Class 2 was heavily focused on Jennifer Tidwell’s Design Patterns. After a brief summary of how our eyes actually perceive light (and after some further reading – how lame humans are compared to certain animals such as the Mantis Shrimp that has 12 colour receptors compared to our RGB receptors and can see lights such as ultraviolet, infra-red and polarized light. That’s not all! The mantis shrimp also has a pseudo trinocular vision giving it the ability to still perceive depth in the event that it loses an eye). But I digress.

What was most interesting was Jennifer Tidwell’s Design patterns that seem to have been effective over the times that computer software has been developed. These are design patterns that I have probably used before yet didn’t realize the intention of it being there. Designs such as the escape hatch or breadcrumbs. I’d imagine a lot of mobile application these days would somehow adapt these design conventions as to not frustrate the user.  A lot of apps, such as tinder for instance, utilizes the card stack principle as to enable full screen content but has more content located to the left or right of the main screen.

All in all I intend to get myself a copy of Jennifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces book. It seems like UI designer’s bible of sorts. Furthermore it is an O-Reilly publication, which tend to have a pretty decent track record when it comes to technical books.