How Print Design is the Future of Interaction

“The first interfaces were built on a need to communicate what they were. They were like a desk, but better. They were completely new, so an approach of direct representation was appropriate. To understand that a word such as “ok” was a new kind of action; surrounding it with the texture and shading of a button made it clear that it should be pressed. Today however, most onscreen content is assumed to be interactive. The literal analog affordance is no longer necessary, and yet, it’s the default path that so many interactive experiences follow. [– –] ”

“[– –] In an age where our interactions are information-based rather than tool oriented, a visual communication language that is hinged on arcane artifacts is no longer relevant. The value of interfaces today is the information it wants to present, not the physical vessel that the information once resided.”

A wider context

“We have always inherited the behaviours and mental models of our time. Models born of the fashion we wear, the music we listen to, the language we speak and the technology we use. All of these influence how we think about the world and in turn, cause us to dream up things that previous generations would never have considered.
And up until now, generations were typically involved.

Portable cathedrals

“Each mobile phone handset is not a mere product, perhaps like the other products that have traditionally adorned the pages of this magazine—as a chair is, or a lighting fixture is. Instead, each handset is a play in a wider global contest, a node in logistics networks of immense scale and complexity, a platform for an ecosystem of applications, an exemplar of the internet of things, a window onto the daily interactions of billions of users, of their ever-changing personalities and cultures, a product that consumers traditionally consider the most important in their possession, after the keys to their home.”

“The phone is an intimate device, not simply through its ubiquity and connectivity, its relationship with the body. While objects have long been cultural choices and symbolic goods, the mobile phone, being the most personal connection to the internet, is a device for generating symbolic goods, a vehicle for culture, a proxy for the owner’s identities. It is vast business and cultural phenomenon, all at once. [– –]”

“Apple’s devices are a triumph of reduction, with their industrial design philosophy driven by the desire to disappear the device, perhaps following Naota Fukasawa’s notion of “design dissolving in behaviour.” [– –]”

Brand Early, Not Often

“One of our clients, Behance, is an online platform that showcases and helps users discover new creative works; it’s also a wonderful example of a design-driven startup that has seen incredible success. Although the majority of their products exist online, they have never let technology purely lead the way–the design team plays a major role in every decision. [– –] ”

“[– –] You get one chance (if you are lucky) to make an impression with consumers, to stick in their minds. Yes, you should constantly be improving on your offering, but if you don’t establish a loyal audience from the start, no one will be there to see (and talk about) these changes. And the most surefire way to build loyalty is through a strong brand that connects with people, especially if you are still testing
and adjusting features.”

Boston Globe’s Responsive Redesign. Discuss.

“As the first responsive redesign of a “real” website (i.e. a large, corporately financed, widely read newspaper site rather than some designer’s blog), the site has the potential to raise public awareness of this flexible, standards-based, multi-platform and user-focused web design approach, and deepen perceptions of its legitimacy, much as Mike Davidson’s standards-based redesign of ESPN.com in 2003 helped convince nonbelievers to take a second look at designing with web standards: [– –] ”

Personality in Design

“I’ll let you in on a secret. I’m not a fan of the name “Human-Computer Interaction.” When I design, I work very hard to make the interface experience feel like there’s a human on the other end, not a computer. It might sound like I’m splitting hairs, but names are important. Names shape our perceptions, and cue us into the ideas that fit within a category.“

“Emotional design’s primary goal is to facilitate human-to-human communication. If we’re doing our job well, the computer recedes into the background, and personalities rise to the surface. To achieve this goal, we must consider how we interact with one another in real life. [– –]”

“We have a history of injecting personality into the things we make, in a bid to make mechanical things more human. When Johannes Gutenberg—goldsmith and father of the printing press—experimented with movable type in the mid-fifteenth century, the human hand inspired him. [– –]”

Don’t Add Features to Make Customers Happy

“If you’re just starting to grow a product, adding more features will not necessarily create more revenue. You need to focus on the core features of your product. Here is a quote from Isaac Hall Founder of Recurly.com, which had the same functionality as Dropbox, but lost because they made the mistake of adding too many features early in the game. [– –] ”

Winning Combinations: Putting Data and Design Together

“Helping people find meaning in large, complex datasets is becoming an increasingly important consideration in UX design. While the need may be clear, the steps of transforming unprocessed data into effective visualizations are not always so apparent. [– –]”

“Finding the right fit between data and visualizations can get more complex and subtle. As a consumer of infographics and other visual representations, it can be well worth asking if the image does justice to the meaning. For designers, it is important to consider how the visual may be clarifying or confusing the point. This process is called “visually encoding” the data. [– –]”

“The big opportunities for problem solving and gleaning insights from large, complex, and diverse datasets require that people with very different skills and mindsets all share in the sandbox. When Raffael Marty started looking into computer security and visualization, he found that “the visualization people don’t know about security concepts and security people didn’t know about visualization. [– –]”

Long Live the Redesign

“[– –] Great designers adjust an existing work with little disruption of the foundational design for a goal or purpose. The end result is a modification to the design that improves the user experience. Good designers, on the other hand, recreate existing work focusing on the aesthetic, with a misunderstood notion that it will always improve it. However they end up disrupting and/or damaging the user’s experience making no real impact with the effort.”

