ralexmiller-blog - Tumblr blog

[ralexmiller-blog]

Good product managers measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/good-vs-bad-product-managers-according-ben-horowitz/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ownsocial

[ralexmiller-blog]

undefined

Coin Flip animation for Making 5

Explanation post here:

https://ralexmiller.tumblr.com/post/189155030955/making-5-for-my-making-this-week-i-wanted-to

[ralexmiller-blog]

Making 5

For my making this week I wanted to continue to build on the after effects skills I’ve been working on in the previous two, but I thought the intro and outro animations I had been working on had reached their natural finish so I wanted to work on something similar but new. I had the idea to have a spinning coin with my old stream logo and my new online avatar. So I found a guide online and set to work.

I first had to take the two images I wanted to display on my coin and prep them, so I went into Photoshop and removed the backgrounds of both images. After importing them into After Effects I made an ellipsis and centered both images in the circle. After compositing this image I made a duplicate composition, and inside of it I duplicated the ellipsis more than 30 times after making it a 3D object. By changing the fill of the interior 29 duplicates to white I was able to get a white edge for my coin when it rotates.

To make it rotate I made a null object, made it the parent of all the layers of elipsis, and then applied the rotation to the null object. Finally to make it a little more interesting I animated the coin to make it flip in from the bottom before it then rotated to show off the two images on either side.

Once I finished making the animation, I exported the file and found it was too long, since the animation only took around 5 seconds I thought having a 20 second video seemed a bit much. To fix this I imported the footage into Premiere Pro, cut off the tail portion of the animated video, and slide the start time back a second just so the video had a second to breath instead of launching right into it when you hit play. All in all I’m pretty happy with this making, I think it turned out pretty well!

Link to post with the actual video here: https://ralexmiller.tumblr.com/post/189155051214/coin-flip-animation-for-making-5

[ralexmiller-blog]

This is really cool to see. I’m a pretty big fan of video games (as those who have talked with me probably know) so I love seeing methods and attempts to positively spread and welcome more people into one of my favorite hobbies. The Xbox Adaptive Controller the article mentions is so cool to see because its a first party device with real care and thought put into what affordances we naturally assume a controller can and should have and then strives to widen access for those whom those standard affordances may not be enough, or even functional at all. Seeing this device take things to the next level in that regard is both heartwarming and exciting to see!

[ralexmiller-blog]

A bit late to this one, but reading it is somewhat scary as an occasional content creator. The incredibly vague definitions YouTube is providing certainly aren’t helpful, though I understand them not wanting to be more specific to avoid any liability issues. This is both interesting and upsetting when you think about how its a major platform that in some ways is simply abdicating responsibility and leaving its content creators, the users who make their website so popular, vulnerable and alone. I feel like I can understand YouTube’s side of things, but I certainly don’t agree with the approach they’ve decided to pursue. 

[ralexmiller-blog]

This was a really interesting interview. I have some mixed feelings about the movie, but the costuming, cinematography, and art direction were certainly amongst the highlights for me. Getting an inside peak at the creative process of just on part of what made the movie look and feel the way it did is super cool!

[ralexmiller-blog]

I thought this article was both a great recap of the issue and an explanation of why its important. Be interesting to see how the case develops!

[ralexmiller-blog]

Critique 3: The UGA App Bus Experience

What is the objective of the design?

The UGA app is a place for students to access a whole host of information in one place. This critique will be focusing on one aspect of the App, the UGA Bus section. Featured prominently on the UGA App’s home screen, when you first tap the Bus section it brings you right to a page focused on helping you get from where you are to where you need to go on Campus or in Athens using the UGA bus network. The other tabs in the section allow you to explore Bus Routes, Bus stops, and a tab to quickly reach your favorites from both of these other categories.

What elements of the design are related to the objective?

The prominence of the elements in the Directions tab (Departure, Destination, methods of transport, and the Directions arrow) all draw the eye to the correct places on the screen. They clearly indicate where to go to figure out how to get to where you want to go (there’s lots of going involved.) The Stops page has routes clearly organized both by proximity and alphabetically, with proximity being listed first as quite often you’ll be checking the map when you’re trying to access a bus where you are. The Routes tab is less clearly laid out but does list all the routes in one place. The favorites tab allows quick access to frequently used routes and stops.

Are those elements effective in achieving the objective?

In general, I believe the design of these elements helps achieve the elements’ objectives. There is definitely a priority placed quick access to nearby stops, which is important since students are most likely to be checking it shortly before boarding and having the location of the closest stops readily available is a good move. One frustrating element though is that there are not a ton of visual indicators of where routes and stops are on campus in the app. The directions tab launches google maps, requiring you to have another app, while the routes have visual live maps of their routes, but this requires users to dig deeper into the app by selecting each app individually. Overall this is frustrating but doesn’t make the app unusable by any means.

This app is definitely a solid way to navigate around campus, but it could be so much better in a few easy ways. First of all, having an interactive map of campus with routes and stops highlighted on the homepage of the Bus section would do wonders for new users trying to familiarize themselves with routes and stops. Furthermore, being able to see routes organized by proximity to your location would be a great way to filter routes to figure out which ones you should be looking at. Ultimately though these are just smaller tweaks on what is otherwise a pretty solid user experience.

