I’m featured in Francisco Inchauste’s article in Smashing Magazine. Part 2 features an interview too. I blush to be in such fine company.
Using storytelling, however, we can pull these fragments together into a common thread. We can connect as real people, not just computers. In this article we’ll explore how user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections.
Nice post from Ignore the Code about Realism in UI Design.
…Graphical user interfaces are typically full of symbols. Most graphical elements you see on your screen are meant to stand for ideas or concepts. The little house on your desktop isn’t a little house, it’s «home». The eye isn’t an actual eye, it means «look at the selected element»…
They also use an example from Scott McCloud – who is an inspiration to a storyteller like me.
Great list of “short learnings” about interaction design, although I’d say it pertains to way more than that.
Some of my favs are:
Margret Schmidt from Tivo discusses how designers can flourish by taking responsibility for their work while understanding that they are not their designs.
Some highlights:
Designers do not “own” the design
Feedback is not personal
Share early and often
This is NOT design by committee
Build your design gut
Celebrate the design that ships
UX Booth has a nice article about dealing with user error, and they use an eBay clip as a good example. Props to Carrie Buckingham and Mark Lapole who designed the icon and treatment (and who are part of my awesome team.)
Great article from Forbes.com author Nilofer Merchant about how sometimes you have to get rid of your precious ideas. Resonates with me because I just had to let go of a particular design direction that I thought was sparse and beautiful, but just wasn’t a big enough change.
Just got back from a road trip with Todd to Yosemite, Mono Lake and Tahoe. Wow. Days and days of real beauty – it truly is healing. We hiked and drew and took many many photos (with my new iphone.) I am refreshed.
Check out the pics on flickr.
I’ve written a long post over on open salon about my Bat Mitzvah – which was many many years ago today. Lots of silly pics of my family…
Some friends have dared me to participate in the infinite summer readathon, and I’ve just downloaded the book to my kindle. Check out the site – lots of interesting facts and advice on how to get through this amazing work.
Join endurance bibliophiles from around the world in reading Infinite Jest over the summer of 2009, June 21st to September 22nd. A thousand pages1 ÷ 92 days = 75 pages a week. No sweat.
1. Plus endnotesa.
a. A lot of them.
Looking at the calendar I’ve got to get to page 63 by friday – already I am behind!
Just had a really great conversation with my team about innovation, mental models, navigation and visual hierarchy. What helped spark all this great thinking? An interactive prototype showing three slightly different versions of an idea. The designer worked with a prototyper – it took about a week to turn around, because as it was coded she began to codify the design and work through the interactions. The team topped it all off with an interesting design review where we openly discussed the various model’s successes and failures, what we might change/add, and how we might use the prototypes to sell our idea.
Now this may not seem out of the ordinary for many of you, but our development model here has been not to waste effort, and that means prototype using reusable code. For me, that just defeats the purpose, but changing how things are done is not an easy feat. I am working to sell the idea of prototyping at all levels – from designers and dev to PMs and biz folks. But its slow.
In the past, I’ve been all about prototyping – from quick and dirty paper sketches to throw-away html. Or full-color mocks linked to mimic an interactive experience. Depending on what we were trying to learn of course. We are designing interactive experiences – we need to think about those interactions, and only using mocks/wireframes doesn’t always cut it. We have to think about the entire experience.
