February 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Good design is...
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.
—Dieter Rams
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User Interface as Customer Service
Time was when we weren’t interrupted quite as much as we are these days. It’s hard to remember, but there was a day without mobile phones, Twitter, Facebook, email, or pop-up ads. We used to be able to take the time to learn something new.
Those days are over. It’s not that we don’t learn new things, but the time slots in which we can learn are much shorter. We...
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Makers of Frames
This week’s esteemed guest author is Liz Danzico
Look around you. There’s a field surrounded by trees, a curb along a street, a raised subway platform, a sign-in invitation, a checkout process with five steps—indications of boundaries, of edges. Of frames. The field, the city, the transport system, the website—none have inherent boundaries. Yet they take on different boundaries when...
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The Power of Frameworks
“The power of frameworks is yet to be uncovered as one of the greatest opportunities for designers.” - Liz Danzico
So if we are makers of frames, what sort of frameworks are we making?
Structural Frameworks: Affect the way we move through space. Creating spaces that people live in and use. Offline known as architecture. Online known as interaction design/information architecture....
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The Usage Lifecycle
As users interact with your product or service, they proceed through a series of steps called the usage lifecycle. The usage lifecyle is a mapping of the user’s experience with your design. Like other lifecycles, the usage lifecycle has a beginning, middle, and an end, each of which are characterized by different behaviors and goals. Though they be similar in every other way, people act...
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You are not your user
Socrates said, “Know thyself.”
I say, “Know thy users.”
And guess what? They don’t think like you do. You know your product inside and out. You knew it when it was just a few sketches on a napkin. You have been using it in every form and iteration it has been through in its entire life-cycle. Your actions, decisions and preferences have been imprinted into every...
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Utility vs. Beauty
A good designer always works to keep the form, function and the aesthetic quality of a design in balance throughout the life of a project. Just because something looks good doesn’t mean its useful. And just because something is useful does not make it beautiful.
More often than we want to admit, we use glitz and glam—or worse, the current popular design trend—to hide the areas where we...
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Dreamers of Day
Designers are an odd lot: creative, moody, pensive, thoughtful, weird. But the one characteristic that separates designers from others is action. They make stuff that didn’t exist before. They take the idea living deep inside their head and pull it out, realizing it in a drawing, prototype, or product. Unlike most people, they don’t just think about it. They don’t just...
