Back in the day, there was a partner who would send me PowerPoint presentations and ask me to add some "sizzle." He knew I'd been to design school and had worked with me on a number of web development projects, so he figured I could add some lipstick to content we were going to share with clients. The problem was that in many cases, the flaws with the decks were structural and … [Read more...]
The Immovable User Meets Irresistible Design
There's a nice article over at all tech considered about the symbiotic relationship between Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive. Ive has designed Apple products since the fruit colored iMacs, and Steve Jobs is, well... Steve Jobs. The article describes the intimate working relationship between Jobs an Ive since The Steve returned to Apple in 1992. The big takeaway from the … [Read more...]
Prioritizing Preferece: The Challenge of Managing Design
Managing any initiative is a complex affair - juggling timelines, milestones, and dependencies; managing risks and mitigating factors. The management of design processes gets geometrically more complex when you add the wildcard of personal preference to decision points. Many non-designers are incapable of articulating their reasons for preference-based choices in a way that … [Read more...]
Our Objects Are Listening
In the last post, I mentioned that our objects are listening to us. Much of this is done in the name of providing a better experience - if an object can adjust to the way in which you interact with it, it should be able to anticipate some of your future requirements or actions. In doing so, these objects gather quite a bit of data about us. Objects are gathering data about … [Read more...]
Design Traceability
Kids are notorious for asking "Why?" Each answer you provide leads to another "why." Each exchange leads closer to some central truth. With kids, that central truth usually ends up being, "Because I said so!" To designers, business stakeholders are also notorious. Not so much for asking why as they are for saying, "I think that should be blue," or, "This site needs more... … [Read more...]
Design Science
My grandfather told me a story (perhaps apocryphal) of a final exam he took in a college Philosophy class. As he told it, the professor walked in, grabbed the chalk, and wrote "WHY?" in big letters on the board. He then sat down without saying a word and began waiting for the students to turn in their essays. Around the auditorium, students began scribbling long treatises on … [Read more...]
Following Function
Smashing Magazine has a good article written by Steven Bradley examining web design through the Bauhaus lens of "form follows function." He first gives a pretty good summary of the history of Bauhaus and the evolution of its principles, then turns his attention to interpreting the validity of form following function. Unfortunately, he takes his analysis to logical extremes … [Read more...]
Are top-tier firms worth the price?
As I mentioned in the previous post, the client was planning on engaging a top-tier firm to perform the heuristic evaluation. The quote they got gave them a bit of sticker-shock. Even to me (a salty vet), 30K seems steep for a heuristic review - especially when you consider they weren't providing any design on the tail end of the review.My take on this was that heuristic … [Read more...]
They may say they value usability
I had the opportunity to provide some usability counsel to a client of the firm today. The client is implementing a multi-million dollar platform to provide commercial line insurance quoting functionality to their independent agents. I was contacted by the project team because the client had expressed an interest in utilizing user-centered design for this effort.As part of … [Read more...]
Vista: Throbbers, and Progress Bars
I installed Vista on my home-built PC about three weeks ago to stream HD video to my Xbox 360 and to generally kick the tires a bit. There's a lot to be said about the usability of Vista (both good and bad), and I'll detail that over time. This post is to address something that annoyed me during the installation process.After gathering information about my machine and … [Read more...]