Vice President of Newfangled.com, Writer for PRINT and F+W Media, blogger, infrequent designer, reader, science fiction enthusiast...

October 7th 2009

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This image comes from a pretty fascinating post from Information Architects, who participated in a paid pitch to redesign the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They lost the pitch, but evaluate the pros and cons of their approach in a thorough and truly humble way in this post.

They had some interesting ideas coming from the perspective of online user interface design, most of which I think would be wonderful to see put into practice. In particular, their idea of using blue text to highlight keywords within the text and both make the articles more scannable and “linked” to the Tages-Anzeiger website was wonderful. Here’s their description:

What’s that blue stuff? The idea is making the pages more scannable by using key words in blue. If you speak German you can actually read the front page in 20 seconds by flying over the blue key words. The idea is that if you type any of those key words on the website search, you will get a lit of articles in a chronological order about that subject. Links in print obviously doesn’t mean that you can click it, it means linking the paper to the online edition.

Posted at 2:36pm and tagged with: design, user-interface-design, infographic,.

This image comes from a pretty fascinating post from Information Architects, who participated in a paid pitch to redesign the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They lost the pitch, but evaluate the pros and cons of their approach in a thorough and truly humble way in this post. They had some interesting ideas coming from the perspective of online user interface design, most of which I think would be wonderful to see put into practice. In particular, their idea of using blue text to highlight keywords within the text and both make the articles more scannable and “linked” to the Tages-Anzeiger website was wonderful. Here’s their description: What’s that blue stuff? The idea is making the pages more scannable by using key words in blue. If you speak German you can actually read the front page in 20 seconds by flying over the blue key words. The idea is that if you type any of those key words on the website search, you will get a lit of articles in a chronological order about that subject. Links in print obviously doesn’t mean that you can click it, it means linking the paper to the online edition.

October 7th 2009

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Cindy Chastain, in Experiencing Themes for Boxes and Arrows. A good article for sure. Here was my comment:

You had my interest immediately when I realized that you were both a designer and screenwriter (I got my BFA in film/video at RISD, but now work in web development). I completely get the idea of making the “story” the unifying element that brings together each individual discipline represented in the development process.

We’ve been exploring the concept of personas, who, as characters in the overall “story,” represent the goals of a site as well as the challenges of succeeding at those goals. By creating specific personas for each project, we can anticipate some of the barriers to communication, as well as identify new ways to articulate messages through copy and design that are most appropriate to the end user.

I’m with @Giles- there is much to enjoy in your article. I’m going to have our Project Management team read this as part of our professional enrichment program.

Posted at 11:04am and tagged with: quote, prototyping, design, user-interface-design,.

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In the case of user-centered design, we do well at coming up with the right technology and features that perform in a way that meets the needs or behaviors we observe in our users. But we often neglect to consider the story that’s told through the interactions people have with the things we make. For this story to be apparent to people, let alone meaningful, those involved with the design of a product should have a shared sense of the kind of experience they are trying to create. In the domain of digital products the story comes from asking the big questions: What’s the product or service about? What will it do for the customer? Where does it fit into their lives? In what ways might we create an emotional response the customer can walk away with?

How does a good story get built? With a theme, of course. Writers and filmmakers have been using themes to build stories for a very long time. They’re also not shy about designing explicitly for emotion and meaning. So why not designers? For us, a definition of the core value of experience can function as the theme that helps teams collectively build a more meaningful product. It’s the thing that can serve as a coordinating force behind the design. When the tangible elements of a product are all working together for the same purpose the product has a stronger story to tell. The theme is merely the thing that helps us deliver that story in the form of an experience.
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October 7th 2009

Fred Beecher: Integrating Prototyping Into Your Design Process

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Good post from Boxes and Arrows- really worth checking out. Here was my comment:

This was a great overview. I completely agree with you that the point to emphasize about prototyping is not the tool itself, but the way that prototyping allows the team to focus on particular decisions related to information architecture without being distracted by issues of visual design. We’ve been prototyping in this way, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” way, for almost a decade now. We created a proprietary ‘grayscreen’ prototyping tool that we use to quickly build clickable, HTML prototype sites. Each page can be assembled either with stock generic content, like formatted lists, images, etc., or can have custom HTML placed in the content area. We use the latter approach most, which at first glance seems pretty low-fi. However, I’ve found that the simple HTML approach keeps us (not the client) focused on the basics rather than getting caught up in an unnecessary focus on ‘elegance’ and styling. Also, having the page layouts and functionality created with HTML allows us to make quick changes on the fly while we meet with our clients, rather than having to conclude our reviews, make changes, and then reconvene at a later time. All in all, the “Low Visual and High Functional Fidelity” approach enables a faster and more efficient process.

