Are you happy? (via j-mak)

Every once in a while we as designers bump into a design that feels wrong. Dustin Curtis hated booking a flight with American Airlines’ website so he proposed a redesign. Tyler Thompson had enough with those ugly and confusing boarding passes so he challenged Delta.

Yesterday, a new $100 bill was introduced. It looked so bad that we were convinced that it’s some kind of a hoax. So we headed to the Department of Treasury website to check if it is.  

It wasn’t.

This really perplexed us. After all, this was an amazing opportunity to redesign one of the most widely used objects in our lives. What a waste. This is literally money down the drain.

It might be the case that this new redesign was intended to introduce some new features to the bill. Five of them are new security features that were added to the front side of the bill. One new visual aid was added to the back side of the bill. But why scarifies design?

Let’s talk about the back side. It looks as if the new visual aid feature was done with MS paint. No kidding. This new font out of nowhere. Those messed up proportions. Aaaaaah…. Take a look:

So we decided to take the challenge ourselves. We thought that it would be wise to have some constraints in place for the redesign:

• Use the same (or very similar) color theme as the original bill.
• Keep the visual aid feature.
• Keep the current content (Independence Hall image, “In god we trust” text).
• Embed current security features (small printed 100s).
• Don’t deviate too much from the current bill that is in use so people would be able to make associations.

We came up with a quick sketch for the new bill as we see it. The main goal was to make it as simple as possible:

We also think that the big 100 type should be made tactile for the visually impaired. Some degree of embossing would be able to achieve this effect.

Designers, we would love to see your versions for this new bill. Send us good stuff and we will post it.

We mentioned Paul Rand before. An amazing designer. You can have him on the go. If you haven’t done so already, you can download such beautiful iPhone wallpapers from Paul Rand’s website.

If this is how the actual user experience looks and feels like than something very good is going on at MSFT. First Project Natal, then the interesting interface of Windows Phone 7 Series and now The Courier.

The future of magazines? We don’t know. But those are some very interesting interaction patterns here in this video by Bonnier R&D.

We had to share this with you! We videotaped Bill Buxton demonstrating touch screen on Casio Watches from 1984. Would you believe that the technology was here for so long? It’s pretty amazing that we had to wait two decades before we could use it in our everyday lives. By the way, the amazing watch to the right is AT-550, and this was the original ad. The technology is here. Why do business applications still suck?

No, that’s not another post about how great or not the iPad is. We’ll leave this debate for other blogs. However, the iPad might mark the beginning of a new era. Touchscreen technology improves at a crazy pace. It’s only a matter of time until we’ll start seeing new and innovative user interfaces that will adjust to this new world.

Well, in PipeJump, we’ve built it into the product from the very beginning. The biggest challenge, however, is to make the app user friendly for a Dell user and still make sure it’s ready for those new kinds of interactions.

Enough theory. Let’s look at an example from PipeJump’s interface. The way people used to move a deal between different stages of a sales process is: (1) Click the deal name; (2) Click “Edit Deal” in the deal info screen;(3) Click the stage drop down; (4) Choose a new stage for the deal; (5) hit save button. This is how a typical SalesForce.com interaction looks like. Yes, five actions to move a deal to the next stage.

In PipeJump it works in a completely different way. You have to … drag the deal to the next stage. Yes, it is that simple. Now, here comes “ready for the future” thing built into PipeJump. Right now, you can do that by using your mouse. In the near future, using a touch screen, you can simply drag it using your finger.

The challenge of having an alternative still remains. For that, we have a dropdown that shows when you hover the deal which let’s you move the deal to whatever stage you wish.

Drag and drop is only one example of how interactions can be simplified and future-ready. We promise to share more ideas soon.