Applying Dieter Ram’s ten principles to web design | Webdesigner Depot
May 26, 2014
Just what it says: what if we applied Dieter Ram’s principles of what makes good design to web design?
Items of Interest
Collecting amazing and interesting things on the web.
Page 13
A User Experience Business of One
May 26, 2014
business / design / design process / user experience
A designer takes a look at the Business Model Canvas, and applies it to doing user experience design, why she does what she does, and how to communicate it.
The Redesign of the Design Process
May 24, 2014
critique / design / design process / design research / jared spool / user experience
An examination of how great design teams work: they design the process by which they design things. They get a common understanding of the problem that needs to be solved, the users who need the problem solved, and the possible ways of solving it. This sounds really simple, but is in fact very hard, and is what separates great design teams from the rest.
Pleasure, Flow, and Meaning – The 3 Approaches to Designing for Delight
May 24, 2014
design / design process / jared spool / user experience
We can measure a design on a scale from frustration to delight. The middle of this scale is a neutral point, where the design is neither frustrating nor delightful. It doesn’t suck, but it’s not remarkable either. It’s just a neutral experience.
At the center of Dana’s framework are three different approaches to making an experience delightful: pleasure, flow, and meaning. Teams can pick which of these they’d like to tackle. For most teams, pleasure is the easiest while meaning will provide the most challenges.
Design is the Rendering of Intent
May 24, 2014
design / design process / jared spool / user experienece
I’ve been hearing the UIE folks talk about a defintion of design as “the rendering of intent” and I think I love it. Designers imagine an outcome, and they do things to bring that outcome into reality.
This fits everything we try to create as designers, and it shows why design is so hard. First, you have to get people to agree on what their desired outcome actually is. This, in itself, is a challenge. Then, you have to get them to agree on how to bring about that outcome, and figure out whether it actually does. This is why good design requires organizational change.
Becoming a UX Unicorn in 5 Easy Steps
May 24, 2014
design / jared spool / user experience
I have had this one sitting in my list for some time. Reading it, the 5 steps mirror my career thus far almost identically. So I guess that’s good?
Attaining a Collaborative Shared Understanding
May 24, 2014
design / design process / jared spool
In a collaborative approach to shared understanding, you focus much more on the spirit of what the team intends.
Here the techniques are not about documentation and agreement. They are about exploration, experimentation, and, dare we say, enlightenment. What we’re trying to do is get to a point where we have an epiphany about the design—a revelation that makes everything clear.
We can see this emerge in two techniques of collaboration: prototyping and paired design.
Product Lessons We Can Learn From Google+
May 23, 2014
design / google / product design / user experience
I’ve long been a critic of Google+ as a product, especially from a user experience design perspective. I don’t think Google did the hard work of figuring out the problems users had with social networking, but instead tried to figure out its own problems and build a product out of that. I still believe this, and it’s rather validating to see one of the folks who worked on the original product echo some of what I said three years ago.
Tracking When Users Print Pages
May 22, 2014
For years I have argued that the best user statistics are those for the site you are building. In the absence of global numbers for how many users print web pages, in this post I’m going to show you how you can measure how many (and which) pages get printed from your site by using Google Analytics.
The Case for Reparations
May 22, 2014
I have rarely reach such a powerful, sweeping piece on race in America. It cuts to the core of what makes the country what it is and how much we have entrenched ourselves in white supremacy and theft from black people like nothing I’ve read in a long time. It’s worth a read, whatever awards it might get, and a national conversation that I imagine we are too racist to have , but I wish we weren’t.