All posts about
Information design

Information design is the skill and practice of preparing information so people can use it with efficiency and effectiveness. (source: Wikipedia)

The adaptive digital strategy framework

Adapting is the best thing to do with any strategy.

“Today we still see a large number of organizations that keep struggling to align social media and new emerging communication technologies with the overall firm strategy. Organizations should adapt, look in the mirror and recognize that they need to change because the world has changed. They should embrace new strategic frameworks to avoid getting caught up in the digital hype that hit them every day with new solutions and focus on what can actually help them achieve their business and communication objectives.”

(Andrea Vascellari a.k.a. @vascellari)

The Dribbblisation of design

How the logical, mental and virtual structures come together in an app.

“A product architecture is not an information architecture. It is not a set of pages that link to one another, or something that shows modals and describes what buttons do. A prototype will always serve this purpose better. It is a level deeper than that. It is the structure. The building blocks. It shows the objects in the system, and the relationships between them.”

(Paul Adams a.k.a. @Padday ~ Inside Intercom)

Five dangerous ideas for the future of design education

Is it old versus new, young, and upcoming?

“Design students lack cultural depth and awareness. Several representatives from leading design agencies expressed variations on this theme. Lack of curiosity and personal development were described as particular concerns. (…) I would take someone who is able to read over someone who is able to draw any day.”

(Tom Berno a.k.a. @tberno ~ dmi dialog)

The distant summit of enterprise design

INTERSECTION arrives in the US.

“This is a thoughtful tome, dense with deep, contemplative thinking on enterprise design. It has a rightful place on the bookshelves for designers that are intrigued by the challenge of cross-discipline collaboration. However, designers looking for a better understanding of technology will be disappointed, and technologists looking for an understanding of the design world will be baffled.”

(Marianne Sweeny a.k.a. @msweeny ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Why cards are the future of the Web

Cards and tags, a magic duo. Ask Paul Otlet or Bill Atkinson.

“We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs. This is driving the web away from many pages of content linked together, towards individual pieces of content aggregated together into one experience.”

(Inside Intercom)

Vintage Infodesign: A set of charts, maps and graphics created before 1960

A set of examples makes the abstract clear.

“Wired’s Map Lab is rapidly becoming a must-follow, when the topic in hand is cartography. We mention their insightful articles regularly, especially on our Data Viz News post – we even created a Cartography section for the latest edition, with all the great content being published about this subject. In one of their recent articles, Gregg Miller uncovered several rarely seen maps from San Francisco’s ‘quirkiest’ hidden Library, the Prelinger library.”

(Visual Loop)

The language of dynamic and interactive graphics

A way to make meaning out of big data, content and information.

“This blog post explores if and how the framework for the analysis of static graphics offered by Yuri Engelhardt in his PhD thesis, The language of graphics: A framework for the analysis of syntax and meaning in maps, charts and diagrams (2002), might be usefully extended to become applicable to dynamic and interactive graphics as well. This brief exploration will center on a discussion of one example of a dynamic graphic: Gapminder World.”

(Lucas Reehorst ~ Masters of Media)

Cognitive science and design: Biological computation

Some deep thinking into design.

“This session will provide an in-depth look at human perception and cognition, and its implications for interactive and visual design. The human brain is purely treated as an information processing machine, and we will teach the audience its attributes, its advantages, its limitations, and generally how to hack it. While the content will provide a deep review of recent cognitive science research, everything presented will also be grounded in example design work taken from a range of Google applications and platforms. Specific topics will include: edge detection, gestalt laws of grouping, peripheral vision, geons and object recognition, facial recognition, color deficiencies, change blindness, flow, attention, cognitive load balancing, and the perception of time.”

(Alex Faaborg a.k.a. @faaborg)

Book review: Intersection

In just one word, “gründlich”.

