Design News
Milk Jug Redesign Doesn’t Realign, Draws User Ire
I congratulate the PR ability to take a one dimensional concern for cost saving internally, then spin it as an ecofriendly and consumer win. Headlines like Solution, or mess? explain the user reactions to actually using this milk jug design. Part of it is simple user habituation. Unfortunately you quickly find it’s only the smallest part when you look at the award winning milk jug redesigns or eco friendly inspirations which are not single–minded cost cutting moves.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with Walmart and Costco cutting costs. However the myopic inward focus of some design projects leads one to wonder what could have happened with less introspection (and PR) and more design thinking and user focus. Would that Walmart took inspiration from EPA Cradle-to-Cradle Design Challenge Winners (PDF). Redesigning to reduce costs can be a win for everybody, if you try.
Putting those Annoying Stickers on Fruit to Use: Realigning Packaging Design
While the stickers put on fruit have meaning within the industry, they’re annoying to users. A fruit ripeness indicator sticker turns that annoyance into a user interface. Packaging for meat can have a barcode detection system which senses spoilage, crossing out the barcode so it won’t scan at checkout. With the recent contamination outbreak in tomatoes making news, packaging designers need to focus less on packaging as pretty and more on packaging as interface. Technology and design (aside from PhotoShop) have been estranged for far too long.
One of the Few UX Tutorials Out There
Are there any elements of modern Web design that drive you crazy?
Irene Au, the Director of User Experience for Google, "Gratuitous use of Flash and Ajax. The experiences of the web today are so much more rich and interactive, and when people are developing websites sometimes the technology can interfere with the user's experience and flow. And there are pitfalls like when it takes forever to load some big flash module."
— SXSW: Chatting About Google's User Experience
Three User Experience Guidelines for Ajax Sliders tutorial (unlike others) is a UX tutorial that happens to be about Ajax. It’s one of the few available tutorials which takes the focus off code to dicusss how factors of implementation make the user interaction different. Usability for Rich Internet Applications takes focus off getting code to work mechanically and onto how a website should work for users.
Confusing Developer Experience With User Experience
Ruining the User Experience explains the perils of resume driven design or designing for the Developer Experience. Buzzword compliance is not required for a good user experience, taking the single minded focus off technology is. Three elements of effective User Experience research: The WUP philosophy explains the benefits and roadblocks to moving the discussion off Developer Experience Design.
Solving for the U …and X in UX Design
User experience is more than just user interface design: it encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction.
— Nielsen Norman Group, UX definition
You just know certain terms are designed for mischief. Few equal UX Design, or the user experience. NN/g has at least a basic statement and philosophy …which is more than most.
What’s missing from a lot of UX pratice is methodology. Specifically those methods which go beyond usability. Design Crux has contextual inquiry, desirability design, and persuasive design methods, backed by such techniques as Kansei Engineering and captology. As far as the technolgist is concerned, Kansei can’t exist. Let alone be responsible for some of the most successful designs in history, like the Mazda Miata. What’s more disturbing is the vast numbers of those throwing around the term user experience who never heard of Kansei in the last thirty years the practice has been around.
Why Icon Design Shouldn’t Be Left To Graphic Artists
The Macintosh, for years, showed an icon of a trashcan of imminent danger of explosion if a single document was placed therein. Users quickly formed the habit of emptying the trashcan as soon as the first document hit. This not only turned a single-step operation into a two-step operation (drag to the trash, then empty the trash), it negated the entire power of the trashcan, namely, undo.
— AskTog, First Principles of Interaction Design
10 Mistakes in Icon Design explains designing isn’t all aesthetics and this week’s PhotoShop fad. Icons are perhaps the most fossilized, archaic part of interaction design. Exploring the Craft of Icon Design means innovative user interactions, not merely the Designer’s Experience (DX).
Why 95% of returned products work: UDRTFM
Users expect products to follow Bushnell’s Theorem: Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master. When products aren’t designed that way the consequence is 95 percent of all returned gadgets still work. An accenture study finds “68 percent of all returns work but aren't meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use.”
This is an off–the–books way for product managers and developers to jam products with features and hide the consequences of creeping featuritis. Featuritis, Tyranny and Web Applications explains the bold new frontier for Featuritis 2.0.
A Better Client Conversation
Think about it this way: would you rather have a conversation with a prospect about whether your feature list is longer than the competition's or about the benefits the prospect will derive from your product? Which of those conversations would allow you to charge more? If you're concentrating on market needs rather than competitive checklists, you have a chance at that second, more profitable conversation.
— Don’t Be Better Than The Competition
What's Good for Apple Is Better for Everyone Else explains why seeking advantage over the competition does what seeking to imitate the competition never will.
Asking the simple question of what software would people actually pay for puts you outside the closed loop of monkey–see monkey–do design.
Making a Case for Design
Design happens. The point is not to set design up to fail. It all starts by answering why design is a competitive advantage for your company.
