Arcade Table's Stealth brings high design, crazy price tag to tabletop arcade

By Christopher Trout posted Feb 23rd 2011 7:57AM The tabletop arcade market isn't exactly a crowded one these days, and for the most part we'd say that's for good reason -- remember those Pac-Man-induced neck spasms? Then again, most arcade tables don't look like this. The Stealth console system from the aptly-named Arcade Tables offers 60 classic games, including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Galaga, in a high gloss cocktail table, sporting an HD LCD screen with an 89-degree viewing angle, built-in speaker system, and two-player controls. Okay, so the thing costs $3,300, which is more than a touch too rich for our blood, but wouldn't it be nice if more throwback consoles looked a little more, well, Stealth-y.

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Facebook Unifies UI As It Rolls Out New Design For ‘Pages’

Back in December Facebook unveiled a significant redesign to user profiles, which now feature a handful of photos at the top of the page, new sections for featuring your family members and best friends, and some other mostly-cosmetic tweaks. Today, the site is launching a similar design for ‘Facebook Pages’ — the public profiles used by brands, businesses, and celebrities to communicate with thousands or millions of fans at once.

The new Pages incorporate many of the changes made during the December redesign: you can now feature images at the top of the page. Application tabs are being moved from the top of the profile down to a sidebar just beneath the profile image. And there’s a widget that shows what ‘Likes’ you have in common with the Page. Which brings us to some of the more interesting changes.

Facebook is now giving Pages much of the same functionality available to normal users — you can browse Facebook as if you were the Page (it’s not as confusing as it sounds). For example, I could take control of the TechCrunch Page and leave a comment on Chipotle’s Page saying that we really enjoy their burritos, and the username leaving the comment would be TechCrunch.

Pages can also ‘Like’ other pages. So, for example, I could steer the TechCrunch page over to Enya’s official fan page and ‘Like’ that, and maybe I’d swing by Google and Apple and ‘Like’ those too. Status updates from each of these pages would then appear in my News Feed (yes, Pages now have a News Feed as well).

When you’re logged in as a Page your notifications window will let you know as people leave comments, and the button that normally displays friend requests will now tell you how many Likes you’ve received since you last signed in. And, in response to what Facebook says has been a highlight requested feature, admins can receive get updates via email as people interact with their Pages.

One other interesting change to the Pages themselves: before now, Facebook didn’t really do anything to sort comments that were being left by other users — they’d just be shown in reverse chronological order. This led to a whole lot of noise, and made the comments mostly useless on popular Pages. Now Facebook is using an algorithm similar to News Feed to sort these comments based on who left them (if you’re friends with someone who left a comment on a Page, you’ll see that on top), how much engagement the comments have received, and whether the comment is left in a language you understand.

Facebook is allowing Page owners to preview the new design for the next four weeks (you can upgrade at any time). On March 10, the change will be mandatory for everyone). And yes, the new features should play nice with Place pages — if you merge a Place page with a normal Page, then the result will include the revamped design and features, in addition to the Place tab (yes, that last bit was confusing).

Some of these changes are pretty significant, particularly the move to expand how much Pages can interact with users and other Pages. I imagine we’ll start seeing some interesting exchanges as brands and celebrities start responding to each others’ posts.

Note that we saw some of these new features briefly in December, when a number of Facebook features went live because of a glitch.

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Twitter’s Creative Director Talks Design, UX and Inspiration

In the web design community, Doug Bowman has distinguished himself both as an individual and as a part of big-name creative teams. Currently, he is Twitter’s creative director, a job he took after leaving Google last year.

This year, Twitter’s dramatic redesign was the talk of the web — the “new Twitter” is both beautiful and functional. Its addition of new features is perfectly balanced with its subtle aesthetic upgrades. Overall, the design team didn’t just make the product prettier, it made the user experience vastly more interesting, simple and pleasurable.

The new Twitter is a clear product of Bowman’s philosophy on web design:

“In a world where data bits flow abundantly, our minds have developed filters to sift through the overflow of useless and badly designed information. While design must appeal to our sense of aesthetic, it must not stand in the way of delivery, cause complications or introduce stumbling blocks.

“Rather, the presence of design should simplify and facilitate our everyday life, enable us to accomplish our tasks more effectively and help us enjoy them along the way.”

We asked Bowman to shed some light on a few subjects, including the redesign. After all, when your application is at scale and users are already accustomed to an experience, how do you change the interface gracefully and well?

“Know very well the reasons why the product needs a redesign, or if it does at all,” Bowman told us. “Understand that users are creatures of habit, and change is often hard to move beyond. Allow them time to try and shift over to a new design.

“However, don’t be afraid of taking substantial risk with a redesign if the product needs a substantial overhaul to improve the user experience,” he added. “Some redesigns are often appreciated more for what they eliminate than what they add.”

Bowman emphasized user experience above all in his notes to us. He’s not the kind of art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic snob who’d sacrifice a user’s needs for a designer’s wants.

