Dlod
This is the final part of my three part rant on graphic design. And this is the one where I move on from tantrums to offering something positive and practical. This posts talks about things I’ve done in the past which have had a positive effect on how teams I have worked with view visual design.
I’ve had a couple of experiences in the past of getting UX design teams I’ve worked in to open up to the role of visual design as a fundamental part of our design process. I’ve even been lucky enough to have had good managers who allowed me to advocate and take ownership of this issue. But even when I haven’t had that luxury, I’ve found that if I can engage people in a discussion about how aesthetics affect our goals, and if I can get them to realise that as the visual designer my goals are the same as their goals, then people are almost universally open to integrating visual design thought into our processes (as opposed to thinking of it as a bit of slap and jazz to be added at the end). So here is what has worked for me …
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience
Posted: December 23rd 2009
Slightly unrelated to anything, I joined Twitter recently (after telling anybody who would listen that I wouldn’t) and tried to make an Icon. Normally I wouldn’t share it here but the end result was such a monumental and creepy failure that I feel compelled to make you look.
It came out like a weird half bird half fish genetic hybrid with a creepy open mouth like it’s waiting to be fed. Or to pleasure someone. It’s so wrong I can’t look away. Also made me realise that I have accidently nicked the Twitter blue. In my mind my Twitter icon has woken up and just discovered that it is now a hybrid mutant and is begging to be killed. I’m sorry bird/fish. You should have never lived.
It’s here by the way: Matt’s Brain
Posted: December 3rd 2009
In the last post I whined a bit about UX designers not taking the impact of aesthetics seriously, the general gist being that the look of a thing affects how well it works. Which sounds like madness I know, but unlike most of what I say I’m actually not just making this one up, there is actually a growing body of evidence to back this up.
So in this post I’ll talk about how the prettiness of something affects how well it works and the evidence that offers this idea some support. My own journey to this idea that attractiveness can be part of usability started from an experience I had when my team was working on an interface for bank employees. This interface was used to gain access to data about customers during face to face meetings. The senior UX designer on the project informed me the interface wouldn’t need any visual design as it wasn’t public facing and the user would be under extreme pressure to access information quickly while focusing on their personal interaction with the customer. The user needed the information displayed in as simple a way as possible. It was my first experience of visual design being considered separate to usability; in this case, so separate that including it was seen as actually diminishing the usability of the interface. This surprised me because even though I agreed that a super clean presentation of information was what was needed I felt that if this stripped back information was presented attractively it would make it easier to process under pressure. I knew this from my own experiences, but at the time I couldn’t back up my claims with any research or even articulate why the aesthetics should make a difference. I could only repeat that I felt that it did. It was a pretty weak argument and didn’t get me very far.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience
Posted: November 26th 2009
I love a good bust up, and handbags are out after a recent Smashing Magazine post. This has exposed a bit of an ugly schism in the online design community. Look at the dust kicked up as we furiously type at each other, preparing our weakened upper bodies for opinion combat.
The post in question is called The death of the blog post and it’s about how creative we should be with the designs for each post in a blog. In the comments it seems there are two camps. The first thinks that we have become too bound to conventions and safety and aren’t employing design creatively enough to engage users, in this case the readers of blog posts. Basically we aren’t taking risks. The second seems to think that this is all self indulgent bullshit, putting our own creative needs ahead of the needs of the user.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Someone Else's Train, User Experience
Posted: November 20th 2009
Well, not everyone. Visual design in the user experience world is often either completely fetishised or treated with barely concealed disdain. There is sometimes a sneering dismissal implicit in the request to a visual designer to ‘make something pretty’ that implies the aesthetic of a design has nothing to do with the serious business of designing how something actually works.
This rant is split into three blog posts to make it more digestible. This post, by far the most useless of the three, is basically a bit of a moan about how visual design is sometimes treated as if it doesn’t effect the user experience, followed by a resentful admission that visual designers have probably bought it on ourselves. But I’ll follow it up with a more useful, more detailed and less bitter post about what we know about aesthetics and user experience. Then to finish I’ll do a post detailing some strategies that have worked for me in the past in getting skeptical user experience practitioners on board with the importance of visual design.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience
Posted: November 4th 2009
If there’s one thing the internet is not short of it’s designers opinions. And I have no excuse for adding one more to the pile except that much like a drunken, vitriolic Youtube comment It’s out there now, I can’t take it back and we are all going to have to learn to live with it.
I should really finish first I suppose, but after fiddling with it for weeks, I realised that I’m never going to be happy with it so should just put it out and fix it up as I go along. So here it is, for you lucky few, think of it as the beta version. If you could contact me if you notice any problems browser wise (or just have some feedback on the design) that would be appreciated.
This is my first wrestle with Wordpress. The first 80% was suprisingly easy, the last 20% suprisingly hard, and there are a few technical issues I’m aware of. The user experience if you make a mistake submitting a comment (try it) is horrendous, as is the error handling in the comments form. The more links take you halfway down the page and the footer looks like the half baked afterthought it is although I suppose I can’t blame Wordpress for that. I’ll have to fix them up, but I’ve decided to post first, fix later. This is also my first grapple with Sifr, and although it is wonderful to be able to expand my choice of fonts it has a host of problems I didn’t anticipate (including no text resizing, unpredictable line-height behavior and odd rendering on screen resizing).
Posted: October 16th 2009
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