There are some cases, though, in which a higher visual fidelity has been necessary. We usually won’t go beyond the “grayscreen” visual scheme, but we might get pretty specific with things like relative text sizes if the particular project might benefit. For example, in designing a business news site, we employed very specific type styles in the prototype so our designers could understand how the extremely dense news landing pages’ content was organized.

I wrote a blog post (http://www.newfangled.com/newfangleds_iterative_website_p…) back in April in response to watching a video of David Kelly, founder and CEO of IDEO Product Development, who said about prototyping that “You don’t find anything out until you start showing it to people.” One point that I emphasized was how important capturing feedback is. We have a commenting system built in that allows clients, project managers, designers and developers to contribute direction and feedback in context on a page by page basis. This is often essential for any one of our team members being able to properly interpret the prototype.

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: quote, design, user-interface-design, prototyping,.

October 6th 2009

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Phil Johnson, founder of Agency PJA

This is a great post from Phil, as usual. The idea of “culture” comes up for us often, too. As I read some of your examples of culture-establishing decisions, one recent event came to mind for Newfangled. We had been considering moving out of our current office space for a while. Our numbers were growing and we were running out of configuration ideas to keep the space workable and efficient. We had infrastructure challenges stemming from the old, but charming, building we’re in. Last spring, we decided that the time had come to finally move, so we began a search for new space. We eventually found some only a couple of miles away, but the configuration of offices was a bit more traditional. Moving there would require us to divide up our team in a physical way that we had never done before. We evaluated the cost of moving, both financially and to our culture, and came to the conclusion that staying put would be best for us. Rather than investing the tens of thousands it would have cost to relocate, we invested a fraction of that in renovating and making some furniture and configuration changes to our current space. The revitalization was wonderful, both as a response to the open, collaborative working culture we have, and as an investment in that culture’s future.

Posted at 5:19pm and tagged with: quote, design, business, management,.

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…Impressions may shape your opinion of the [agency] culture, but they don’t answer the big questions. How are we going to treat people? How far will we go for our clients? What will we do in order to win? How do we resolve conflict? Where do you find the balance between being nice and being great? How much crap are we willing to take? What’s the agency’s responsibility to society?

The answers to those questions tell you more about the culture of an agency than any of the shiny surfaces. They provide the operating instructions that determine how an agency responds to every situation and where the lines get drawn at decisive moments. To discover that knowledge you need to look into the history of an agency and identify those critical moments when someone made a decision that shaped how people will behave, what they believe, and where they will or will not compromise. In every agency’s life, there are a handful of those big moments, and they’re seldom the easy ones.
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October 6th 2009

1 note |#

Phil Johnson

Posted at 3:09pm and tagged with: design, quote,.

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At another point, during one of the last market downturns, I could feel morale plummeting. All my efforts to motivate people fell short. I felt more and more disconnected from the organization. On a whim I asked a few people what was the worst place to sit in the office, and I gave up my private office to move to a desk in the middle of an open studio area. To this day, I still believe that was the first mark of our turnaround. A commitment to an open environment started at that moment, and continues to shape a lot of the ways in which we communicate and work.
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October 6th 2009

Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience

6 notes |#

From 0.1 seconds to 10 years or more, user interface design has many different timeframes, and each has its own particular usability issues.

Posted at 9:01am and tagged with: user-interface-design, design, user-experience-design,.

October 5th 2009

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The English language is half redundant.

From an old project called B/W.

Posted at 3:10pm and tagged with: language, design,.

The English language is half redundant. From an old project called B/W.

October 5th 2009

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I saw this image on a bag I got from our local co-op. It got me thinking about the role of design in environmentalism. There is something to all the ‘green’ details that are showing up on our consumer products that probably do more to encourage us to consume rather than conserve. It’s almost as if we see these ‘green’ cues and, assuming we care about the planet, are able to feel better about whatever purchase we’re considering.

If you look at this image, it simplifies a system which depends first upon the actions of the consumer (who recycles their paper), and then upon the reclamation center, which probably cannot reclaim 100% of the material brought to it. So, that said, the cycle is limited to a certain number of ‘rotations.’

