Our friend and former colleague Tim Zheng is on the just-announced lineup for Ignite SLC #3, set for August 20. He’ll be giving a finely polished discourse entitled “Chinese People in 5 Minutes.” A few of us hit Ignite #2 earlier this year and loved it. Tim, just be sure to finally answer the question, What does Chinese Dragon eat?
Of course it is totally understandable to take the ideas of those that pay our bills as gospel. But we should also be reminded that those same people hired us for our expertise. If they just wanted someone to follow orders, they’d probably have hired someone else.
This is especially true in our jobs here on North Temple Street, where design instruction can come from the same people who write actual Church doctrine. I fear too few of us stand up for our own truths, the truths of proportion and color and composition.
While our customers – and yours certainly – are well versed in the gospels of their own sphere, we are the trained experts of design. Often these people who demand that the page doesn’t scroll or whatnot haven’t a clue as to how their message should be communicated.
Instead, let us assert our expertise. Carefully take the customers’ feedback, adjust the design as you see fit, and with confidence explain why those decisions were necessary. In the end, you’ll have progressed the design in ways that improve the product – and not the egos – of your customers.
“Oh right, the flaming chainsaw animation. I’d love to
take that off the site, really I would, but I just think it’s so
neat, and besides it aligns with our brand message of innovation
here at Acme.”
VP of Marketing (presumably caricatured), quoted by Mark Hurst at Good Experience. Very funny supposed transcript of a customer meeting gone awry (or… is that really just the way things usually are?)
“Unless websites are redesigned for the special circumstances of mobile use, the mobile Web will remain a mirage.”
Jakob Nielsen in his latest Alertbox on mobile usability. No news here… which is actually part of the news.
Many findings in the most recent study—which I thought looked pretty darn thorough and well-balanced, from diary studies with users’ own phones to more controlled lab tests—suggest that in some ways we are no better off on the mobile web than we were a decade ago. (Unless you have a pretty large-screened mobile device, such as an iPhone.)
This made me think of Cameron’s advice in Mobile Web Design, that two of the best strategies are “do nothing” (if you are targetting smart phone and especially larger devices such as the iPhone that have a decent chance at rendering the site as-is) and mobile-optimized sites (if you care about anybody else).
The Human Centered Design Toolkit was created by IDEO and the Gates foundation as a free open-source toolkit to assist organizations providing services for communities in need.
“If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today? And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
Gadi Amit introduces Three Client Types and How to Work With Them in an article for Fast Company. Not an exhaustive treatise, but covers some common cases and how to work with the hand you’ve been dealt. Recognize any of these from your own work?
Via my friend August de los Reyes’s Facebook page. (Yes, I’ve finally taken the FB plunge, with a little trepidation at adding another timewaster to my life. Which is why I’m checking only infrequently and haven’t added everyone I ever met to my Friends list, so don’t be offended if I haven’t accepted every offer!)
I feel really stupid for not making progress on a silly website when they’re growing grass in the desert in China.
NYTimes – “Dunhuang, an oasis town deep in the Gobi Desert along the famed Silk Road, has become a center of China’s drive to lead the world in wind and solar energy.”
Handcrafted CSS, a new book from Dan Cederholm and Ethan Marcotte, looks to add to the smallish pile of useful CSS books on my shelf. The others are in a large pile in the community library at work.
“This book will show how craftsmanship can be applied to flexible, bulletproof, highly efficient and adaptable interfaces that make up a solid user experience.”
In an unrelated post, Jamis Charles asked, “I know this is totally unrelated, but you mentioned some time ago you started using Balsamiq Mockups. I’d like to pitch it to my UI Team. How has it been working for you? How do you incorporate it into your workflow? Has it increased productivity? A post about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.”
I’ll let others speak to their own experience, but here’s a quick post on how it worked for me. I was looking for something easy that would help my team focus less on pixels and colors during the planning stage, and just focus on concepts and framework. Balsamiq worked admirably for that purpose. In fact, within weeks of using Balsamiq for our weekly high-level design meetings, team members were themselves articulating the reason to use Balsamiq: “We don’t get bogged down in the details anymore!”
The workflow was something like this:
I would review high level requirements, talk with the customer and mock something up quickly in Balsamiq, with sketchy notes in the margins. As promised, the tool is drop-dead simple for most things it supports. Don’t expect a freeform drawing tool, but for dragging and dropping basic UI elements, it’s very easy.
Team would meet to discuss.
I would take notes directly in Balsamiq, sometimes updating the mockup, but often just leaving a note in the margins for later. Because of the low fidelity of the prototype, the team was able to get past nitpicking the details and focus on the functional requirements and workflow.
Once we moved out of planning into iterative development, I would refer to the mockups and the notes recorded there to create higher fidelity prototypes, using Fireworks images or HTML prototypes, depending on the need. I tried to get a cycle or two ahead of the dev team, and was generally successful.
As the high fidelity design progressed, we referenced the low fidelity mockups less and less. By the last cycle or two, we were hardly using them at all anymore. I probably haven’t opened the tool in 3 months.
So in terms of productivity, our planning discussions were more productive because we were not bogged down at the pixel level. But in terms of turning the Balsamiq Mockups into production code—that was not really our intent, nor does the tool really support that.
Anybody else have a perspective to share on this or other rapid prototyping tools?
John Jensen is a talented designer who is studying at BYU. My favorite pieces are his Air poster and his Zinc Magazine design. Not only is the work a notch (or two) above, but his URLs are nice and clean. No flash based, black box website syndrome here. (via my Brother Joey )
In our quest to design simple, intuitive, and efficient things, we must be careful to not over-design. I have run into several examples recently where I believe the designer (or more often, the business employing them) is trying too hard—too hard to be everything, too hard to have too many options, too hard to up-sell, too hard to be original or innovative, too hard to be too simple—and has failed. A fine line is walked between questioning traditions and standards for irrelevance, age, or oversight, and respecting them for their tenure of existence. A delicate balance must be struck between production costs, competition, patents, marketing, aesthetics, work-flow, and usability. While we most often are not the one with the final say, I believe it’s a designer’s duty to satisfy a project’s many requirements simultaneously while diligently advocating usability—resisting and preventing the mistake of over-designing.
That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great.
... it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.
Is it better to release something mediocre than to wait to release something great? Too often I hear this excuse: “this is better than what we have now.” This is a tempting excuse to spew out of your mouth, because no one can argue with it. Of course it’s better. It’s easy to be better. But is it great? Is it awesome? Are you cheating your customers or viewers of something that would blow their minds?
What do you think? Is it better to release early and often, improving on a”good” idea in public? Or is it better to wait until an idea strikes this beautiful chord of greatness and then unleash it on the world?
