This serves up an odd question: do HTC and Nokia have evidence that the majority of people hold their smartphone in their left hands? This is an odd statistic and deserves a lot of investigation by the design community if it’s true as it goes against the logical paradigm that centres around 70-90% of people being right-handed.

What may have been found is that people use smartphones two-handed, holding them in the left and typing with the right as on-screen QWERTY keypad buttons are so small that people would need to type with their fingers instead of their thumbs. But this is all conjecture of course. There may be other reasons for this left-biased design.

I think I’ll investigate further. I’ll add to this article if I find anything substantial.

Principle categories:

1. Layout and compsition
2. Size and hierarchy
3. Colour and contrast
4. Content consistency
5. Dynamic interaction

A breakdown of each area:

1. Layout and composition:

• Know the intended medium and audience.
• Whitespace is your friend.
• All elements should retain consistent margins/padding where possible.
• Layout should not be repetitive unless the content dictates that it be so (like a list of products).
• Elements of greater importance should be higher/sooner and preferably larger.
• Rows should not have repetitive column structures as the user moves down an interface. Row 1, column 1 should not have direct replication in row 2, column 1 unless the content of row 2 is directly related to the content of row 1.

2. Size and hierarchy:

• Headers should look like headers. They should be substantially larger than body copy and there should be a clear visual hierarchy in header elements.
• H2, H3, H4 headings should be used in proportion to their importance. H1 should only be used once, H2 sparingly, etc, as per the diagram here.
• Regular paragraph text should not stand out more than headers and hyperlinks.
• All elements should fit into a visual hierarchy that will be easy for people to understand. Complexity and disorganisation causes confusion.

3. Colour and contrast:

• Stick to a limited but well balanced colour palette that gives good contrast.
• Text should always be high contrast, normally black/dark grey on white. Black on white is a friend in any situation.
• Imagery should be rich and colourful to give good visual contrast to the simple, informative text content framework that you’ve constructed.
• Links should always look like links, and preferably be blue if the brand colours of the website allow for it. Try to avoid red links, they look negative/preventative even if your brand colours are red.
• Links should have a small, bright icon on their left side to make it simple for users to spot a link. If there’s a list of links keep it limited to preferably three links per list.

4. Content consistency:

• Text and images in close proximity must relate to each other.
• Similar content should look and behave in a similar fashion.
• Set a precedence early on in a user journey for how links should look/behave and stick to those rules.
• Images should be in a consistent style wherever possible, unless the purpose of your project is to produce a product with varied images, such as an online image storage library like iStockPhoto

5. Dynamic interaction:

• Where appropriate, provide movement, animations and transitions to enhance the user experience.
• Take care where interactions are added. Advanced interaction is generally used in the discovery part of a journey like when choosing a product. Anything too fancy should be avoided at key stages of journeys like a checkout or registration form, but facilities like inline form validation benefit from clean, well made transitions.
• Small touches make a big difference. Animation soup should be avoided so that users don’t get too distracted from their task and so that the weight of the page/interface you’re creating doesn’t become too large in code terms.
• Consider differences between touch screens, smartphones and desktop/laptop interactions. If one design caters for all, that’s excellent and rare, so you may have to make two or three versions of a website.

The question should really read: what if the “goldilocks zone” around the Sun which we inhabit, and the relatively calm climate and environment on our planet have actually hindered evolution?

Complex systems

I got onto this subject when pondering the complexity and similarity of life on earth. There are a set of logical reasons why, for example, quadruped mammals like ourselves are dominant. Four legs (and a tail, originally) seems to have been a logical design.

There is also a logical order to the forms of life. It seems that there are certain shapes that prevail. Many plants mimic the shape of blood vessels in a vertebrate as it’s the most efficient way of delivering water and nutrients to a complex system.

This is just one of millions of tidbits that add up to our understanding of evolution, but one of the most prominent questions is around evolution on our planet compared to others. An assumption many make is that our temperate, somewhat calm circumstances are the only way to the evolution of complex life.

Why do we think this?

On Earth, life has evolved over billions of years via small genetic mutations that span thousands of years within a species. We also have the view that any specialised trait is at the expense of another specialised trait, and that this specialism is always refined over time.

This is an odd notion given the evolutionary anomaly of the crocodile, a species that actually reached the pinnacle of what it needed to be around 250 million years ago and hasn’t evolved since. The crocodile emerged at a time of huge genetic diversity among the life forms on earth, and traits like muscular/bone structure ideal for swimming and a huge jaw can be seen as highly specialised, risky traits when considering long term survival of a species.

Considering how we believe evolution to occur, why has the crocodile not been superseded by a “better” predator? The answer is that it doesn’t really have any competition in the water. There are very few fresh water predators, pike being one that comes to mind, and they’re relatively small in size compared to a crocodile. Why is there not, for example, a voracious fresh water dolphin with sharp teeth and camouflaged skin? Mammals dominate every where else so why not here? Competition from humans is a reason that springs to mind, but what if we’re missing an obvious point?

Life is easy

It’s easier for mammals to live on land. It’s warmer, meaning less energy expenditure to keep the body functioning. There are only a handful of species of marine and freshwater-dwelling mammals, whereas there are thousands of land dwelling mammal species.

What would have happened if our planet’s land mass was somehow eroded to a tenth of what it is today? We’d probably have more water-dwelling mammals who would have more competition for food and living space. Land mammals may have become amphibious, or at least good at swimming, and would have been forced to develop traits beneficial for both environments.

What if this switch of land/water mass happened frequently, and the land mass was regenerated in a short space of time, and then eroded again? Certain sea currents could do this if in a high enough concentration. Life would have to adapt to the act of adaptation itself.

