The following posts have been tagged week 38

• ☞ Week 38 ☜

  Keep On Learning

  

  One of the greatest qualities in most creative problem solvers is a thirst for learning. Most designers and user experience professionals I know have some level of post-graduate education. But if you were to dig a little deeper, you would likely find that many have degrees in either partially or completely unrelated fields. The truth is the greatest thing you learn while getting a college education is that you alone are responsible for what and how you learn. 

  Andy Rutledge recently leveled a very stern, yet honest, criticism of the state of UX Design Education in the college system: “Today the appropriate path for UX design education goes around, not through, nearly all universities and colleges.” 

  While there is undoubtedly a gap is this area of design education, thankfully people like Liz Danzico (MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA) and Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson—aka the Web Standardistas—are leading the way by creating cutting edge interaction design curriculum that will hopefully serve as a model for education in our field in the years to come. 

  But what if you don’t live in New York or Belfast? How can you gain the knowledge and experience needed to be a trustworthy user experience design practitioner?

  Find a mentor. Search out the best user experience design team in your area and apply for a job. Intern if necessary, but do what ever it takes to work along side someone with experience in the field. Try to expose yourself to as many of the various facets of UX Design as you can and immerse yourself in the work. Your true passion and aptitudes will reveal themselves, allowing you to focus your skills and cultivate a career as a UX Designer. 

  In addition, I would encourage you to read. Read everything and anything you can that relates to designing the user experience. Art, science, psychology, all types of design—all of it will help you form a solid foundation, gain an understanding of the language of design, and provide you with practical tools and methodologies which can be applied immediately in your work. 

  In order to give you something to read through this long cold winter season, I have compiled my list of “essential UX reading” to help get your UX education off to a good start. This list is in no way exhaustive, but rather a selection of various titles that will help continue the growth of any user experience designer. 

  • Everything from Rosenfeld Media - no joke.
  • Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior
  • Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks
  • Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
  • The Design of Everyday Things
  • Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
  • About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
  • Universal Principles of Design
  • Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
  • The Elements of Typographic Style
  • Sketching User Experiences
  • Envisioning Information
  • Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web (2nd Edition)
  • Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students
  • 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
  • Graphic Design: The New Basics
  • Designing with Web Standards (3rd Edition)
  • Beautiful Evidence
  • Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
  • The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web
  • An Eye for Color
  • The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
  • A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
  • How Designers Think, Fourth Edition: The Design Process Demystified
  • Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type
  • Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
  • Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design
  • Geometry of Design: Studies in Proportion and Composition
  • The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems

  Whether you side with Andy Rutledge in boycotting the collegiate system or you just want to become a more well-rounded and educated designer, I implore you: never stop learning because the moment you stop learning is the moment you become obsolete. 

  September 24, 2010 by jbrewer

  Tags:

  week 38

  education

  jbrewer
• ☞ Week 38 ☜

  Groupon and the Value of Copywriting

  

  Speak to any seasoned designer long enough and the topic of copywriting comes up. Any designer worth their salt knows the value of great copywriting and how it can transform a dull, routine web experience into a delightful one.

  But what exactly does it mean to write great copy? How do we know when we’ve achieved it? Is this something that we can learn as part of the design process, or should we have a dedicated copywriter (if we don’t already)?

  A good case study for the power of copy comes from the white-hot startup Groupon. Groupon is a collective buying service that offer daily deal coupons in most major cities around the world. By some estimates Groupon is the fastest growing company ever.

  If you’ve ever read a Groupon deal (and chances are you have) you may have been struck with how friendly and informal the writing is. They take great pains to make even the most mundane services sound exciting. Here’s an excerpt from a recent Groupon I received for a deal on a dentist: 

  The Tooth Fairy is a burglarizing fetishist specializing in black-market ivory trade, and she must be stopped. Today’s Groupon helps keep teeth in mouths and out of the hands of maniacal, winged phantasms: for $49, you get a cleaning, an exam, and x-rays at Longwood Dental Group in Brookline (a $356 value). The office is easily reachable from the C Line’s Englewood Avenue stop on Beacon Street.

  Now, anybody who can make a visit to the dentist at least interesting is writing some impressive copy. And the thing is, Groupon makes this look easy. You barely realize they’re sucking you into another daily deal for an everyday service when you’re already clicking through to take advantage of it. That’s the power of great copy…when it’s really good you barely notice it’s there. 

  It turns out that Groupon has lots of writers on staff. (as of September 2010 they had 70) And they also have an entire style guide that helps writers adhere to the friendly Groupon voice: 

  Public Groupon Editorial Manual

  Reading through this manual is a wonderful exercise in decoding what makes Groupon’s writing work. I highly recommend it. Here’s an example of how Groupon uses counter-intuitive imagery to draw readers in:

  Use Absurd images. Sweeping, dramatic nonsense. The absurd narrator.

  e.g. Humankind has been playing with fire for years; now we can harness the bronzing essence of the fiery sun in a gentle mist, proving once and for all our dominance over the weak, inanimate solar system.

  There is lots of talk of whether Groupon can keep their advantage over new competitors. But the competitors I have seen don’t have the copywriting chops that Groupon does, at least right now. As long as Groupon continues to write such great copy, they’ll have a big advantage over their competitors. That’s the value of copywriting…an integral part of the user’s experience. 

  September 24, 2010 by bokardo

  Tags:

  week 38

  bokardo