Win a copy of my favorite new book, Simple and Usable: web mobile and interaction design, by submitting screenshots or links to the worst mobile apps you have used.

I’m on the second to last chapter of my new book, Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, and I am looking for fodder for final chapter on Anti-Patterns. Any OS is fair game: iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, webOS (Palm), Symbian…

I’ll randomly choose a name from everyone who submits a sample to theresaneil at gmail dot com and/or comments with the app name and link.

I need at least 100 submissions, so share this on Twitter.

Deadline: August 5, 2011

I noticed an article on bokardo, Joshua Porter’s blog, about Functionality, Gamification, and Feedback Loops. He has some insightful comments on the Wired magazine article Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops.

I saw a great example of gamification and feedback loops in the iPad app Kobo. Kobo is an alternative to iBook. Unlike iBook, Kobo has integrated a concept called “Reading Life” that offers awards, statistics, and images to share in my social networks

Kobo tablet screenshots- from OhGizmo

I immediately called my friend and asked her to get Kobo on her iPad so we could both use it and see who reads the fastest (a little competitive spirit going on). Then I sent a link to another friend- encouraging her to use it too. Then I bought some books and will shortly post my Bookcover on Facebook.

Compare this to Audible’s Stats (timer, achievement awards and badges), which leave me feeling under-motivated. I mean, I’ll use the app and all, but I’ll never intentionally open the Stats screens again.

Kobo and Audible are both using gamification techniques to encourage specific behaviors (buy more books). So why is Kobo getting me to change my behavior and Audible isn’t?

1. Audible has a bug and isn’t pulling in any of my hundred of stories I’ve bought over the past few years. So the feedback loop that might encourage me to “level up” isn’t working because the data is bad (I’m not an AppNewbie).
2. Kobo started me off with some badges already earned (good for me!), Audible has me at 0 out of 15 (lame-o).



3. The stats in both apps stay up to date to reflect my reading/listening patterns. Audbile only has one stat, listening time, whereas Kobo offers lots of interesting information.



4. Most importantly: Kobo tapped into not only how I read (pages per hour), but how reading is a part of my life. I’m in a book club, I share my favorite titles and authors with friends, I read out loud to my kids, my mom and I bond over books. With Kobo’s “Reading Life” I can now easily share what I’m reading with my circle of friends and family.

Please share other example of apps using gamification and feedback loops effectively, or examples of ones that failed.

UX Magazine published my most recent article, End to End Experience Design today. Take a look, it has lots of pictures and even comes with a helpful checklist:

Thank you to Pascal Raabe for the great design.

Harvest, the time tracking and invoicing tool we use, just added a new filter mechanism to their report generator. While I appreciate the additional functionality, I was most impressed with their multi-select combobox. It looks like a normal text field, but once the field has focus you can select any option and it will be added into the field, click again and you can select another option, building up any number of options. The field just gets larger (more rows are added) when you add more options than can be displayed in a single row.

It is equally easy to remove items from the field by clicking the little ‘x’ next to each option.

Does anyone know if there is a JQuery control for this? That would be awesome. A Flex control like this would be nice too, just in case there are any motivated developers reading this (wink, wink)…

We’ve been working with Adobe since last year to design and develop a showcase of reference applications for Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5. This has been an amazing project from a design and development perspective, designing for multiple form factors, and coding with the new SDK.

Read more here:

Just a year after Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 SDK were released, new versions are available with Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex 4.5 SDK! The main focus for Flex 4.5 SDK and Flash Builder 4.5 is the ability to build mobile applications that target the Google Android, Blackberry Tablet OS, and Apple iOS operating systems. Additionally, Flex 4.5 SDK introduces new Spark components and improvements for large application development while Flash Builder 4.5 introduces dozens of new coding productivity features for faster ActionScript and MXML development.

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After our book release in January 2009, we posted an article on 12 Standard Screen Patterns. It went viral with hundreds of thousands of readers. Two years later, it still gets 1,000+ readers each week.

In 2010 we updated the screen patterns, including a few more and all new examples: RIA Screen Layouts. With more than 40k views on Slideshare, it seems to be pretty popular.

And now they are in print too! Three books this year included our screen patterns as the way to solve common UI problems:

• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design- Second Edition by Jenifer Tidwell, O’Reilly Media 2011
• Smashing Book #2, Smashing Media GmbH 2011
• Professional Web Design: The Best of Smashing Magazine, Smashing Media GmbH 2011

New article on InsideRIA this week:
Top Ajax Technologies and RIA Frameworks
I posted a fairly comprehensive list of RIA frameworks and Ajax technologies rated on:

• Completeness of their UI control set, based on the list of essential controls
• Usability of the controls
• Aesthetics, based on the default visual design of the controls

I also included some examples of applications built with the top frameworks and technologies. Please check it out and share other technologies you have used and/or applications developed with these technologies.

In our book and often in our talks we discuss a technique for thinking through and documenting detailed interactions in a user experience. Just arrange the interesting moments in a grid. List the “actors” (user interface elements) vertically and the events horizontally. The cells in the grid become the interesting moments.

With the classic example from the of drag and drop there are at least 96 interesting moments (6 actors X 16 events = 96 interesting moments).

About a month back I gave a talk at Zurb, a northern California design firm, in which I discussed this technique. On Friday I was pleasantly surprised to see they had already taken the idea and used it in a new product they announced last week — BounceApp — which was featured on TechCrunch.

Check out their article on 110 Interactions for Editing Annotations on Bounceapp.com.

Nice application of the grid.

Lucy Spence did a great job capturing Bill’s Designing with Patterns workshop at UXLx in Lisbon.

Check out her whole set of sketch notes from the conference on Flickr.

A couple of months back Theresa Neil & I filmed a combined workshop on the material from Designing Web Interfaces plus Theresa’s material on application patterns, screen patterns and ui controls.

This is a beautifully recorded workshop by O’Reilly Media filmed at the Images in Motion Studio in Sonoma. The workshop is over 4 hours long and broken down into 11 smaller, digestible segments. A full camera crew, HD video and lots of great post production conspire to create a video series I am proud of.

Here is a sample of the material posted on youtube.

To appreciate in all of its HD glory visit our video site on O’Reilly Media. The full 4 hours is only $79. You can get it and show it to your whole team.