Category: Design

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Design

UXKitteh

I like memes. I like kittehs. I like good UX. You see?   Iz my life. really. Iz […]

Design

Grading the Damn Thing

Recently I’ve been working with General Assembly to create a new immersive user experience design class: five days […]

Design

Farming and Knitting

I don’t get Farmville either.  Like you, I tried it out and found it painfully boring. I liked […]

Design

Find Your North Star

I don’t think there is one of us today that doesn’t know of the north star, and that […]

Design

Design as Mangement

What gets measured, gets managed. –Peter Drucker   Companies that identify, measure and manage key customer behaviors are […]

Design

A Mission for Design

I was invited to say a few off-the-cuff words at a design offsite for a Well Established Company […]

Design

Designers Don’t Ask

This is the original article that became “Design Can’t be an Afterthought” on Women 2.0. I’ve left the original title, […]

Design

Words on Wireframes

Design is a Job should be required reading for anyone making a living doing Design. I will write […]

Design

Tiny Process for Writing

First Draft: say everything quickly. race to the end! Second Draft: replace pronouns with nouns, explain vagaries. Third […]

Design

Working the Canvas, Reworking our Process

When I was in art school, one of the most important ideas I learned was called “working the canvas.” It meant never spending too much time on one area, but continually moving from one part to the next, so you are slowly building up a complete picture. You can see it in the movie below taken from the nifty ipad app Brushes, that lets you make a film of your painting creation process.


Continue reading Working the Canvas, Reworking our Process
Design

Conflating Sturgeon’s Law

“I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science […]

Design

How to Design

Design like Thomas Keller cooks: “Cooking is not about convenience, and it’s not about shortcuts. Take your time. […]

Design

Compassionate Design

Designers have all had the mantra of user-centeredness beaten into them. But how many apply that same understanding […]

Design

Consistency is a Tactic

Often, when critiquing a design, I ask how a designer came to make a certain decisions. Too often […]

Design, Words

Why You Should Speak

At conferences and meet-ups, I spend a lot of time with young practitioners. And every time I chat […]

Design

Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here

One of the most flumoxing issues I encounter when reviewing design work is misplaced interface objects.

When you craft a sentence, you’d never think to write something like “Fluorescent, she picked a red.” Somewhere or another you learned that  — unless the lady in question was glowing faintly —  “fluorescent” should be placed next to “red” to modify it.

Yet over and over I’ll see a design where a filter or an undo button is off in a corner, far from the thing it is supposed to filtering or undoing. I’ll hear a designer say, “well users can be trained.”

But think about that sentence again… you were able to guess the red was fluorescent, but it stopped you in your tracks, didn’t it? Design’s job is to disappear into the pleasure of use.

Next time you review a design, consider treating interface objects as if they were verbs (or adverbs) and figure out what word they affect. Then read your sentence out loud and see if it makes sense!

Continue reading Lolly, Lolly, Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here
Design

The Shuffle is a Robot

When we think of robots, we usually envision something with wheels for feet, and arms spinning like the Lost and Space guy […]