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Design, Design, Design & Design!!! Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
To: Omnigroup
Att: Designers

how come a company that create such wonderful products...has such bad Designs! Omnifocus is very effective but it looks like a bad Microsoft app from the 90's.

with 10.5 out! it couldn't be easier (Core Animation, iTunes sidebar interface, translucent menus, Quick Look...)

zx

btw - take a llok at http://www.culturedcode.com/things or www.midnightbeep.com = both are very goos and extremely beautiful! especially things

Last edited by zxspectrum; 2007-12-17 at 09:01 AM..
 
You like inBox's design???

I recently created a web site for my college that involved all the sciences, so I had to work with other departments in the design. Now, I've made all my own designs for my course web sites and other reference sites, but this was the first time I had to deal with many tastes other than my own. It was surprising how many different opinions there were in the design (layout, and other GUI considerations) of the site.

I don't think OF is bad. The design would have been awful, in my opinion, if OF looked like Omni Outliner. Now that's a program that reminds me of DOS
 
I've been doing UI design for web applications in a large corporate environment for roughly a decade and learned a long time ago that *everyone* is a UI designer (or at least thinks they are). You'll get a thousand differing opinions on a thousand different aspects. At some point, you just need to stop asking others' opinions or you'll never reach a consensus. The tricky part is deciding when to listen and when to ignore.

Arrogance and Humility
 
I don't really mind the spartan design, but what on earth are the diagonal stripes in the top of the window? That's amateurish in the extreme.

Victor.

PS in the latest build it's no longer "today", "tomorrow", but "due today", "due tomorrow". I feel like the program is scolding me!
 
The diagonal stripes are sort of supposed to suggest caution tape. They are not part of the final design, but just a prominent visual indicator that you are running an application that is still "under construction".
 
Thanks for the clarification, Lizard; I actually submitted a bug report / feedback form regarding those stripes as I was wondering whether OF was sort-of broken on OS X Tiger. :D

Hi everybody,

I like OF’s “design” a lot. It’s functional and not visually distracting. I just want a place to manage my tasks, not animations all over the screen and drop-shadows all over the place. I’m not a fan of all those apps of the “delicious generation” which go for nice looks and hardly anything behind it … I want to work on my Mac, not look at all those cool graphics.

Naturally, I appreciate applications that are visually pleasing. And I think OmniFocus belongs into that category. But please, no flash …

Well done, you OF UI designers!

Cheers,
-Sascha
 
I prefer OF's simple, clean interface too. It looks and feels light and nimble. I've never used Midnight Inbox, but judging from the screen shots, it looks a bit gaudy.

zxspectrum: What specifically would you change in OF's design? OF uses transparent menus in the View Bar and Quick Look for attached files. Its sidebar looks and behaves slightly differently from Leopard's standard (as seen in Mail and iTunes, etc), but that doesn't mean it's bad.

VicDiesel: Are you referring to the "under construction" stripes at the top of the window frame or the crosshatching background of the inbox? I'm also anxious for the "under construction" stripes to go away, but that'll surely happen in January. As for the crosshatching, I really don't have a problem with it. It's a simple way of showing that the space is special.
 
it's really not about taste people...there is a new wave of Mac APPs that are taking advantage of the Mac(+10.5). that's one of the main reasons that we are using a MAC.

Delicious Library
Pixelmator
Things
Cha-Ching
Disco
Xtorrent
 
ZXSpectrum is right - design is not just a matter of opinion, there is an irreducible cognitive issue of the signal-to-noise ratio.

Every visual edge between differing colors and intensities is a stimulus to the eye and brain. Strong contrasts (e.g. black on white) provide stronger stimuli, and weaker contrasts (e.g. different saturations of the same color) provide quieter stimuli.

Wherever there is a contrasting edge that communicates no information, or a visual difference that is more pronounced than the minimum necessary, you have noise rather than signal.

Technical changes like increased color spaces (and some of the new UI possibilities in Leopard) open opportunities for the improvement of information design quality because they make it possible to lift the signal to noise ratio, typically by eliminating redundant edges and muting contrasts down to the minimum effective difference.

It's clear that Omni are not prioritizing visual quality in the way that some other companies are. You have only to look at the unneeded yellow background in the context sidebar, and the jarring contrast with adjacent purple text, to realise that not all the visual stimuli in Omnifocus actually communicate any information. Some simply distract.

For further food for thought, try "Envisioning Information" by Edward Tufte, or anything on Relevance theory.

Last edited by RobTrew; 2007-12-17 at 10:50 AM..
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by RobTrew View Post
It's clear that Omni are not prioritizing visual quality in the way that some other companies are. You have only to look at the unneeded yellow background in the context sidebar, and the jarring contrast with adjacent purple text, to realise that not all the visual stimuli in Omnifocus actually communicate any information. Some simply distract.
That yellow is not unneeded noise - it tells me at a glance that I'm looking at Context Mode rather than Planning Mode!
 
 


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