Intelligent life

This leads onto the evolution of intelligent life. With constantly adapting circumstances, a method of survival would be the development of problem-solving levels of intelligence. If humans were forced to live on a planet of constantly shifting land mass, we probably would survive due to our problem-solving nature. It could be argued that intelligent life could evolve as an answer to extreme circumstances rather than a result of temperate climate and stable surroundings.

We now live in cities which are the most logical and easiest way to organise large groups of humans. But what if there were several forms of intelligent life on one planet, all lower in number than humanity, who were forced to share an ever-changing landscape? These beings may have needed to develop co-operation as a means to survival rather than consumption, competition and eventually destruction, traits that humanity had an evolutionary bias towards.

Cities may have been seen as unnecessary if widespread co-operation was a trait bred into these life forms over time, meaning life could be more transient. Life in these circumstances would benefit from constant innovation, and a widespread share of knowledge. The city, itself an evolutionary combination borne from a collective dwelling and a fortress, may not be required in these circumstances.

What would this all mean?

Our assumption that intelligent life evolves only in certain circumstances as hypothesised by Frank Drake (see the Drake equation) could actually be a completely flawed argument. Intelligent life may thrive within our galaxy, but they may be driven by completely alien ideals due to varied evolutionary circumstances.

The exploration of space may itself be a uniquely human idea, or at least an idea that only occurs to a limited number of intelligent species. We have huge cultural differences on earth within the relatively strict confines of humanity, so if truly alien intelligence exists, we may not be able to comprehend them even if we meet and communicate with these intelligent beings.

Suffice to say that without faster than light space travel, or some form of teleportation, we aren’t likely to be able to test this theory either way. But at least we can build upon it, and maybe find better ways to understand ourselves and others in the meantime.

A unique challenge, the creation of this took some imagination. As Orange doesn’t have an extensive offers system for the sales force to populate, there weren’t any offers with which to populate the design. Rather than using mis-leading lorem ipsum copy, I was forced to populate the designs with offers made up by yours truly. The sales team remarked that some of them were actually decent propositions. I told them I’m sure they could do better – and they will.

The 2010 Christmas shop on T-Mobile was the most challenging design I’d ever undertaken at the time. We had an idea of combining all Christmas buying options into one page, giving customers the easiest possible way to choose and buy, and the quickest journey to the checkout.

I delivered the graphic design and wireframes for this project, and the page benefitted from a creative workshop early on in the process involving all of our small design team at the time. The idea of the living room was to try and match what T-Mobile’s retail stores were doing at the time, as they had cardboard fireplaces and picture frames with phones in them.

A project close to my heart as an Android phone user, the aim of this undertaking was to inform customers about what they can do with an Android phone. T-Mobile stock so many Android phones that this zone became a necessity that the User Experience department including myself had to push for. Our competitors at the time had similar but much less content-rich Android areas, and we spotted an opportunity.

A message for sales departments everywhere: listen to your technophile designers when selling electronics.

These pages were pretty frequently produced for different products each month. As time went on we were able to add more to these pages with improved imagery and more interactivity. The hot spots that appear over the products are hover objects and they change the state of the text next to the image. The hot spots are placed in positions relevant to the feature and as time went on we were able to add images to illustrate each feature too. These were simple but enjoyable pages to create as they give the products room to breathe.

This page was an all-singing, all dancing introduction to the Motorola ATRIX, a pretty special phone that plugged into a “lapdock” so you could use it as a laptop as well as a smartphone. I needed to capture both the excitement and refinement of the product and achieved it with various forms of rich media including advanced interactivity via an image selector module, feature flyouts and an integrated zoom tool.

The video containers in the main content each contained two short videos about each product option (just the phone, phone and HD dock or phone and lapdock). The specifications page while not exactly rich media is a pre-requisite on electronic product pages these days, and the Android tab was there to give a fun introduction to the operating system for those who have never used it.

A personal project of mine that is still a work in progress, Lets Talk Tall is intended to eventually be a hub for tall people like myself to share opinions and reviews about product and services they’ve used, or experiences they’ve had. People are getting taller but the world hasn’t caught up yet, so hopefully site and other like it can help to change that.

While this was fun creatively, after implementation I wondered whether I’d made the right decision with an illustrative style rather than a sensible, ecommerce style. It does show that we can’t always get it right, but that we shouldn’t be afraid to do something bright and fun.

If you want to see the live site: Lets Talk Tall

http://how2notfail.com/web-development/password-protect-phpmyadmin-without-htpasswd/

Basically, you edit the config.inc.php file which sits in the root directory of your PHPMyAdmin folder. In WAMP (and I assume LAMP and MAMP too) your PHPMyAdmin folder will be in ../wamp/apps/phpmyadmin{version number}, a location I kept forgetting so I thought I’d write it down.

Just in case the link is dead:

First check in PHPMyAdmin > Preferences, and you should see a usernames table. Check you’ve got a username and password  in the standard setup. Originally, I set up a MySQL root user without a password so I needed to amend that before progressing. Instructions for that can be found via a Google search

In config.inc.php, change the servers auth_type parameter:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘config’;

to “http”

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = ‘http’;

The server authorisation type of “config” is only meant for installation/configuration. As soon as you start using your localhost web server to input code, especially when using port forwarding on your router for remote access to you computer, this password protection is pretty vital. Using the http authorisation type forces PHPMyAdmin to use it’s own built in password protection system.

I’ll update this post when I find out how to safely update the name of the PHPMyAdmin director, which is something people recommend frequently without actually telling you how to safely do it. People regularly write “simply change the name of the directory”. Don’t – there’s a configuration change needed to enable the PHPMyAdmin system to find the new directory. That’s what I’m currently searching for.

You know what I love about really short, assumptive instructions? F*$k all.