Software Already Has a Default Personality
Adobe guru to improve Windows interface has this tidbit, “Adobe wanted to give Lightroom a deliberate personality—even if that means some feathers are ruffled. ” In contrast we have the default interface behavior, which already ruffles plenty of feathers. The design crux is you get a personality for software whether you want it or not. And too many decisions designed to keep feathers unruffled within a company instead ruffle the feathers of paying customers.
Creativity and Design Thinking for Businesspeople
Getting Down to the Business of Creativity talks about how companies foster practical business creativity. Teaching design to businesspeople explains “There's a growing literature detailing how businesspeople can build and sell better products if they think like a designer.”
Another Word Your Designer Doesn’t Know: Sparklines
Sparklines are small data graphics placed inline with text “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” Unlike the normal use of graphics as almost completely irrelevant decoration, sparklines are highly relevant data objects every bit as important as text. Accessible Data Visualization with Web Standards from A List Apart discusses adapting existing CSS techniques to render sparklines as does Generating CSS-Only Sparklines in Python.
Sparklines also require the hapless designer to learn another unfamiliar term: User Testing. Sparklines are used in content for decision making, so user testing is not an optional frill. And that user test, the user interaction with data, is the crucial element which crosses over into information design.
Why Your Car Doesn’t Have a Gas Mileage Indicator
Interesting article about the marketing veto on gas mileage display on every dashboard. This combined with the concept car doing nothing but being a padded room for designer goofyness which will never see a production run, and you have a recipe for disaster. Where is the concept car with on–dashboard feedback which informs the user of driving and system factors which can improve mileage by 30%? Something like the Toyota eco display light doesn’t just display the end result gas mileage, it provides feedback on those factors the driver can change to improve gas mileage like the Dashboard Miser does. What better way to counter the market perception Detroit is focussed on gas guzzlers.
Open Letter: Blackboard.com Linkers
If your courses are linking this site as a reference, why not write a short note telling me details about your course and how you use Design Crux in teaching about design. Perhaps provide a resource link I can use to link to your course in exchange. (Outside the walled garden of academe).
Affective Computing
Feelix, a robot which can express emotions in response to human interaction, is one application of affective computing. Trivial, but a leap ahead of emotionally oblivious computing. Better Desirability Design: An angry email catcher which gives you a nudge before the angry language gets sent.
Informative Feedback Curbs Energy Use
Studies show providing feeback is crucial for curbing energy use. Users simply can’t understand energy use without context. A Power Cost Controller power strip does provide that crucial feedback, allowing users to change their behavior.
A Social Network Radio
Olinda is something new in the form of a pocket radio. Modular, with social network fuctionality, it has interesting design goals, “Physical things make people think differently and can help them better understand new concepts.”
Olinda is genuinely interesting design, which is what can happen when you don’t neglect the design brief. Creating a design brief can be as simple as answering a few key questions to insure you and the designer are on the same page.
New Article on Branding Through Design
Most companies slap a logo into a hole in a layout or product and call that branding. It is rather a too literal application of the cow branding metaphor applied to branding than one would hope. Consequently what the graphic designer (or worse yet, a creative) does goes on in one silo, marketing goes on in another disconnected silo, and never the twain shall meet in the place where branding matters: the mind of the customer. So I’ve done a series of graphic panels — high bandwidth — as an online presentation you can find here. If you like this presentation, let me know and I’ll do more.
A designer can take graphic dictation, or become a strategic partner to ensure the CMO needn’t pursue any other interests than making the cash register ring. The cow branding idea of slapping in a logo breaks down in the twenty-first century where scientists develop test tube cultured designer meat.
Perhaps Information Technology Does Exist — Meet SuperMemo
It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge - introspection, intuition, and conscious thought - but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.
— Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
A fairly modest goal for information designers is to minimize cognitive load and leveraging intellectual assets. SuperMemo does just that.
System Dynamics
Whole system thinking is crucial for information work. The presentation An Introduction to System Dynamics explains why the level of thinking producing problems isn’t sufficient to solve the problem.
New Article: 3D Style and Architectural Views
…I looked at all the fancy architecture magazines. None had any pictures of people inside buildings. The buildings were all devoid of people. And most still are. We put people inside the spaces they inhabit. We inserted people into the conversation of their lives. Now, smart architects engage the masses in their designs. They hire firms who do social geography, showing how people really interact in organizations, not what their titles suggest. Informed with this information, they design spaces.
— Are Designers The Enemy Of Design? by Bruce Nussbaum
You’ll find a new article added on 3D design and architectural illustrations.
Human nature is an inconvenient fact foiling many an otherwise perfect design. I used to have a lot of meetings in a building designed by a hugely famous architect. The building’s metal skin sucked up wireless signal like a sponge. The purpose of the building: Business School. I guess real business people don’t need to get a signal.
You can’t fully appreciate the pristine beauty of human–free architectural views until you watch people delay a business meeting while on a reception ‘bar hunt.’
