“Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.”Fred Brooks, in interview by Wired’s Magazine’s Kevin Kelly about his new book The Design of Design
OXO’s angled measuring cup, via an article on Good Experience: “Customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How? Simply by observing the customer experience.”
(By the way—this brand appears to be sold at Kohl’s; Bed, Bath & Beyond; and Sears to name a few… so I might just drop in a buy there rather than pay shipping…)
“For practicing User Experience Designers, one of the most important laws isn’t Fitts’s Law, which helps us understand how to design interactive elements. Nor is it Hick’s Law, which describes how long people take to make decisions.The pull-no-punches opening to Jared Spool’s article today on
It’s Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 99% of everything is crap.”
Nice article on interviewing users by Jakob Nielsen—strengths and weaknesses, when and when not to interview. Fits in with what I’ve experienced with contextual inquiry, especially the importance of focusing interview questions on what users are doing right now.
“Self Design only works in those instances when you are the user and there’s a lot of users just like you.”Closing quote from an interesting article by Jared Spool on the pros and cons of designing for yourself, using 37signals as a prime case.
As I’m sitting here working on a revision of the Church’s online catalog, I just perused a great summary of 10 reasons to not copy Amazon by GetElastic. Good advice for me, and just about everybody who’s not Amazon.
“Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human capacity to make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs, and give us meaning in our lives.”Enjoyed this quote this morning by John Heskett in his book Toothpicks and Logos.
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It continues to perplex me how so many basic interaction conventions did not make it onto the web. With each browser revision, we’re slowly improving experiences online, but so much of it is simply catch-up and not new innovation. Sure, it was born as a method for structuring and sharing documents, but once we started building things with it that involved interaction, why didn’t we at least start with what we knew thus far? Simple patterns designed decades earlier are slowly starting to show up on the internet but so many are still not even technologically possible.
It’s unfortunate because it limits the internet’s potential. By requiring experienced users to learn new behaviors, requiring users to deal with a sub-set of features, or lowering standards and expectations by providing new users with a sub-par experience, we are doing them a great disservice.
This is a preview of the front page of the news and events section coming in the new lds.org. It will be up on the beta site in the next few weeks. It will provide an aggregate of articles and new content being published on the site and by official Church news services.
“ticky-techie tactics”My favorite (and also alliterative) quote from Mark Hurst
A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. More than just grids, their entire process. Required reading.
“Great ideas can’t be tested.Legendary advertising icon George Lois, from the t-shirt series
Only mediocre ideas can be tested.”
“A by-product of sub-par design courses is that aspiring designers today see computers as the only truly necessary tool. On the contrary. By removing the computer from the creative process, you gain much more freedom when translating your thoughts.An insightful quote from David Airey in his new book, Logo Design Love.
You learned to draw before you learned how to use a computer. Why? Because it’s easier. It’s less restricting. And it’s more creative. You want a circle here? A stroke there? No problem. Just do it. Translating the same process to a computer requires unnecessary steps that hinder your creative flow.”
For those of you in SLC and not heading to Austin this week, come join us this Thursday at the Stimulate SLC Hack Night. Bring your laptops and sketchbooks and collaborate with a few dozen creative hackers.
Huge disclaimer: Stimulate isn’t affiliated with NT or the LDS Church, but Chris and I organized it.
There’s limited space so get in here. All the info’s at Hulabalub.
““Good” beats “Innovative” nearly every time. An obsession with innovation leads executives down the wrong path. Just trying to be good would be a smarter focus.”Former colleague Scott Berkun in a recent Business Week article. Before objecting, read the whole article; innovation will happen, but not if that is the primary goal. The primary goal should be to produce Something Good. If innovation is required to get there—great! But if there are tried and true solutions, all the better.
“I have to admit something strange: I’m amused by poorly designed websites. The worse the better. Much like some people “love to hate” movie villains, I get a peculiar satisfaction from finding myself completely lost in an ill-conceived, over-designed, steaming pile of a website. ... I think I have to enjoy it on some level, given my role as a customer experience consultant; otherwise work would be pretty difficult (see also: doctors who can’t stand the sight of blood).”Mark Hurst, noting accurately that customer experience is harder than it looks.
The latest design for lds.org just went beta. This release represents some long hours, lots of iteration and effort by everyone on the project team and we’d love to hear your feedback.
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Lying and simplifying aren’t the same. In fact, they’re not even friends-in-law. They’re archenemies. That’s right. Think Batman and The Joker, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Glenn Beck and Rahm Emanuel. As designers, it’s essential that we understand this, because our lives are spent shooting for simplification. But far too often in our quest for UI Zen, we fall into the bottomless pit of lies, lies, lies.
Love this page layout in the latest JCrew catalogue, as featured on Coudal.com and FieldNotesBrand.com.
And I can say too that the Field Notes we got at An Event Apart have held up to the wear and tear of my back pocket better than expected.
“When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. If you do not meet your own deadline, you are a failure. And since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with scanty or no tests.”David Heinemeier Hansson, It’s not a promise, it’s a guess