The following posts have been tagged week 14

• ☞ Week 14 ☜

  A picture is worth a 1000 words, except when it isnt

  

  One of the primary jobs of any designer—regardless the medium—is to convey complex stories and ideas visually in such a way that the viewer can nearly instantly comprehend the information being presented. Human beings are highly visual creatures able to make connections and process visual information almost instantly. Your overall decision to engage, trust, believe, purchase or commit to an action is formed in milliseconds.  

  In light of this, the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is an incredibly powerful statement, implying that a single still image can convey more to the observer than an elaborate block of text, nearly instantly. 

  But what about when this isn’t the case? 

  One of the most dangerous elements in any design is imagery that conveys the wrong message, causes confusion or leaves the user with a sense of shallow fakery. In that moment, you would be better off getting those thousand words properly formatted for the user to read because the damage is often hard to undo—because it is so quick, subjective and subliminal—as well, you may lost your chance to entice the user into further action.

  Someone recently said on Twitter, “…I hate fake people stock photos with a passion - are they actually any good to motivate action?” 

  I thought it perfectly illustrated my point (even though that person’s company is guilty of this exact statement). Corporate websites are notorious for the over-use of insincere, shallow stock photography employed to “really say something about our company!” 

  Unfortunately it usually ends up saying, “We were too cheap to get someone to take some photos that are an authentic representation of our company and our culture.” 

  I know not everyone has the resources to do this, but even when using stock photography, care should be taken to ensure that the photo is truly telling your story and reinforcing your message.  

  It doesn’t matter if it is a picture, an infographic, a screenshot, or a product rendering, all visual communication in your design leaves a cumulative impression on the user. Take the time to make sure that every part of your visual communication on your site or around your product is reinforcing your message. 

  April 11, 2010 by jbrewer

  Tags:

  photography

  week 14

  jbrewer
• ☞ Week 14 ☜

  The Experience belongs to the User

  

  We all like to play God. We like to imagine that the design we create is ushered into the world and all those who use it have an epiphany…they do things exactly in the way we have prescribed. They approach, use, and experience our design in the manner we envisioned, resulting in an amazing user experience.

  You might call this the God complex approach to UX. It is the ego-driven approach, the one in which designer knows better than user, the one in which users don’t know what’s good for them.  The architect Frank Lloyd Wright fell into this mould. He designed houses for a particular (in his view enlightening) experience. He designed all aspects of the house, from the large unified rooms to the built-in furniture to the small kitchen. As a house owner you could change very little. You want the furniture a different way? Too bad. You’re a foodie who wants to entertain in the kitchen? Not going to happen. Wright had already determined the experience you should have. 

  But most people who have actually lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house report that it’s not all that great. It’s too restrictive, too confining. What Wright saw as the ideal way to live isn’t the same as another’s ideals. Wright took his God complex too far…and built beautiful but not quite usable houses. 

  No design survives contact with the user. Just like most people change the house they live in, most people change design artifacts to suit their needs and taste. Computer users customize the software on their computer, adding the programs they need and removing the ones they don’t. House owners paint the walls of their house to their current favorite colors. Social software users are customizing from the very moment they add a particular friend…the entire user experience of social software is personalized. 

  Designers do not create experiences, we create artifacts to experience. We create tangible things that people use over time. If someone using our artifact has a good time while using it, they might be said to have a positive user experience. But we cannot dictate this in the sense that Wright would have wanted. The experience (positive or negative) belongs to our users in the same way that a memory belongs to them. It’s an event that happened to them, not us. It’s a custom internalization.

  In his book How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand describes the static nature of architecture as an endemic problem. 

  “Almost no buildings adapt well. They’re designed not to adapt; also budgeted and financed not to, constructed not to, administered not to, maintained not to, regulated and taxed not to, even remodeled not to. But all buildings (except monuments) adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are changing constantly.” 

  
  Brand could as easily have been talking about any designed artifact. We start out building them statically because we don’t see people using them over time. Once that happens, though, once a design has had contact with its users, and the designer observes that contact, the world changes. This is what social software is showing us each and every day: its core value is its ability to be something different for everyone, to be adaptable to people’s varying needs, to change over time, to be a subjective user experience. 

  April 11, 2010 by bokardo

  Tags:

  week 14

  bokardo