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Information design

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

Design process is a myth

Just a set of steps a.k.a. process in ‘hinzeit’.

“Typically, when a product design falls flat, people want to insert a design process to fix the bad design. However (…), a one-size-fits-all design process does not exist. Don’t force a process on a design team that everyone must follow. Every designer has their own unique way of solving design problems. Bad product design is fixed by hiring good designers not by adopting a better design process.”

(Marc Hemeon a.k.a. @hemeon ~ Medium Design/UX)

How design principles help you make design decisions

If no principles, then random and ad hoc decisions.

“While some principles are more important than others and are likely to be thought about first, I don’t think you apply design principles in sequence. The principles of design are about how to communicate ideas and concepts graphically. Understanding them leads to better design decisions. While this post will focus on design, please note much of what’s here could be applied to many other aspects of life. As a general rule I think understanding more about any subject is valuable in helping you make better decisions.”

(Steven Bradley Glicksman a.k.a. @vangogh ~ Vanseo Design)

Web organization is not like book organization

That’s why the concept of the ebook is flawed. It’s ‘The Link’ that makes the difference.

“One of the most difficult aspects of moving content to the Web is that webs are not organized like other things — books in particular. And the difference is not small. It is not that web organization is somewhat different from book organization. It is so different that you can’t even look at web organization the way you look at book organization.”

(Mark Baker a.k.a. @mbakeranalecta ~ Every Page Is One)

Multi-dimensional analysis of dynamic human information interaction

Studies and research for our fields of practice are important parts of our fundaments.

“This study aims to understand the interactions of perception, effort, emotion, time and performance during the performance of multiple information tasks using Web information technologies. (…) The results of this study can be employed as a theoretical foundation for designing human-friendly, adaptive user interfaces, which function as intelligent and affective central mechanisms and help users prioritise, monitor and coordinate their needs/tasks/goals effectively and efficiently. This study introduces the emotional factor, which is a newly emerging dimension, in dynamic information seeking and retrieval contexts and enlightens the existing areas of human information interaction.”

(Minsoo Park ~ Information Research 18.1)

How the web designs information

Great insight into paper versus digital, online, Web, ‘what-have-you’. Now filter design included.

“On paper, information design is monolithic and paternalistic. It is all about static structures page layouts, indexes, tables of contents all specified by a supervising author. On the Web, information design is distributed and democratic. It is all about filters, about designing filters that work for you, and about designing content to work with the filters. (…) Content needs to be designed for the Web. The filters need to be designed for the content.”

(Mark Baker ~ Every Page Is One)

Web science: A new frontier

Scientists getting their heads around the largest information machine mankind ever made.

“During the past 20 years, humans have built the largest information fabric in history. The World Wide Web has been transformational. People shop, date, trade and communicate with one another using it. Although most people are not formally trained in its use, yet it has assumed a central role in their lives. Scientists and researchers cannot imagine their work without it. Governments interface to their citizens using it. Media are seeing the nature of their industry change because of it. Travel, leisure, health, banking, any sector one can think of are changed by what we have created. The Web is now ubiquitous, and like all things that become commonplace, we take it for granted. This is true for the great majority of users. Until recently, it was true for researchers too. Over the past few years, there has been a growing recognition that the ecosystem that is the Web needs to be treated as an important and coherent area of study—this is Web science.”

(Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler and William H. Dutton ~ Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society)

What does a user-centered design process look like?

Reading the high-level phases, thought it was rather circular, iterative and incremental than linear.”

“What really differentiates user-centered design from a more traditional waterfall model of software design is the user feedback loop, which informs each phase of the project. This feedback loop is established through the use of a range of techniques that have become the staple for UX Designers. There are a ton of them, and knowing when to use which techniques during which phase of a project comes with experience. Personally, I find experimenting with new techniques and tweaking old favorites is part of the fun of being a UX Designer.”

(Matthew Magain a.k.a. @mattymcg ~ UX mastery)

Content strategy: Separating content from information

A kind of new style DIKW and DTDT thinking with “(…) describes what content really is.”

“Content is a piece of information we want to share with our audience. We create content by turning a piece of information into a type that our audience is familiar with. Then we distribute that content on the channels where we think our target audiences spend their time.”

(Ahava Leibtag a.k.a. @ahaval)

Reading on the web: Implications for online information design

Reading, still one of the most important activities on the Web.

“This presentation will sketch our evolving conceptions of reading on the Web. It examines the empirical literature about reading online with a focus on how reading has changed between 1980 and 2010. To support this analysis, I profile some typical purposes for reading online and suggest what these purposes imply for designing content and for supporting the human relationships that we intend to enable. I also point to research about how effective writing and visual design can help people understand, remember, and appreciate online content while creating human relationships and enabling actions.”

(Karen Shriver a.k.a. @firstwren)

Typography and information design: Reflections and critiques (.pdf)

Typography as the essential ingredient of design for search, find, and use information.

“A stroke, a letter, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, and a book: all essentially linear constructs of the typographic mind put into action. There is a typographic order of ‘things’, a logical sequence from the most simple, to the most complex. A line, a space, a rectangle, a margin—an aesthetic device for visuality. As an infinite list of signifiers, the above lists signify the qualitative/quantitative display of the visual properties of typography: the micro and the macro, the color and the density, the positives and the negatives, the visible and the invisibles; these are some of the typographic paradigms that yield communicative visualization.”

