I can’t emphasize how much I use it, how much I really love it, and how it is one of the reasons why no matter what phones I use, I keep the iPhone on me.

One of the downsides of the Cohdoo Highlight was that you can download the files to your computer and listen to them but without the highlights that you “tapped” while recording the interview.

I was excited about the Player, it saves time and don’t have to drain the phone’s battery while listening and writing in the report.

First things first, it’s a player. This is what it does, it plays back your recordings. End of story.

No complications no nothing. BUT (after the screen shot)

When you first fire it up, it doesn’t give you a quick guide on how to transfer the files from your iPhone to your Mac. It would be a nice addition, I scratched my head for a few seconds before remembering how to (plug iphone, run itunes on desktop, open apps, scroll down to sharing, click Highlight, click on file, save to, voila! or directly from your dropbox if enabled)

It would be nice to have a quick walkthrough.

After transferring the files, it’s pretty straight forward from there, open the file you want and you get all the information you saved using your phone. Jumping to highlights is a breeze, you get the location on the map to remind you where the interview took place.

Simple, sweet, straight to the point, right arrow to jump to the next highlight, left for the previous one…can’t get any simpler.

However, as much as it made my life easier to listen directly on my laptop to the recordings and jumping to the highlights, I noticed that there were a few points I missed during the interview (yes, my bad, it happens!) I would’ve liked to add highlights/rename highlights and most of all add comments right from the desktop app (it’s no biggie to fix/add/edit comments/names/pictures on the iPhone)

Is it worth 4$? Well you can listen to the recordings on quicktime, but you won’t get the highlights. It’s a first release, I am hoping in the future ones we will be able to edit the files. It would’ve been “nice” to have it for free because it compliments the iPhone app and non Highlight users cannot use it anyway…Should you get it? it’s only 4$ give it a spin! Just remember, it’s only a player! (lost much?)

Note taking is always a pain, be it in uni, a lecture or for us UX designers/architects

One of the tools I use is the Livescribe pen, good concept, nice for taking notes and recording the interview and linking the notes with the voice recording (gone cross eyed yet?)

I am not always walking around with my Livescribe pen and notebook and sometimes I just need a quick way to take notes and highlight some important points that are being said, or as Cohdoo’s say, that “aha” moment.

Enter “Highlight”, an iPhone app that does something and does it really good: Voice recording with the ability to highlight that “aha” moment on the fly!

How it works is pretty simple, you load up the app, click on new recording, start, and whenever you hear that “aha” phrase you just tap on the screen and it marks it so you can review it later on. Dead simple, straight to the point!

You finish recording and want to check it out, this is the sweet part, sometimes we record a dozen of interviews and we need to sort them out quickly, what CH does is offer extra options for your recordings; rate them, write notes, show the location (maps) and add picture/photo be it straight from the camera or library.

Another feature that I really like about it is sharing the recordings via email or through itunes. The extra oomph to the Cohdoo’s Highlight is the Dropbox integration, I know it is hindering with the limited connectivity that we have around in Beirut, but I end up pushing all the data there at the end of day, backing up never hurts.

Overall, I am in love with it, easy, simple, straight to the point and does what it says on the tin, the only downside is that you cannot resume a recording when you get a phone call, you will have to start a new one but the old one will be saved. Don’t forget to switch your iPhone to airplane mode, you are conducting an interview/research and you want the least interruptions possible ;)

Make sure you drop by their site or get the app directly from here

I can’t help it but smile when I hear this statement “I want to learn about UX, what books do you recommend?” I wasn’t lucky enough to get some guidance when I first started, I was put with one book (User Centered System Design), a dvd (Paper Prototyping) and a training seminar!

After that I was flooded with books, white papers, insights, videos, webinars, I didn’t know where to really start and where to really stop.

after a few months of swimming in total darkness, I had the fortunate help of people around the net and was put on track and had a cleaner start and learned that you can never stop…

I am not going into what it takes to be a UX designer (yet), I am just gonna list 10 books that anyone should read in the given order if one wants to get his feet wet with UX design

1. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
2. The Design of Everyday Things by Donald A. Norman
3. Emotional Design by Donald A. Norman
4. About Face 3 by Alan Cooper
5. A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger & Carolyn Chandler
6. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld
7. Web Form Design by LukeWroblewski
8. Usability Engineering by Jakob Nielsen
9. Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky
10. Measuring the User Experience by Thomas Tullis and William Albert

That’s pretty much it for the time being, I didn’t even scratch the surface here but this should give you a good start. If you have any question just drop a comment/line!

We all smile sometimes when we see/hear/read something really smart. I couldn’t help it but smile really wide when I played around with Nieves.

Nieves is an independent publishing house in Zurich :) that publishes artists books and “zines”.

I never ordered online but recently downloaded their iPhone application, and all I can say is that I smiled after I ordered the first book. Aesthetics I love the way it is, UX/IxD wise, it’s simply amazing.

Explanation:

Magazines are usually wrapped in nylon before you buy them, most of them are anyways. Here we have a few “zines” of this month, all shiny as if it is wrapped. Cool?

When you choose a “zine”, you will get some information about it and it’s still wrapped in nylon. Cool so far. You hit buy and voila:

The “zine” is unwrapped now. It is yours, a perfect “real life/normal” behavior that you do when you buy a wrapped magazine, remove the nylon.

When you check all the “zines”, whatever you bought is unwrapped (second row, 1st and 3rd zine are bought)

Plain, simple, natural behavior, reflected beautifully in a mobile app. Simple UX/IxD that makes the geek in me smile!  If you are artsy you will love Nieves for iPhone!