Author: Julie MeridianPage 2 of 4
Julie Meridian is the experience design consultant behind Make It Legit, where she helps companies hone their strategy, interaction, and visual design. Prior to that she designed for LinkedIn (member growth, Recruiter, Groups) and led design of the Adobe Creative Suite, Photoshop, and Illustrator. When away from the screen, she pursues fine art and illustration.
One of the best qualities of working with a team is diversity, and that comes through in working styles, too. This can cause friction when different styles of critique – or reactions to stress – clash.
Leaving old experiences alone is simply not a neutral choice. Old UI incurs a cost: it decays over time, and as long as it exists, it will come back to bite you. How do you deal with the zombies in your UI?
We’re all time-constrained at work. In this kind of regiment we each track our own time and goals, and can feel the pressure to keep moving. Sometimes the best thing to do is to pause, and let others take the conversation forward.
Beyond the skill, strategy, and chance, games shape your thinking. These are a few games I’ve come across that pose challenges that correlate, in some small measure, to the types of problem-solving I do every day.
A popular concept in understanding your product experience is “eating your own dogfood” (or “drinking your own champagne,” or any number of other food-or-drink metaphors). But are you really using it the way your users will?
The objects we can grasp in the real world can become a reference point for describing a number of things: a comparison, a structure, a volume, an interaction. Does that world ring true for your users?
Design is a relay race where the work you do now can affect your product after you have moved on. How are you planning on handing off that baton to the next designer?
Personas are stand-ins for real people – abstractions that can be as specific or general as you need them to be. That kind of abstraction may seem unnecessary, but I’ve have come to realize that they are extremely useful for a particular type of project.
Without a shared understanding of the goals and priorities, you may optimize towards the solutions that are easiest to measure. You may, in effect, game your own system.
How do you learn about the people you’re designing for? You may be overlooking teams that are just as invested as you are in understanding your users–those who sell and train users about your product.