Framework for Designing for Multiple Devices

“Every device does something different. Each device is better at doing certain things, and worse at doing others. So, not all features make sense on all devices. You need to identify how the user will use the product in different contexts. Mobile users want different things from your product than desktop users. As an example, consider a website about movies currently in theatre. On the desktop, users want an immersive experience including trailers and production details. On mobile, they focus on movie listings, nearest theatres, and showtimes. We need to maximize the user experience for all devices so users believe that the application was actually designed for their devices instead of being simply stretched to fit the screen on their devices. [– –]”

“Users consume content from multiple devices throughout the day. It’s important to understand the context in which these devices are being used to craft experiences that specifically suit them. You need to provide the right content, on the
right device, at the right time.”

The Opposite of Fitts’ Law

“In the cockpit of every jet fighter is a brightly painted lever that, when pulled, fires a small rocket engine underneath the pilot’s seat, blowing the pilot, still in his seat, out of the aircraft to parachute safely to earth. Ejector seat levers can only be used once, and their consequences are significant and irreversible.

Applications must have ejector seat levers so that users can occasionally move persistent objects in the interface, or dramatically (sometimes irreversibly) alter the function or behavior of the application. The one thing that must never happen is accidental deployment of the ejector seat. [– –]”

“I can think of a half-dozen applications I regularly use where the ejector seat button is inexplicably placed right next to the cabin lights button. Let’s take a look at our old friend GMail, for example: [– –]”

New Form Techniques Proven to Save Time and Money

“Filling out forms are painful when they’re time-consuming. A form that’s efficient to fill out can save users time. But it can also save companies a lot of money. A few seconds saved on a form can end up saving companies millions of dollars a year in reduced labor costs. Form efficiency makes a huge difference when you look at how it affects thousands of people over an extended period. [– –]”

“Just how fast is using a unified text field and location automation field compared to the traditional approach of using multiple form fields? The best way to find out is to analyze the time it takes for users to complete each step in the process and compare each approach. To do this, we’ll use a hard science approach known in the field of human-computer interaction as the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM). [– –]”

A Case for Web Storytelling

“In addition to style and content (even understood in their broadened definitions), I propose that there is at least a third element in the web design mix that is getting overlooked. And I think it’s the most important element of all. I’ll call this missing element a “narrative voice.” You can have your slick style and your meaty content, but without a mature and perspicacious narrative voice, your site will still fail to engage your visitors. [– –]”

“The reason for this lack of industry focus on narrative is that we still think the web is a set of technologies. We are still primarily tech geeks. Which is why corporations still don’t trust web designers to make marketing and branding decisions, even though we should understand this medium better than anyone.”

Will Ford learn that software isn’t manufactured?

“Ford’s troubles follow a familiar pattern of older, industrial companies struggling with digital age problems. The challenges of digital technology, particularly its human-facing aspects, can’t successfully be addressed with technical skills rooted in manufacturing. What’s more, the organizational structures of the industrial era can become counterproductive when applied to the people who make digital systems”.

“Neither can those manufacturing companies dodge the problem. Digital solutions are so much cheaper and more flexible than mechanical ones that they will eventually come to dominate the entire company. Companies who can master the challenge of software’s unique nature, and particularly of how humans interact with it, will thrive. Ford is learning the opposite lesson. [– –]”

“Designing and building a better automobile cockpit is the tip of the iceberg. The biggest task facing Ford and other car companies is changing the way they think and the way they work.”

New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms

“For many of us, logging into websites is a part of our daily routine. In fact, we probably do it so often that we’ve stopped having to think about how it’s done… that is, until something goes wrong: we forget our password, our user name, the email address we signed up with, how we signed up, or even if we ever signed up at all.
These experiences are not just frustrating for us, but are bad for businesses as well.”

“How bad? User Interface Engineering’s analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested their password every day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password.”

Transmedia Design for the 3 Screens (Make That 5)

“Although it makes for a good story to claim that something new will kill the old, things rarely work out that way. As Peter Zollman once said, “with the possible exception of the town crier, a new medium has never put an old medium out of business.” Despite TV, we still have radio — and, for that matter, live theater. In the computer industry, we still have mainframes, and IBM harvests billions each year accordingly.”