Strangely enough I never see the problems I saw in real life depicted in architectural illustrations. It’s an instructive design exercise to see people trapped in a vestibule due to design. (In design, indicating how a door opens is called an affordance). Right now, you may have the misadventure in technology dubbed destination based elevator technology.
CIOs use Artificial Ignorance Technology
CIOs should start embracing ignorance on the front end of the technology life cycle. That is, how and when technology enters the organization. The request for proposals process that prevails in most organizations is too stupid. Technology organizations deny their ignorance, saying that the bunch of lists they send to ethically constrained but word–processor–powered vendors constitutes a legitimate problem statement.
If you really know what the problem is, put it on your Web site — along with how much money and time you are willing to spend to solve it. Then let the solution providers bid for the right to solve it under the fiscal and temporal terms you have dictated.
— All hail the chief ignorance officer By Thornton May
An intriguing little post on log scanning via artificial ignorance brings out a point in stark relief. Most companies with IT departments have no actual Information Technology. Zero. Information processing is offloaded to humans, and then painstakingly uploaded manually by computer users …where the technology takes the credit. That’s data processing, not information work. Information happens, but it happens in spite of technology. Consequently, information is still scarce, only now meaningfully actionable information hides in a thicket of hyper structured data sets instead of a desert.
Your first information worker should be the CIO, which does not stand for CIO/CTO, the first bit “nescience” to manage.
Non Disclosure and The Myth of The Big Idea
I’ve signed a lot of non disclosure agreements (NDA). Fully 80% of the time, you’re not missing out on anything — what you can read about freely available here is more interesting. In practice, most people don’t seem as concerned about their big idea getting out as not allowing any information in. Especially anything which would end their love affair with the one big idea.
The myth of the one big business idea is just that: Myth. Too often people want to fall in love with their belief in the potential of a specific, singular big idea. Don’t look for just one big idea. The better probability for success is often three or more fair ideas. One fair idea each in the areas of business, technology and design for example. Each idea polished and integrated so it feeds into and multiplies the effectiveness of the others. Try for an ecosystem of ideas.
Ten ideas about Ideas gives a very thoughtful perspective on secrecy versus disclosure, ideas versus execution. Don’t use the NDA to shield your precious, untested and unproven idea from the incovenient information it requires to become viable, feasible and desirable.
Text As Interface
We don’t understand how to make Web content both usable and persuasive. I, by no means, intend to imply that we should sacrifice the usability of content to make it more persuasive. Truly winning content must be both.
— Turn Usable Content into Winning Content
A List Apart has a singular tagline, “for people who make web sites.” That’s why it comes as a surprise when you find out ALA has an entire section dedicated to writing. Perhaps not so surprising when you read text is interface and web designers should learn to write. Nor should it be much of a surprise well written content does more for branding than some of the stock photography being used.
To that end, I have a PDF Design Crux Special Report on Positioning and Copwriting for you to download. Your Homework: If you download it, give me some thoughtful feedback on how what you read applies to your business.
What Game Design Can Teach
11 innovation lessons from creators of World of Warcraft is probably familiar to the young inventor of Elemento, a card game aimed at kids and based on chemistry. Using a game interface for a variety of system adiministration tasks harnesses what employees are doing on break to accomplish work.
The Design Crux: End the tyranny of multitasking and embracing the genius of task fusion: Simultasking.
A Branding Test Most Designers Continually Fail
Ask yourself, or your designer, what’s wrong with this picture. An absolutely gorgeous layout design done in the grunge style, blood red on black. You could put this in front of ten, perhaps twenty designers and not get a hint of anything wrong. Now, add the client business: An orthodontic surgery center.
Blood red, spattered upon the page is not really something a potential surgery patient wants to be reminded of. Grunge, symbolizing unsanitary conditions, is the wrong symbolism. Until I pointed it out in my design intervention, the designer didn’t see the problem. (And this is hardly the exception which points out how great designers are with branding.)
And that is the problem. Designers use the word branding all the time. Most simply have zero brand literacy, of looking at a design like the object of branding efforts would. Yes, there is a recognition of this week’s PhotoShop fad. Yet there is almost no recognition brands don’t happen in graphics programs or board rooms, brand meaning happens in the mind of the customer. Too many designers know the word branding, when they need to add terms like positioning, brand dissonance, as well as the difference between brand awareness and brand preference. Until designers can pass the brand test, they’ll continue using the words, and producing atrocious design decisions.
The Future Tense: What separates infographics from data graphics
The predictive power of data lies in the idea patterns repeat. The infographic What If shows some important variables of where a life could have gone. Click on an icon to read how a possible future unfolded. The descriptive power of data is useful for prediction, as long as current patterns or trends continue. A turbulent present and uncertain potential furture which will result from decisions today require the “what if” information provides.
Art of ’Ware — Now Online
One of the classics of software, an adaptation of Sun Tzu for software development, The Art of ’Ware is now online. (scroll down to see the chapter headings) And Bruce Webster is developing an updated 2.0 version.
Nobody should be allowed near software development without this book. Get it. (Since it costs nothing, I’m not getting a cut of the zero).