Design and Research “AI” is Paving the Wrong Roads
I’m not convinced the “AI” is doing much of the work. The permission to go full-feature-factory is where the gains are coming from. When the tools enable “I have a cool idea” to become “my idea is validated by research” without understanding the situational context of the user, things will dramatically speed up. The team will appear more productive.
Designing with “AI”
I want to see how they work. I want to personally explore and critique their potential value. I want to have a “library” of experiments to pull from as I encounter new obstacles. Experiments I can combine or extend from memory without needing time to figure out how to do them in the moment.
Situationally Reflective Design
Over the last few months of attempting to observe my behavior while designing things, this is what I see myself doing. It’s holding many incomplete threads as potentially useful in the future. It’s weaving them together. It’s untangling them later. It’s weaving them together again in a different way.
Systems Exhaustion and Playing Whack-A-Mole
The more I study systems literature and attempt to apply what I learn, the more I encounter people (including me, multiple times) concentrating on levels of systems that are out of their direct or indirect influence.
Too Much Structure?
It's important to demonstrate that adding too much structure can introduce whole new activities and efforts. And sometimes, that new work defeats the purpose of the original task.
The Design Way
My favorite design book — without question. The Design Way, written by Harold G. Nelson and Erik Stolterman can be summarized as dismantling problems and solutions as the primary intellectual framing of design, and software development in general.
In Pursuit of the Common Good
A short, fun book written by Paul Newman and A.E. Hotchner telling their story of starting Newman’s Own and building it into an enormous, profitable, and beloved food company while donating more than $600 million to children along the way.
My Only Design Principle
The suggestion to “make simple interfaces” can be laughed away as overly simplistic. Or, it could be an idealized standard that’s impossible to achieve. It all depends on your interpretation.
A Reflective Conversation with a Situation
Every profession is confronting a dilemma of rigor or relevance. On the “high ground” the problems are trivial. In “the swamp” below you can work on the important social and technological problems of the age, but you don’t know how to be rigorous in any way that you can name.
Is Everyone a Professional Designer?
The goal shouldn’t be to have all design decisions be made by people with the word “designer” in their title. The goal is to make sure every design choice is made with rigor. With skin in the game.
Hey, Designers! Stop Fighting for Users.
Fighting for users is a wonderful sentiment, but not what we should be doing. More accurately, we should be matching and reconciling mental models. We should be improving the ways the business and its users understand and interact with each other.
The Problem with Problems
Don’t talk about problems (or solutions). Instead, talk about progress. Only then can we be precise without dictating implementation details.
Writing a Good Objective
Working with abstract concepts doesn’t make us more strategic. It doesn’t mean we understand the big picture. It doesn’t mean we’re doing something more valuable.
Interface Design Values
When designing interfaces, we value clarity, efficiency, consistency, and beauty. Designing interfaces with these values in balance is possible. Unfortunately, it’s time and resource intensive. To get things done, we make sacrifices.
Is Asking Why Always the Best Strategy?
There’s such a thing as getting down to the root problem too quickly, particularly when it comes to product design. The value in figuring out the “Why?” behind things isn’t quite as much about the destination as it is about the journey.
Product Feedback You Can Act On
We should happily take anyone’s feedback any way they want to give it. After that, it’s our job to continue the conversation and make sure we have the right information, and enough of it, to make a good choice on what to change in our products.
Product Design Skills in Plain English
In short, I’d like to get specific about the fundamental skills involved in product design, a few brief examples of the type of work that can be done for each skill, and how they’re mapped to common product design roles.
Design is a Team Sport
Design can’t be relegated to a single role. We all care. We all want to make a better product. Unfortunately, we all too often forget the most important member of the team. The customer.
Learning to Observe
With the right background, an observer can find so much more value in their observations. But when the background of the observer is different than the intended audience, an observation can become a huge liability.
Ignorance
The ideas in Ignorance by Stuart Firestein, surprisingly, reiterate s and clarify many principles of designing and building great web products. The ideas aligned well enough that I kept thinking I was reading a startup book. Now that I think of it, it’s one of the best startup books I’ve read in a long time.
Wireframes — A Good Communication Tool, a Poor Design Tool
Wireframes have been a crucial part of just about every project I’ve worked on. I’ve spent countless hours explaining to clients the central importance of wireframes as a tool for good design. I’ve come to realize that I was wrong.
Attention Spans, A Theory
Attention spans aren’t simply on or off. There are phases that you need to move through by earning your audience’s trust.
What Does it Mean to be Simple?
Most of the time we think simple means less, that by removing stuff we achieve simplicity. A better definition of simple is “just enough for comprehension and the ability to pursue and complete our goals”.
Match the Tool to the Problem
One designer will claim that you shouldn’t do anything without sketching it out while another claims that doing anything less than full-on HTML prototypes is a waste of time.
Decoupling Usability and Visuals
Design is often seen as a subjective and creative pursuit. I tend to agree, but feel that the more subjective and detached you are from specific strategic goals, the more problems will arise.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork — and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions?