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Something really important for those designing for financial institutions.
“Sites must meet users’ basic trust needs before they demand that visitors enter information or engage with them. There are 5 distinct levels of user commitment, each with their own design requirements for users to give a website what it wants from them.”
Let’s re-frame the relation between theory and practice. It’s not at all anymore about mind and hands.
“Increasingly, researchers engage with design as a means of inquiry to understand and theorize about real-world situations in a nuanced and generative manner. Doing so involves negotiating a tension between two opposing objectives. On the one hand, design is inherently concerned with addressing the problem through shaping a unique and particular solution. On the other, theorizing is increasingly desired as an outcome of a design inquiry. Or, in other words, a design inquiry needs to formulate findings that are transferable across various situations and are generative of new designs. How do design researchers negotiate the dialectic between theorizing and designing in practice?”
Naveen Bagalkot and Tomas Sokoler ~ ACM Interactions Mar/Apr 2016 ★
Content, the UX material we work with. And code of course.
“The most common mistake by organizations designing a website, app, or other digital product is breaking the number one rule of human-centered design: put content where users are most likely to look for it. Instead, mission-driven organizations, in particular, such as government agencies and nonprofits, muddle the execution of their design as they struggle to promote their message and meet the needs of stakeholders.”
Nikki Kerber a.k.a. /nrkerber | @SocialWebNerd and Rachel Weatherly a.k.a. /rdweatherly ~ UXPA Magazine ★
Architecting information as an architect.
“The design process consists in defining hypotheses of what the balance between these forces ought to be, and articulating them to two main audiences: stakeholders — the people who are commissioning the product and/or those who will be using it — and its builders. This articulation happens by means of models, which the designer creates to communicate the intended balance to these audiences. These models can take many forms: sketches, comps, prototypes, etc. Feedback from stakeholders and developers helps designers refine these models as the project progresses, and the models evolve from being abstract and ambiguous (rough sketches) to concrete (screen comps, prototypes).”
Jorge Arango a.k.a. /jarango | @jarango ★
When you start with three, more will follow.
“Designing information effectively is a wonderful and complex challenge. I feel grateful that in the past ten years I have had the opportunity of working with extraordinary teams of scientists to the end of communicating complex data. These three lessons are among the most precious lessons I have learnt along my journey.”
Angela Morelli a.k.a. /aamorelli | @angelamorelli ★
Making, the most human activity there is.
“In this article, I’ll describe the UX and digital marketing prototyping methodology and then what I understand of a particular TV show genre counterpart. I’ll explore fundamental differences in these processes and outline what television can learn from UX. From there, I’ll introduce a unique storytelling ecosystem that already naturally integrates some UX techniques and how that leads, in my humble opinion, to the best TV in the world.”
Montgomery Webster a.k.a. /mxmlln | @uxMonty ~ Boxes and Arrows ★
The Turing of cybernetics.
“A review of the contribution of Gordon Pask, the resident cybernetician on Cedric Price’s Fun Palace. He describes why in the 21st century the work of this early proponent and practitioner of cybernetics has continued to grow in pertinence for architects and designers interested in interactivity.”
Better this realization now than never.
“The biggest change in my understanding of design after joining Capital One, by far, is how I understand the importance and nature of content strategy in my design work. It just makes logical sense that when someone interacts with something you’ve designed, a lot of what they see and what colors their understanding of the experience as a whole is word-based! I honestly can’t understand how I’ve gone as long as I have without really digging into content strategy; it just seems so obvious now. This realization was made a lot easier through the similarities between how Adaptive Path thinks about design and how our director of content strategy, Steph Hay and her team think about content. They aren’t lone poets just winging it; it’s actually a very rigorous process around understanding the purpose and context of the product, and using natural language. Because of these similarities, our methodologies around generative research and non-arbitrary design decisions work together seamlessly.”
Scott Sullivan a.k.a. /scottsullivanli | @scotsullivan ~ Adaptive Path ★
Deep thinking and hard fun is rising to the synapses.
“A new era in shaping products is already upon us. Design has to respond, and products must meet the demands of this era. We must look back, to move forward.”
Sanjiv Sirpal a.k.a. /ssirpal | @SanjivSirpa ~ Mbient.com ★
HCI giants on whose shoulders we stand.
“In 1996 Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen published a thought experiment, The Anti-Mac Interface. It’s worth a read. By violating the design principles of the entrenched Mac desktop interface, G and N propose that more powerful interfaces could exceed the aging model and define the Internet desktop. It’s been almost 20 years since the Anti-Mac design principles were proposed, and almost 30 since the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines were published. Did the Anti-Mac principles supersede those of the Mac? Here I reflect on the Mac design principles of 1986, the Anti-Mac design principles of 1996, and what I observe as apparent (and cheekily named) Post-Mac design principles of 2016… er, 2015.”
Adam Baker a.k.a. @twomonthsoff ★
A lot of problems to be fixed.