(Chun-wo Pat ~ Parsons Journal of Information Mapping)

The four waves of user-centered design

Always loves categorizations of our history. Surfing the waves of Information Design.

“As practitioners, we must broaden our understanding of innovation from both business and user-experience perspectives. From a business perspective, we need to empathize with the impluse to reject the investment of resources innovation requires. Innovation is embraced only when the value gained is substantially greater than the investment costs: a marginal gain is rarely adequate. Our past practices have been confined almost exclusively to our existing, primary user market. It’s time to direct some of our attention to the fringe markets where disruptive technologies take hold.”

(William Gribbons ~ UX Magazine)

Intersection: How enterprise design bridges the gap between business, technology and people

With this book, Milan Guenther achieved a comprehensive reframing of the Enterprise concept for the 21st century with Design as its primary driver. Intersection will become a beacon for many in the design, business and technology communities.

“Many organizations struggle with the dynamics and the complexity of today’s social ecosystems connecting everyone and everything, everywhere and all the time. Facing challenges at the intersection of business models, technical developments and human needs, enterprises must overcome the siloed thinking and isolated efforts of the past, and instead address relationships to people holistically. In Intersection, Milan Guenther introduces a Strategic Design approach that aligns the overarching efforts of Branding, Enterprise Architecture and Experience Design on common course to shape tomorrow’s enterprises. This book gives designers, entrepreneurs, innovators and leaders a holistic model and a comprehensive vocabulary to tackle such challenges.”

(Milan Guenther a.k.a. @eda__c)

David Weinberger keynote address at KMWorld 2012: Facilitating knowledge sharing

Knowledge sits in the relations, not in the nodes.

“Now we have a new medium and this medium is capacious beyond belief, and is linked. So what we’re seeing within this capacious medium is knowledge living at the level of the network, not in the individual nodes, not in the books, not in the minds of the individual experts, but knowledge now consists, in my view, of knowledge networks.”

(David Weinberger)

Media studies, mobile augmented reality, and interaction design

Integrating, relating, and syncing multiple important fields of practice and disciples always results into something interesting.

“McLuhan’s idea is compelling, but media aesthetics is not as simple and singular as McLuhan suggests. It is not simply that technology changes and extends our perceptual systems, because we are not passive in this process. As individuals and as a whole culture, we create new technological forms and designs that define new relationships between us and our environment. There is a feedback loop in which our view of the world changes our designs, and our use of new artifacts and designs changes how we perceive the world. If we take a historical view, we can see these feedback processes at work. Media studies can then contribute to aesthetic design, which we can define as the practice of reconfiguring the way the user perceives her environment through technology.”

(Jay Bolter, Maria Engberg, and Blair MacIntyre ~ ACM Interactions Jan/Feb 2013)

Design your life

One of my very few ‘heroes’.

“It occurs to me at this point that Richard Wurman behaves like a 77-year-old child. I do not mean this to be condescending or dismissive. It is one of the things I like most about him. He seems to have somehow maintained a portion of preoperational egocentrism and the world is richer as a result.”

(Brendan McGetrick ~ Domus) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio

Designing Life-Changing Solutions

Design of digital stuff changes everybody’s lives. Deal with it.

“The boundaries between design and psychology are progressively blurring. With designers increasingly facing high stakes challenges and more psychologists jumping off the academic pedestal to get their hands dirty with real people in real contexts, the two disciplines are more intertwined than ever before.”

(Giorgio Baresi a.k.a. @giorgiobaresi ~ design mind Frog Design) ~ courtesy of fabiosergio

Avoid Problem Solving For Better Critiques

You can also call it a critical cognitive walkthrough.

“Problem solving in a critique is also a frequent occurrence. It seems to be a common trait of people who are involved in the design, development and overall creation of things, whether they be websites, products, services, or whatever. We can’t help but try to solve problems. It’s just the way our brains work. But in the context of a critique, problem solving and jumping to solutions can be detrimental for a number of reasons.”

(Adam Connor a.k.a. @adamconnor ~ Discussing Design)

“Product designers” and design team evolution

The new ‘homo universalis’ of experience design.

“Product designers often work alone, and because they’re expected to do so many things, end up working on projects of limited scope. (I think this contributes to the problem of managing complex user experiences). My supposition is that the small team of generalists can also out-produce an equal number of team-of-one product designers. You get higher quality, because folks who have a functional emphasis (such as visual design or interaction design) can deliver better than those whose priority is developing a broader set of tools. And you get greater output, because their mastery of those areas means they can deliver more quickly. What you give up are the transaction/overhead costs of teamwork, but I don’t think those are as great as the gains.”

(Peter Merholz a.k.a. @peterme)

Philips Design: From data to meaning for people

Sounds a lot like ‘Design for Understanding’, but I guess that’s not what they mean. Or maybe they do in part 2/2.

“The internet is becoming ever more intertwined with our daily lives, even more so now that mobile platforms are blurring the dividing line between the online and physical worlds. Data now touches so many parts of our lives that our world is becoming a composite of digital and real. Data is pervasive, abundant and constantly changing how the world operates. Tapping into this wealth of Big Data has huge potential for data-enhanced businesses that are creative and capable of making data meaningful and relevant for people.”

(YouTube Part 2/2)