Before attending the IDC'14 conference I had not thought of personalization from the perspective of enabling persons who use an artefact to explore the artefact. I had only thought of personalization as based on algorithms or settings. The new perspective feels very valuable.
Category: process
Those that I am passionate about
The list is a reminder of the very broad range of persons, systems and organizations that I must empathize with and cater to when designing. "Users", editors, developers, graphic designers, guidelines, CMS:s, future system owners...
Lessons for digital products
Part 6 of 7 in the series Bathroom User Experiences.
Use the human ability to see connections between separate parts of a system. Build products that help us improve the world a bit. Build accessible artefacts. Make the important system states obvious. If your interface needs instructions, you have failed.
Don’t know what a triangle looks like? Play CamQuest!
Game-apps for preschoolers can skip storylines and big goals and can benefit from enabling two kids to play together. These where two of my take aways from a paper presentation about the app CamQuest.
Web development in 4 simple steps (kinda’)
All web sites have a purpose and goals. Based on those, an Interaction design (IxD) can be created to specify how the site should work. Graphical design build on the IxD to define how the site feel and look. Implementation then actually make it work.
Am I reeeally needed, and if so, how much?
Which design tasks need Interaction Design knowledge to be properly solved? Do you have any?
Prototypes of Design Patterns
I am reading Todd Zaki Warfels excellent book about prototyping and realized early on that I need to use prototypes as a compliment to functional diagrams for documenting design patterns in the misfits method. In interactive applications, the full solution should often be a prototype.
The misfits method might create innovative patterns, but that’s not important
Language divides reality and can never present the whole, real X (with X being any man-made or natural object or system). Language also categorize and, together with culture, formalize the categories, thus making it difficult to discovery new ways of categorizing the world. "Whether the pattern is new or 'old' does not matter as long as the pattern is a good fit."
Misfits are my new best friends
I have recently finished C. Alexander's seminal book "Thoughts on the synthesis of form" in which he outlines the base of what was to later become "design patterns". Modularizing design.
All points in a flow where not created equal
One thing that many vocabularies lack is a way to specify that some parts of a flow are more important then other parts. We need to focus our design efforts on the parts that add most value and we therefore need to be able to communicate the relative importance of different flows and even of different points in each flow. The careful addition of color to flow charts to depict importance can enhance the communicative ability of the chart.
Thoughts on IxD process
Each project has it's own characteristics and goals, but with these five activities I can help my clients obsess over customers and create products and services that both delight and help customers reach their goals. Epic and lean.