[ralexmiller-blog]

Design of (Expensive) Everyday Things

This weekend I purchased a new phone online. My current phone, a Google Pixel XL, is a little over 3 years olds and will be receiving its last official update from Google next month. With performance already a little sluggish this seemed to indicate it was time to move on. However, while my phone is several years old it was still a flagship device when it launched, so I wanted to avoid losing out on features I had become accustomed to in a newer but cheaper device. I did a lot of searching around and something that really jumped out at me as I read review after review was the idea mentioned in DOET about competitors racing to be the same, leaving us all with a bunch of indistinguishable products. This seems especially true in smartphones, where everyone is either trying to be an iphone, is an iphone, or is doing their best to be the not-iphone. Software is king and the end result is that just about every midtier phone as the same screen sizes, the same double or triple camera setup, and the same midtier processors. Nothing stood out, at least until I found the device that I ultimately purchased: the OnePlus 7t. Sure it was a little more expensive than some of the other devices I was looking at, but unlike those samsey devices this one had stand out features that set it apart: a 90hz display, the fastest charging on any phone out there, ufs 3.0 memory, and 8gb of ram (not to mentioned the best processor that's not in an Apple product). It may sound like a bunch of stats, but the design of the device, being able to squeeze all these features into a handset that costs nearly half of an Iphone 11 pro Max, is what really sold me on it. I use my phone more than any other thing I own, I’m looking forward to using one thats designed to (to borrow OnePlus’ slogan) Never Settle.

(For those saying why not get an Iphone, I’ve just been team Android for far too long now, and while I have tried to departisan myself from my younger, more fanboyish ways in recent years, there's still too many things about Android that I prefer. If Apple ever gets around to using a USB-C port on their Iphones like they do with all of their other devices and everyone else does with theres, then that may change though.)

[ralexmiller-blog]

This is certainly disappointing to hear, and while Apple is in no way the only company to demonstrate problems like this before, it's also not the first time its technology or in this case adjacent technology has come under scrutiny for discrimination. Hopefully this is something that gets fixed quickly!

[ralexmiller-blog]

This is sort of a minicritique of the terrible scaling of GTC’s website ordering process. I went to go see Zombieland 2 tonight at University 16 and when I went to buy the tickets online earlier this week this is the screen I saw. I assumed it was a small theater with a large screen because of the image presented to me. Come to find out, it's a reasonably sized medium-small theater with an average at best sized screen and now because I didn't want to be right up against a massive screen I’m way in the back. I didn’t have to squint but as someone with eyesight that is objectively worse than normal the surpise was certainly not a happy one. Getting the little things right matters and this is just another example of why.

[ralexmiller-blog]

I used to be a long time user of Firefox before making the switch to Chrome when it exploded onto the internet scene a number of years ago. However I quote often glance over my shoulder at my former browser of choice and think about making the switch back. User Experience centered design decisions like this one are a major reason why. Maybe in 2020.... (Chrome froze and crashed the first time I tried to post this blog. Oh the frickin irony)

[ralexmiller-blog]

So for my making this week I wanted to continue working on the animation I started in my last making, where I animated my youtube channel’s logo to fill up and have the title appear. This week I first added a wipe/transition which proved fairly easy to do. I just created a black rectangle and used keyframes to ease it in and out of the shot when I wanted and in the direction I wanted. the second part of my making was considerably more challenging, though potentially through my own making. I wanted to animate my logo/avatar picture and have it act as part of a video end card. The problem is that its a still image with the windmills blades in place, so I needed to go into Photoshop and using the clone stamp tool, making several new boxes and the magic wand tool I was able to approximate enough of the background that you might not notice it looks wonky at first. I then had to separate out the fan blades and export those as a separate png. Importing it all into after effects I started using key-frames to rotate the blades, except they weren't turning around what should have been the axis, so while rotating them I also had to apply positional transformations. The end result of this was a herky jerky mess that did not look good no matter how much I tried to smooth it. I figured out the reason why this was happening however was because when I saved the image I hadn’t centered it in Photoshop, Id simply left it where it is in the drawing. Fixing that mistake and reexporting the picture, I was able to use the rotation transformation to smoothly rotate the fan every 3 seconds for the duration of the video. So much like my initial path I went a long way to end up where I wanted to go, but in the end I’m pretty happy with it!

Click here to see the new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y7v5IJCrKE

[ralexmiller-blog]

Facebook's attempt to put a shiny coat of paint on their tentacle like grasp of the social media market is mostly just...sort of boring? I appreciate the decision to not rebrand the parent company because I think they’re right to say that would look like their trying to obfuscate or hide from their overwhelming market presence, but still I feel like this is just sort of uninspired. There's minimalist and then there's boring, and this feels like the later.

[ralexmiller-blog]

Interesting discussion for a number of reasons. First about how the useability and quality of the experience FitBit gave its users helped it become a market leader. Then after the important discussion of privacy concerns it turns to  speculation about how combining their hardware and software experience with Google’s desire for a successful entry in the wearable space and vast experience with AI centered software could change the market. As an android user and someone who has had a couple of fitbits over the years, I’m very interested in seeing what comes out of this move (assuming it passes regulators).

[ralexmiller-blog]

This is fascinating. Really interesting to see how something that is designed one way with a specific use in mind (in this case a game with micro transactions) can be used in completely new and to the developer unimaginable ways once its released into the world. Its good that this is being cracked down on in this case, but its still a really interesting case study.

[ralexmiller-blog]

Certainly an interesting move by Twitter, though not wholly unexpected. The problem I see in this however is that saying you will remove all political advertising is inherently arbitrary, who decides what is and isn't political. The other unfortunate side effect of this is that I think we will see twitter get flooded with even more bots to try and magnify the reach of what were once paid promoted posts but will now have to be grown “organically.” I do like how Facebook has completl;y abdicated responsibility on their platform and made it a free for all, but I also don’t think this move by Twitter is the best alternative. Only time can tell though.