufte’s second example is especially compelling. — Tom McCrystal

Charlie Park via Daring Fireball. And just a day after re-reading Tufte’s Slopegraph article, John Gruber points out a very nice analysis of the data visualization technique. — Tom McCrystal

Realise Digital: A discussion on why it can be a good idea, for the sake of accessibility and design, to build multiple versions of your websites. One for the latest and greatest browsers and tech and a similar, but reduced, design for those using outdated browsers. — Davis Murphy

Design Shack: An interesting article that covers the awkwardness of the CSS float property for use in website layouts, and what new methods and specifications may be used to replace them. — Davis Murphy

Fierce Healthcare. “Physician training cuts proposed to fix deficit”. Politics aside, this seems a great way to balloon the deficit in outlier years, as less training will create more medical mistakes. In general, “Training = GOOD.” — Tom McCrystal

Welcome to the new Creative Perspectives blog.

As much as we love our web site, it doesn’t really tell the whole story of who we are and what we do. That’s important, because when you work with us at Creative Perspectives, you not only get our design skills and our technical expertise, but our perspectives on design, technology, User Experience, and the industries that we serve, such as the Life Sciences, Telecommunications, and Technology industries.

We’ll also be using the blog as a way of keeping you up to date about Marionette™, our exclusive platform for developing interactive content. Marionette is the sum total of everything we’ve learned as developers over twenty years.

(Haven’t seen Marionette at work? Ask us for a demo.)

The Cast of Characters:

Ellen White: Ellen founded Creative Perspectives in 1985 with $50 for a used museum case that repurposed as a makeshift lightbox. Since then, she’s grown the company from a one-woman graphic design shop to an interactive development company with clients around the country and is known around the world.

Ellen is our President and Creative Director, and is responsible for a our design style that’s been called “elegant”, “international”, “beautiful”, and “thoughtful’.

Tom McCrystal: Tom joined Ellen in 1989 as a design associate, and is now the Chief Technology Officer at Creative Perspectives. And old-school programmer, Tom’s written working code in 70 or 80 different languages, most of which you’ve probably never heard. (SNOBOL? Algol? Z-80 Assembly? Anyone? Anyone? Bueler?)

Tom is also engaged in the public policy side of technology, and was the founding Chairman of the Virginia Piedmont Technology Council. He’s currently serving on the Advisory Committee on Privacy of the Joint Commission on Technology and Science, his sixth appointment to JCOTS in ten years.

Davis Murphy: Davis joined the team in 2006 fresh out of Full Sail University. Starting as a production associate, Davis is now a member of our technical staff as a multimedia producer focusing on Flash, Actionscript, HTML/CSS and PHP. He takes great joy and pleasure from working on the web and creating solid and dependable interactive experiences.

Thanks for reading. We hope you find our content insightful and intriguing, and that you’ll feel free to share it with others. Enjoy!