March 2010
8 posts
3 tags
Visual Hierarchy
We have many words for the frustration we feel when an interface isn’t directing us to what we need to know. Loud, messy, cluttered, busy.
These words have been appropriated from other parts of life, of course, but we need them to express our feeling of being overwhelmed visually by content on a screen or page. We need them to express how unpleasant a user experience it is to not know...
1 tag
Visual Weight
Visual weight reinforces a page or screen’s visual hierarchy by contrasting the size, color and/or position of elements in the design. By adding visual weight to elements that are of primary importance and reducing the visual weight on elements of less importance you help guide the user and strengthen the overall design of the page or screen.
Just as you would consider each and every word...
2 tags
Make Less More
“What if instead of adding new features, a company concentrated on making the service or product much easier to use? Or making it much easier to access the advanced features it already has, but that few can master? Maybe what they lose in market share in one area will be more than compensated for in another area. In a lot of markets, it’s gotten so bad out there that simply being...
1 tag
Changing Existing Situations
“Everyone designs who devise courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Design, so construed, is the core of all...
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
1 tag
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...
1 tag
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...
1 tag
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....
2 tags
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...
3 tags
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...
1 tag
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...
1 tag
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...
January 2010
8 posts
1 tag
Constraints Fuel Creativity
We are often led to believe that the more freedom we have the more creative we will be. Full creative license? Sweet. Unlimited budget? Awesome! No timetable? Even better.
Yeah, right.
I say embrace your constraints and draw out of them the very solution that sets you apart from the crowd.
The imposition of constraints can lead to great design decisions. Limitations often force you to view...
1 tag
Apple's iPad: For what Audience?
After years of speculation, Apple finally released a tablet computer yesterday called the iPad. There was fanfare! There was rejoicing!
There was also much criticism: everything from it doesn’t have a camera or USB port to it doesn’t support Flash or HDMI out to it doesn’t let you multi-task. In 24 hours we have dozens of reasons why the iPad will fail in the marketplace.
But...
1 tag
Deliverables vs. Delivery
Wireframes, flow diagrams, personas, card sorts, content strategy documents, etc. All of these things are important to design, and designers need some combination of them to synthesize their user research and communicate what they’re doing with the other members of the team.
But too often these deliverables are the last line of contact for designers. Too often these deliverables are what...
2 tags
Sketch, sketch, sketch
I’ve heard it so many times: “I can’t sketch a stick-figure to save my life.”
Some people are afraid of showing their drawing to others. They think they’ll be ridiculed if their sketch looks like it was drawn by a five-year old.
In truth, it doesn’t matter if you are good at sketching. The less formal the sketch, the better. In fact, avoid the urge to use a pencil...
1 tag
Solve Existing Problems
In our attempt to create amazing user experiences, we often want to push the envelope, to create something new, to show people a bright new future. But too often we fall into the novelty trap. The novelty trap is when, in an attempt to dazzle our clients and our users, we focus too much on the new and not enough on the now.
To create great user experiences we need to focus on the now. In...
4 tags
Solutions are easy if you know the problem
“Good design is problem solving.” – Jeffrey Veen
You could say that actually solving the problem is good design in practice.
This rarely boils down to choosing whether or not to apply that “1px inner glow” or rearranging a few blocks of content. Quite often, it means eliminating one’s own assumptions and applying problem-solving techniques in order to truly identify the problem area. Some...
3 tags
The First Rule of UX
“You cannot not communicate. Every behaviour is a kind of communication. Because behaviour does not have a counterpart (there is no anti-behaviour), it is not possible not to communicate.”—Paul Watzlawick’s First Axiom of Communication
This is the first rule of UX. Everything a designer does affects the user experience. From the purposeful addition of a design element to the negligent omission...
1 tag
What Makes the User Experience?
The user experience is made up of all the interactions a person has with your brand, company, or organization. This may include interactions with your software, your web site, your call center, an advertisement, with a sticker on someone else’s computer, with a mobile application, with your Twitter account, with you over email, maybe even face-to-face. The sum total of these interactions...
