Microsoft has taken a step back to completely rethink the Windows 8 operating system, and a large part of this is the new Metro style apps (although legal issues mean this is going to be renamed). These take full advantage of the operating systems features to create seamless and rich experiences. I recently attended a Windows 8 UX workshop at Microsoft’s Victoria Street office to get a better idea of what that means.
Developing mobile and tablet guidelines involves creating a balance between standard mobile design patterns, OS specific guidelines (where appropriate), alongside existing online brand guidelines. All of these together allow you to create a better user experience for customers who are using a mobile or tablet device.
Part two of this mobile and tablet specific guidelines series looks at the content of these guidelines in more detail.
There have been suggestions that responsive design layouts are the silver bullet to solve the problem of platform divergence, and unify experiences of websites across different devices.
Interaction design patterns are constantly evolving and every now and then a really interesting one crops up. This time, it is a novel approach to faceted navigation, called 'elastic lists', which utilises information visualisation principles.
