New iPhone App (NBA Game Time)

(See larger image on Flickr)

Disclaimer: This post is my own opinion and is no way affiliated, directed toward, or on behalf of Turner Sports, the NBA, or its affiliates.

There is a new iPhone app called NBA Game Time. It is a sports application which gives iPhone and iPod Touch owners the ability to receive live updated scores from NBA regular season games. You can get it FREE from the iTunes App Store. Click here to download (iTunes is required)

The navigational structure is a tri-view of NBA information categorized into ‘Scores’, ‘Schedule’, and ‘Standings’. On the landing screen, a user can select yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’s scores which will take them into one of the three days viewable within the 'Scores' view. Inside of the ‘Scores’ view, a user can toggle between yesterday’s, today’s, or tomorrow’s scores manually. Users can 'touch' games that are in-progress or FINAL whereas as a subview containing team boxscores, player stats, and team stats appears. In addition, the 'Scores' view shows television broadcaster tiles that highlight nationally broadcast games (i.e. ABC, TNT, ESPN, or NBATV). From the ‘Schedule’ view, users can select a date from the 2008-2009 season to see historical, current, or future game data outside of the 3-day range. From the ‘Standings’ view, users can see the current East and West conference standings. The top 8 teams from each conference are highlighted to show eligible teams if the playoffs were to start today.

The application is extremely data intensive and pulls game data to populate all of the play and team statistics fields and the court images of the home team. I'm hoping that in the near future, the app will be able to use some rich media such as recap videos and / or live audio within the application to provide the 'immersive application' experience as defined by Apple.


I'm looking forward to the 2008-2009 Playoffs version of the application and maybe the app will get some sort of honorable recognition @ the 2009 Apple Design Awards.

Mobile Interaction Design

(Wireframe built using iPhoneMockup)

You may have seen through the infinite number of blogs and news feeds that there are 10 skills that developers will need in the next five years. Surprisingly, the last item in the list is Mobile Development. I’m a little confused by how low mobile design / development is ranked as we are at the beginning of a new era of interaction design based on gesture and touch. The very catalyst for the new methodologies and the widespread use of multi-gesturing and multi-touch is mobile devices. For example, with so many wireless options of interaction, some applications have actually made tactile contact a highlight of functionality within the app. See below:


Visual design of mobile applications is changing to incorporate new points of interaction such as depth perception and virtual environments. See below:


Stanford University, for example, is now offering their classes and programs through the iTunes U. Big deal, you say? Its not new that a school decides to spread knowledge through Apple. However, look at HOW they give information about heir school and classes to their students via an iPhone application. They use an iPhone application model that uses a 'nested application' view to give the user's the ability to feel like a single application is multifunctional. See below:



Lots of good ideas are coming out everyday and we, specifically the interaction designers and developers, can use these platforms to set good behavioral examples for the future and drive home basic interface rules and principles that have been ignored in other platforms. Just imagine the possibilities when the Palm Pre becomes available...

A Project Guide to UX Design Book Review

A Project Guide to UX Design is a book that defines the micro and macroscopic views of user experience design and its role in the project life cycle. Russ and Carolyn do a great job of reiterating what the core of user experience design is as well as identifying the different roles that utilize it. The book covers a lot of ground and takes a transcendental approach of showing the underlying purpose for each role in order to promote a synthetic comprehension of user experience design as opposed to shallow memorization.

The main target audience of the book are Information Architects, Interaction Designers, User Researchers, and other project stakeholders (Business Analysts, Content Strategists, Copywriters, Visual Designers, and Front-end Developers).

To make the contents more inviting, I've created an enclosing outline to provide abstract classifications for several groups of chapters. Each number represents the number of pages in each chapter:

+ Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Tao of UXD (8)
- Chapter 2: The Project Ecosystem (29)

+ Business Perspective
- Chapter 3: Proposals for Consultants and Freelancers (15)
- Chapter 4: Project Objectives and Approach (10)
- Chapter 5: Business Requirements (15)

+ Research
- Chapter 6: User Research (26)
- Chapter 7: Personas (13)
- Chapter 8: User Experience Design and SEO (17)

+ Information Architecture / Interaction Design
- Chapter 9: Transition from Defining to Designing (18)
- Chapter 10: Site Maps and Task Flows (17)
- Chapter 11: Wireframes and Annotations (17)
- Chapter 12: Prototyping (15)
- Chapter 13: Design testing with Users (25)
- Chapter 14: Transition: From Design to Development and Beyond (10)

The book also contains frequent references to books, online resources, and user experience groups and authors throughout as opposed to an Appendix or a 'For further reading' section nested in the back. This helps to drive home the thoughts as you read them, rather than 'when you are finished'.

As an aspiring user experience professional, I do believe that this book is worth owning, reading, and referencing as a compass to create effective user experience in any project setting.