Mystifying design with jargon only we understand makes us feel like heroes and creates a sense of job security. But it also creates an “us and them” atmosphere which excludes non-designers, obscures the true value of design, and generates antagonism when only cooperation will yield the best product. By revealing our process and inviting others into our world, we can create a team that is invested in the success of our work, and deliver better design.
He then started to invite people to join him with the simple words “come follow me.” (Luke 5:27) Jesus did not send them to a bible study class or question them about their beliefs. He simply invited them to go on mission with him.
I humbly submit that there is no single element more important to your interface than the copywriting. There is nothing that makes or breaks a positive experience more than the simple set of words that you choose to communicate with. In a world in which we have to simplify as much as possible, nothing matters more than the small vocabulary you end up with in your final work.
The notion of a “new,” digital kind of book scares a lot of folks because there is such a rich fabric of romanticism, nostalgia and myth built up around the physical book. These qualities — romantic, nostalgic, mythical — are really indicative of emotion. And we don’t want to lose that emotion. It’s easy to forget this; I know I do. I forget how the weight of those myths (some real, some imagined) can and should be informing the work I’m doing now.
Card sorting is a usability methodology that has been used by information architects for years to organize web designs and web content more effectively. It involves placing content, groups, keywords and the like on physical note cards and allowing study participants to move the cards into groups to see how the cards can be organized into categories.
In his Faster Mobile Anyone? presentation at Breaking Development in Nashville, Steve Souders discussed the importance of performance on the Web, why it is even more important on mobile, and a set of emerging best practices for faster mobile Web site.
Many UX researchers and analysts aspire to influencing not only design implementation, but also product strategy. However, it is rather difficult to effect this kind of influence because user research insights tend to center on design and fail to speak to a company’s overall strategy for a product.
With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form. What does that mean? To understand just why the iPad is so exciting we need to think about how we got here.
The idea is a very mature way of thinking. It’s almost ingrained as a designer: this is how we approach layout. But we’ve tried to make it work on the web by basically inventing a page, like a best fit. We’ve created a page in a medium where there are no edges, there is no page. The web is different. So I’ve thought up three rules, which I think we need to apply to modern web design. It’s a complete reversing of the way of thinking about it.
The central thesis of Bill Fulton’s talk was that the perceived value of usability is what needs our attention. Instead of spreading usability department thin trying to fix whatever we can, Fulton recommends focusing our efforts on specific departments, projects, or sub-projects are the most receptive to usability recommendations and thus will produce high-impact results. Teams that actually value usability engineering will develop products that are shining examples that make usability look like key asset that can accomplish great things.