“Leave the design-centric language (…) behind. Speak the language of business. The more we as designers do this, the more we drive home the message that a strategy conversation without design present is incomplete.”
Jeff Gothelf, Andy Budd, and Chris Thelwell ~ InVision blog ★
Applying a systematic modeling approach to content is half the work.
“Design is about relationships. Whether digital, print, or physical artifacts, designers manage and structure the relationship between form, material, and content. As UX designers, we manage the relationships of content, navigation, and user journeys within the confines of a user interface. Increasingly, the content we want to publish must exist across many interfaces at once and be ready for platforms and devices yet to come. We need a way of making our content ready for anything the future will bring.”
Mike Atherton a.k.a. @mikeatherton | Carrie Hane a.k.a. @carriehd ~ UXPA Magazine ★
Forgetting your content at a strategic level is a major UX sin.
“Kristina Halvorson, one of the pioneers of the content strategy movement, once wrote that content strategy is essentially content planning, or not treating content as an afterthought. Most of the time at the large corporations in which I’ve worked, working on projects first involves mapping out an experience based on business requirements and what IT can support, then garnishing that experience with piecemeal content: a product description here, a headline there; intro copy for one page, a button label for another. Done and done. The problem with that approach is that it creates a disjointed narrative that’s not really focused on dealing with real customer needs. So how do you know what your customers really need? How can you be sure your content is prioritized appropriately? How do you know how much content is too much, and how much isn’t enough? Our organization had always addressed design from a customer perspective. Now it was time to focus on how to use content strategy to enrich our content and make it more customer-centric.”
Kelly Turner a.k.a. /kelly-turner | @KellyRTurner ~ UXPA Magazine ★
Customer journey and service bliueprint, the lorem ipsum artifacts of service design.
“There are a lot of artifacts and methods out there for mapping experiences. I had a great need that none of what existed could meet, so I took from all around me and came up with something new. That’s what is great about design and the creative process. We don’t have to be stuck with what we’re given, and we don’t have to stay idle and hope that someone else will come up with something to solve our problems first.”
Erik Flowers a.k.a. /erikflowers | @erik_flowers ~ Practical Service Design
The force of the numbers gets stronger and stronger.
“So where did things go wrong? Or more importantly, how can we get them right? Surprisingly, the answer does not lie with design. It lies with data.”
Knowledge at Wharton courtesy of @anous ★
Words and numbers as design material.
“Everything around us is designed on some level. There are decisions made about both the function and the form. This does not mean that everything is good design and that everyone should be a designer – just as every piece of content is not good content and everyone should not become a content manager or copywriter.”
Renata Barros a.k.a. /renatabarros | @rjmbarros ~ Gather Content ★
Design systems, not destinations.
“A fundamental shift is happening in the approach to designing cross-platform applications. Designers are moving away from focusing on individual styles, restricted grids and fixed components for singular platforms. Instead, we are focusing on sharing flexible design systems. These easily accessible online repositories include design principles to follow, responsive grid systems, reusable components and style guides with examples of what and what not to do.”
Andy McDonald ~ Electronic Ink ★
Language is infrastructure for sense-making and place-making. Language is a medium for making. And, as RSW once said: “Language generates structure.”
“Twenty-five years into designing and developing for the web and we still collectively suck at information architecture. We are taught to be innovative, creative, agile, and iterative, but where and when are we taught how to make complex things clear? In my opinion, the most important thing we can do to make the world a clearer place is teach people how to think critically about structure and language.”
Abby Covert a.k.a. /abbytheia | @Abby_the_IA ~ A List Apart ★
Service design discovers other established design research fields, like contextual inquiry.
“One of the first places to start when you want to improve your service is to look to your customer feedback and data. But what do you do when no one in the room understands how people are using your service, and the data you have is limited to high-level usage analytics? This is the perfect time to introduce ethnographic research into the mix to better understand how your service is perceived, used, and experienced. (…) In this post, I wanted to share my process for running this research—how I went from one step to the next, what tools I used and why, and the realities of what the day-to-day looks like running a research project of this kind—in the hopes that it might be helpful for those considering running similar research.”
Megan Erin Miller a.k.a. /meganerinmiller | @meganerinmiller ~ Practical Service Design ★
Some really deep and historical thinking on design and systems.
“Beginning in the decade before World War II and accelerating through the war and after, scientists designed increasingly sophisticated mechanical and electrical systems that acted as if they had a purpose. This work intersected other work on cognition in animals as well as early work on computing. What emerged was a new way of looking at systems – not just mechanical and electrical systems, but also biological and social systems: a unifying theory of systems and their relation to their environment. This turn toward ‘whole systems’ and ‘systems thinking’ became known as cybernetics. Cybernetics frames the world in terms of systems and their goals. This approach led to unexpected outcomes.”
Hugh Dubberly a.k.a. /hughdubberly ~ Dubberly Design Office ★
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