Category: Design By Doing
Both the arts of technique and thinking more critically about what you are communicating.
Once you’ve got the functionality you need, there’s plenty that can be done to simplify an interface by stripping it down one piece at a time.
Choosing the right photos, especially those photos that are meant represent your users themselves, can be powerful tools in a user-centered approach to design. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the questions they raise.
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?
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?
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.
You’ve thought about the happy path your users will take — time to anticipate how it could break so you can build in some safeguards. Time to put on your infosec hat.
No matter how well-arranged your interface is or how simple your flows are, the imagery you use in your designs will have a disproportionately large influence on how it will be received. Beautiful imagery, when done right, can be a powerful force for progress.
Designing for a product that’s been around means working within expectations. How do you (gently) break someone free from a timeworn path to discover a new one? Use a few cues from magic to shake things up.
I can’t stand seeing designers hit walls. The nature of designing is creating a reality from the kernel of an idea…but a vision isn’t enough. This is my attempt to explain the techniques that I have seen work.