“As designers, one of our ‘wants’ should always be to help satisfy user needs. [It] kind of goes with the job description when the user experience is so critical to a product’s success. Good designers understand and are attentive to what users need and want to accomplish,” Bowman explained. “Great designers realize that fulfilling those needs can happen in unique and unexpected ways.”

In addition to reimagining one of the modern web’s more popular applications, Bowman has also built an extraordinary design team at Twitter. Together, they’ve rolled out a string of successful mobile applications in addition to rebuilding Twitter.com.

In a market rife with talent, how do you build a design team that works?

“Look for creative folks who understand basic design principles and critical thinking over those who have sought out advanced skills in Photoshop or CSS,” Bowman advises.

“Hire designers that are more talented than you,” he added. “Encourage everyone on the team to share their work and think often. With a small amount of guidance, trust that they will create incredible experiences.”

Finally, we asked Bowman what most stimulates his creativity. He cited nature and architecture as inspiration, and after his focus on UX, we weren’t surprised to find that Bowman is also inspired by “constant cycles of user feedback.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, gorriti.

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5 Design Trends That Small Businesses Can Use in 2011

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

In the past 12 months, we’ve seen a lot of changes in the world of web design. Growing popularity in the mobile device space — including smartphones and tablets like the iPad — have refined the way many users access and interact with content.

Likewise, the formal adoption of web standards like HTML5, web fonts and CSS3 by browser makers means that more and more users are now able to take advantage of the latest and greatest features on the web.

It’s often tough for small businesses to stay up on the latest web design trends because of the cost involved with redesigns and the necessity of being accessible by a broad range of users. Still, there are some great web design trends from 2010 and leading into 2011 that small businesses should consider incorporating into their sites.

We’ve already written about some of the aesthetic web design trends that small businesses should keep an eye on, so this list is more about some of the technological trends taking place in the world of web design.

Regardless of where you stand in the war over Flash, the fact remains that more and more sites and web developers are moving away from Flash-only solutions for video, animation and navigation.

Flash still excels when it comes to building fully interactive designs and Rich Interactive Applications (RIAs), but for small business owners who aren’t showcasing or providing that sort of experience, trading Flash for HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 might just make more sense.

The fact is, Flash is not accessible on most mobile devices. Even the mobile devices that do support Flash don’t support each element reliably. As a customer, there is nothing worse than visiting a website from my mobile phone and finding out I am unable to access the contact information, list of products and services or location information because the navigation or core content was built in Flash.

Flash is a great tool for certain types of work, such as sites that can capture audio or video, do complex animations or run web games. If you’re still using an old circa-2005 Flash template, 2011 might be a good time to upgrade to something more modern.

Typography is an important — I would argue crucial — component of any web design. Historically, customizing the typography you use on a website has been a complicated and headache-inducing process. As a result, most designers were reduced to either using the small selection of web-safe fonts or using workarounds like text images or Flash as text replacements.

The good news is that in the past 12 months, the situation with fonts and the web has improved quite a bit. Thanks to services like TypeKit, Fonts.com Web Fonts and Google Web Fonts, it’s now possible to use web fonts on your own site with very little effort, for either free or very nominal costs.

You can also check out some of the latest trends in web fonts.

More and more websites — big and small — are taking the time to make their sites small screen friendly. Having a mobile compatible or mobile optimized website means that not only will your site load faster over cellular data connections but that content will be better formatted for the screens of smaller devices, making it easier to access and understand.

As smartphone adoption continues to soar, more and more of our online time is spent on our phones. For small businesses, making sure that that experience is fast and pleasant can be a great way to improve your website’s effectiveness.

There are a slew of tools and services that make it easy to optimize your website for mobile devices.

The popular microblogging platform TumblrTumblr is a great way to quickly and easily post updates, share content and garner direct visitor feedback. Tumblr has become a really popular platform and more and more small businesses are using it for their own company blogs or sites.

And while Tumblr has some great themes geared toward small business users, Tumblr itself is also having a pretty big impact on web design as a whole.

Even if you don’t use Tumblr for your company website or blog, you can incorporate elements of the Tumblr style — distinctive icons for post type, big, beautiful typography for titles and headings, and a minimalist layout.

As I stated in the introduction, it can be difficult for small businesses that aren’t in a design-related field to adopt many of the cutting-edge web design trends for fear of shutting out parts of their potential audience.

And while it is true that there are still some corporate networks and a smattering of home users using old, decrepit and nearly extinct browsers, the latest versions of the major web browsers — Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer, FirefoxFirefox, Google ChromeGoogle Chrome, SafariSafari and OperaOpera — all support CSS3 and HTML5 features and elements. Additionally, practically every modern smartphone supports advanced CSS3, JavaScript and HTML5 features, too.

At this stage, it’s OK to experiment with HTML5 or CSS3 elements on your small business website.

The great thing is, it’s possible to use techniques that will offer an enhanced view on modern browsers but degrade elegantly on systems that don’t support the latest and greatest. There are even some great projects that make it easier to get started.

What trends in web design are you watching for in 2011? Let us know in the comments below!

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Image courtesy of iStockphotoiStockphoto, marekuliasz

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