Archive for the 'design' Category

What’s your design ?

Do you think simplicity is the be all and end all of design ? Is it the panacea that we are all looking for ?

Quite a profound pic that has been floating around on the web.

Steve Job’s take on “What is design ? “

In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product.

PS: Emphasis mine :)

Learning from 37 signals

Jason from 37signals had a blog post on questioning your work. I think that everyone startup or for that matter any company doing anything worthwhile should ask these questions. Here’s what they propose. The image below is from Jason’s presentation at SXSW.

The above tenets make a lot of sense and it’s worth looking at this the next time you decide to start doing something.

The six disciplines of User Experience

As envisioned by Donald Norman and inspired by his book “The invisible computer“.
The following skills are required for building the best user experience into a product (could be any product from hi-tech to manufacturing)

  1. Field studies - Observing potiential users doing their tasks in their normal settings. Skills require careful and systematic observation and usually come from the fields of anthropology and sociology.
  2. Behavioral designers - People who create a cohesive model for the product based on a detailed task analysis of the users. They mesh the task requirements with the skills and capabilities of the intended users and this model becomes the basis for engineering design.
    Skills required for this come from the cognitive science and experimental psychology.
  3. Model builders - People who rapidly build prototypes and product mock-ups that can be tested even before the real technology is ready. Skills for this usually come from people with a designing and programming background (information architects) and architecture and industrial design.
  4. User testers - These people are usually involved in performing usability and feasibility studies. Through rapid user-testing studies , they enable to iterate through designs in order to meet the real needs of the users. Skills for this come from experimental psychology.
  5. Graphical and industrial designers - At this stage, the aesthetics of the product are brought in through people who have experience in graphical and industrial design, and the “joy” and “pleasure” of using the product come into picture. Not only must the product designed merge the conceptual model and behavioral aspects but it must also meet varoius requirements of technology. These skills are usually brought in by people from schools of art, design and architecture.
  6. Technical writers - The goal of these people should be to show the technologists how to build things that do not require manuals. However in the real world scenario, they are usually brought in after the product is built and are asked to write usage manuals. The technical writers should be able to understand the audience, what the intended users require of the product and how they can go about getting their tasks done through the product. The technical writers should be an integral part of the development team, so that the product is built so well that no instruction manual will be required.

So here’s the deal, in a typical technology product, there is no luxury of time to go about doing all the above mentioned steps and in many cases some of the steps can’t be executed because the target audience characteristic is too far and wide.

What do you think is the best model that can work for a typical web based application scenario in order to make sure that the real needs of the user are met ?

For Christ’s sake!

It’s all about MyTinyJesus - Saviour 2.0.

No explanations. No FAQ. Just a figure of Jesus which keeps on emitting random Twitter posts in cartoon-like balloons. Pointless? Probably. Cool? Definitely.

What do you think ?

Yahoo’s new WPF messenger for Vista

Yahoo released their new version of the popular Y! messenger with an exclusive version built for Vista on WPF. This is currently only for preview. The UX is brilliant, and this app brings more of a human touch to conversations with smooth transitions and the likes.

The app however does not run on XP even if you have .NET 3.0 and the other jazz. But this looks and feels so much like a native Vista app, including the richness and the transparencies. This new version also provides a good deal of customization, with the usual laundry list of features. These two features were extremely useful

  • The Vista gadget which comes along with this IM is very useful and enables you to drag and drop your favorite contacts on to your sidebar so that you can ping them from there itself.

  • Being able to switch between different people that I’m chatting with in a single window.

Multi Window Y! IM

But the bigger question is, ‘What do you think provides more value’ - a quick and dirty IM chat client like Gtalk (also built into your gmail) or an app like this which provides a great UX.

Laptops - as designed by 7 year olds

Interesting, isn’t it ?

Laptops designed by 7 yr olds

More available here.

Picture courtesy : The morning news


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