“(…) for me, the contrast between designers and more science-/engineering-oriented professionals has become a long-standing theme. But I find this debate refreshing and, again and again, it leads to interesting thoughts and viewpoints. One of the recent arguments that designers put forth when emphasizing their aptness for guiding and leading strategic design initiatives is that they maintain a holistic point of view and that, unlike people with a science or engineering background, they are not blinded or paralyzed by details. Located on the other side of the trench, I am somewhat skeptical with regard to such statements. To exaggerate my point somewhat, I view designers like butterflies who jump from flower to flower and become dizzy when thinking about all the connections and interrelations between flowers/design aspects. But, as the book shows when Guenther applies his framework to a general design process, designers, too, focus on specific aspects when this seems appropriate. So there is hope for finding common ground.”

(Gerd Waloszek ~ SAPdesignguild)

The message gets the medium it deserves

I have always been fascinated about how the unique characteristics of a medium define its design space.

“I see this as a core principle of higher order UX; to use the medium in such a way that the medium facilitates the delivery of the message instead of polluting it. It’s that pollution that brings about unanticipated consequences in what the user experiences. This is just as much a holistic experience problem as well as a nitty-gritty design and interaction problem.”

(Erik Flowers a.k.a. @Erik_UX)

Emotional design with ACT: Designing emotion, personality and relationship (2/2)

A kind of anthropomorphism, products with personality.

“We judge products by the personalities we sense through their aesthetics and style of interaction. It takes the skill and sensitivity of designers, marketers and user experience professionals to properly identify the personality that appeals to their target audience, and then consistently design, market, advertise and package that product with the appropriate personality in mind. The A.C.T. Model can help practitioners to more fully and systematically address the requirements that lead to successful products.”

(Trevor van Gorp a.k.a. @trevvg ~ Boxes and Arrows)

Replacing “requirements gathering” with something that works

Requirements are these wet pieces of bath soap you can’t get a strong hold on.

“The replacement activities of creating hypotheses, conducting research, creating scenarios, and running critiques will take more time. A lot more time. How do we do that when our schedules are already full? We have to put it into context with the rest of the project. How much time will we save by getting closer to a great design faster? How much time will we get back because everyone is on the same page about why we’re doing what we’re doing? We spread these activities evenly throughout the project, instead of a small box upfront. They make practically every other box in the project chart better and faster. In a weird twist of project physics, we end up saving time by spending time. Most importantly, we end up with a design that uses real requirements to create a great experience. That’s what we were brought in to do in the first place.”

(Jared Spool ~ User Interface Engineering)

Starving for understanding?

Sense making of big data a.k.a. design for understanding.

“Wurman is among a relatively small group of sensemaking oriented thinkers who figured out, early on that what is important is not the data but rather the understanding, the making sense of it. If you look at the present, relatively early cycle of the Big Data wave this realization regarding the importance of sensemaking is only just starting to emerge. At the moment in the Big Data phenomenon cycle tons of beauty-oriented graphics are being thrown up on the web everyday, a small fraction of which have anything to do with helping others reach understanding.”

(GK VanPatter ~ Humantific)

Design in teams: What designers contribute to multidisciplinary teams

Shared understanding, commitment and direction, team work.

“Products are developed by large multidisciplinary teams. The teams deal with many topics requiring the expertise of several specialists simultaneously. They have to decide together if something is a problem; propose multi-disciplinary solutions; and align their activities into a seamless whole. Stated differently: team members have to ‘think collectively’, which is named team cognition.”

(Guido Stompff a.k.a. @guidostompff ~ About DiT)

Findability is a content problem, not a search problem

Search, find, and use. But then the fun part starts: the information experience.

“Findability is a constant theme in content strategy and technical communications, yet it seems to me that people often treat findability as a problem existing outside the content. Findability is addressed using SEO tactics and by devising sophisticated top-down navigational aids, such as taxonomies and faceted navigation, but it is seldom seen as issue to be addressed in the content itself. I believe this focus on top-down findability is wrong. Top-down finding aids have their place, but the majority of the focus should be bottom up, and it should start with the content itself.”

(Mark Baker ~ Every page is one)

Exploring and enhancing the UX for television: A debrief

The fourth screen coming soon in this theatre.

“At the BBC R&D, we have been working on how to exploit the interactive functionality now available through connected televisions through a number of projects under themes such as companion screens, authentication, Internet of Things, recommendation services, accessibility and so on. They are all exciting topics to explore and we were interested in finding out what the research community had to say on the subject.”

(BBC R&D blog)