Posted at 12:07pm and tagged with: design, environment,.

I saw this image on a bag I got from our local co-op. It got me thinking about the role of design in environmentalism. There is something to all the ‘green’ details that are showing up on our consumer products that probably do more to encourage us to consume rather than conserve. It’s almost as if we see these ‘green’ cues and, assuming we care about the planet, are able to feel better about whatever purchase we’re considering. If you look at this image, it simplifies a system which depends first upon the actions of the consumer (who recycles their paper), and then upon the reclamation center, which probably cannot reclaim 100% of the material brought to it. So, that said, the cycle is limited to a certain number of ‘rotations.’

October 5th 2009

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Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson (via Daniel Pink)

Posted at 10:04am and tagged with: quote, design,.

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A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.
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October 5th 2009

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The preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) considered his Liber Novus, the famous Red Book, to be the “prima materia for a lifetime’s work.” Many contemporary scholars regard it as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. Now this cultural touchstone—in which Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—is to go on public view for the first time in a special showing at the Rubin Museum of Art. Entitled The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, the exhibition from October 7, 2009, to January 25, 2010, coincides with a major event in publishing: W.W. Norton & Company’s publication of a facsimile and translation of Jung’s original.

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: history, art, design, psychology, carl-jung,.

The preeminent psychologist C. G. Jung (1875-1961) considered his Liber Novus, the famous Red Book, to be the “prima materia for a lifetime’s work.” Many contemporary scholars regard it as the most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. Now this cultural touchstone—in which Jung developed his principal theories of archetypes, collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—is to go on public view for the first time in a special showing at the Rubin Museum of Art. Entitled The Red Book of C. G. Jung: Creation of a New Cosmology, the exhibition from October 7, 2009, to January 25, 2010, coincides with a major event in publishing: W.W. Norton & Company’s publication of a facsimile and translation of Jung’s original.

October 3rd 2009

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From GOOD:

Each city is a collection of massive systems, all of which must interact seamlessly in order for the metropolis to function. This is a look at what makes up each of these systems. The numbers themselves are culled from New York, one of the world’s most quintessential cities, but they could be comparable to any urban center. From transportation to health care to the government itself, a city is only as good as the sum of its parts.

One thing I noticed is that there seems to be far fewer hospital beds given how many people are actually admitted…

Posted at 9:01am and tagged with: design, urban-planning, infographic,.

From GOOD: Each city is a collection of massive systems, all of which must interact seamlessly in order for the metropolis to function. This is a look at what makes up each of these systems. The numbers themselves are culled from New York, one of the world’s most quintessential cities, but they could be comparable to any urban center. From transportation to health care to the government itself, a city is only as good as the sum of its parts. One thing I noticed is that there seems to be far fewer hospital beds given how many people are actually admitted…

October 2nd 2009

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Last week, I threw together a chart showing the various articles I’d read that week broken down by category. I was tracking the same idea this week and thought it would be more interesting to compare the two weeks. This week, less architecture, more futurism…

Posted at 3:46pm and tagged with: design, reading-list, infographic, graph,.

Last week, I threw together a chart showing the various articles I’d read that week broken down by category. I was tracking the same idea this week and thought it would be more interesting to compare the two weeks. This week, less architecture, more futurism…

October 1st 2009

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The Economist, Creative Tension: Google’s Corporate Culture

Posted at 1:10pm and tagged with: design, quote,.

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For years Google has had a fairly informal product-development system. Ideas percolated upwards from Googlers without any formal process for senior managers to review them. Teams working on innovative stuff were generally kept small. Such a system worked fairly well while Google was in its infancy. But now that it is a giant with 20,000 employees, the firm risks stifling potential money-spinners with a burgeoning bureaucracy.

To stop that happening, Google has begun to hold regular meetings at which employees are encouraged to present new ideas to Eric Schmidt, the firm’s chief executive, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its co-founders. It has also given some projects more resources and independence than in the past. Both moves are designed to ward off the conservatism that can set in as companies mature. “We are actively trying to prevent middle-agedom,” explains Mr Schmidt.
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October 1st 2009

6 notes |#

Funny first line of David Sherwin’s blog post on the “verb problem” interaction designers will be presented with when working on augmented reality applications.

Posted at 9:02am and tagged with: quote, design, user-interface-design, user-experience-design,.

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I can see into the immediate future. It will consist of millions of people standing around looking at their phones.
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