Category: Design
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The Power of Small Multiples
The graphic novel Persepolis, in addition to being a gripping emotional story and the only comic book to ever bring me to tears, is a masterpiece of comic art and a testimony to what you can accomplish through repetition of basic forms. What Persepolis writer/artist Marjane Satrapi can accomplish with a few simple pen strokes…
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UX Origins: How childhood experiences shape design choices
Someone recently pointed me to an interesting book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, by Toby Israel. The book’s thesis is that a designers’ childhood environment profoundly affects their professional and adult design choices. The environments and objects children see and touch in their formative years will, according to Israel,…
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Random Acts of Design Kindness
Have you ever thought of design as an opportunity to be kind to someone? User experience designer Jeff Howard wonders if service design (a way of thinking about design in which the user experience has many “touchpoints” across many channels and contexts) isn’t ultimately a frustrating and Sisyphean task, where customers and users are always…
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There is no “Design with a capital D”.
There are two ways of writing nouns in the English language: you capitalize proper nouns and you don’t capitalize common nouns. There is an unfortunate tendency, however, for people to think that you can elevate the importance and even the definition of any old common noun simply by capitalizing it. To me, this is the…
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Apple in Stereo
Apple is famous for their minimalist aesthetic, and infamous for occasionally taking the aesthetic too far and sacrificing usability. There’s the famous round mouse for the original iMac. There’s the symmetrical third-generation iPod remote control whose identical volume and previous/next buttons are impossible to distinguish. While not as egregious as the previous examples, Apple’s iPod…
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See. Feel.
Touch Sight, a fascinating “camera” for blind people. For my entire design career, my colleagues and I have wrestled with the terminology we use to segment and focus our work, both in our careers and in our critiques. Whether it’s the “information architecture vs. interaction design” debate or the “visual design vs. graphic design” debate,…
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Experience Design User
A week ago, Jesse James Garret veritably bellowed the words “user experience designer” in his plenary address at this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, attempting to create some common ground between the information architects and interaction designers in the room and across the industry. In a strong and deeply-felt speech, he admonished the community (-ies?)…
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Are We Designing Interactions or Designing Software?
One of the problems faced by designers trying to integrate their work with most software development processes, even (or possibly especially) with Agile development, is that the literature makes no distinction between software development and software design, or at least no distinction that makes any sense to dedicated user experience designers. The common complaint among…