Why should your iPod and (some) other entertainment electronics have great design, but not essential medical devices also used everyday by people?
That was the challenge (US user experience consultants) Adaptive Path took up with the design of a type 1 diabetes medication device.
You can read the full story of their design process at their project blog.
Or if you want to cut straight to the chase, watch the 2 minute product intro video on YouTube. It’s a great example of how to simply tell the story of an experience – something we could do for the web products we design too.
As designers there is a careful line to walk between taking over a design, disempowering our stakeholders and often losing our voice at the table, and being limp lettuce – merely executing the instructions of others.
But how do you find that sweet-spot?
Here’s an insightful quote from Jonathan Ive, (VP Industrial Design at Apple) from AIXS magazine. And it starts with one of my favourite characteristics – inquisitiveness.
Q: What is important for designers in a company that has been as successful as Apple?
A: Being inquisitive. Being genuinely interested in learning and being genuinely interested in being proved to be wrong. If someone says something just can’t be done you have to learn a lot to have an intelligent debate to find out whether that really is the case or not. You can’t confuse dogma with being resolute. You have to maintain the sprit of inquiry. You mustn’t get stuck on a particular approach in the early stages of your idea but you have to be resolute as you start to refine an idea so that it can make the transition from just an idea into a real product.
Sites redesign and launch. We go “oh! ah!” at the pretty bits. File the really clever bits away for future designs of our own. But sometimes we miss the really impressive stuff.
apple.com has resisted the Jakob approved convention of having search in the top right of each page for years, so when a search box appeared there in their new global navigation header, I thought they were just playing catch-up.
But then I used it. Yeah, I know: useful search on a website. Sure. Whatever.
Oh wow! Just like their Mac desktop Spotlight tool, only for the web. It’s really beautiful. You’ve gotta try. The pictures, the categorisation, the responsiveness, the direct links to the store, the full results page. Search for an Apple product, technology, or even a movie.
Here’s a wonderful (and witty) 20min video from TED by Sir Ken Robinson about encouraging creativity in the young (and the not so young).
Children aren’t frightened about being wrong. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. We stigmatise mistakes. We are educating people out of their creativity capacities.
Creativity is defined as original ideas that have value.
Here’s a nice list of qualities and approaches from early ex-Amazon staff – things to ponder and wonder how we can do more of.
The full list is on 37signals.
But some of my favourites are:
- Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.
- Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building something valuable. [My equivalent: imagine the Steve Job’s keynote]
- Open up your system with APIs and you’ll create an ecosystem around your application.
- Look for three things in interviews: enthusiasm, creativity, competence. The single biggest predictor of success at Amazon.com was enthusiasm.
- Innovation can only come from the bottom. Those closest to the problem are in the best position to solve it. any organization that depends on innovation must embrace chaos. Loyalty and obedience are not your tools.
- People’s side projects, the one’s they follow because they are interested, are often ones where you get the most value and innovation. Never underestimate the power of wandering where you are most interested.
Here’s an interesting article about design factors the mean digg.com is more susceptible to “gaming” – artificially inflating the popularity of an item.
When you think “comments on sites”, the first thought that often comes to mind is: “how to we make it easy for people to comment? – we have to encourage that behaviour”.
But as this article notes:
Derek Powazek in his book Design for Community, makes the point that the harder it is for someone to comment on something, the better the comments are. In other words, people who jump through hoops (or pay attention long enough) to comment are the ones who really care about the subject matter, they’re invested in the story and see value in taking the time to respond.
Web-based office apps have been growing in momentum. People are starting to respond to their ubiquitous access and built-in collaboration and sharing.
But they have always looked underwhelming and seemed like sad Office cutdowns.
Buzzwords (acquired by Adobe this week) is the first to raise my pulse. It’s Flash-based and quite beautiful to look at. But it goes beyond that. They have started to improve the word processor in little, appreciated ways. For example, when you highlight some text, a subtle comments icon appears out in the right margin for you to quickly add a comment, so the functionality isn’t hidden.
But the best way to experience it is to play yourself. They are currently in preview/beta and you have to request to get an invite to join. I only had to wait a day.
Find out more, see screenshots and get access to the preview.
Duarte Design a communication company I’d admired for a while. They work with a presenter to uncover what their key messages are and what the experience should be, then craft a presentation to match. Most famously they did Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation that became the movie.
I love their staff profiles. Staff profiles are the perfect place to really nail and project the tone and character of a company. Check out Duarte’s. It makes you want to click through each one and find out more. You can find them in Organization > People.
Catalog Choice is a US site that contacts US catalog merchants on your behalf and gets them to stop sending you catalogs. For free.
It’s a really nice example of a simple online product design, which good use of AJAX transitions for smoothness and a simple registration process.
Times are a changin’. This is a great video, humorously depicting the changing relationship between advertisers and consumers. Arrogant advertisers beware. Yeah, coupons, of course ;-)
