Dlod
Why do projects with the best of all possible foundations sometimes fail? I think I’ve fought so hard in the past for better design processes, more research, more strategy and more testing that I started to think that if a project had strong enough foundations it couldn’t fail. But recently I’ve seen a bunch of projects with excellent research, genuine user insight and superb strategic thinking either deliver a mediocre result at best or fail altogether at worst.
Not just fail in a business sense, in the way that even the best design can fail if it’s the wrong idea in the wrong place or at the wrong time, but fail specifically because of poor design. Why? Why do these projects with such excellent foundations deliver such ‘meh’ designs?
I’ve made a few uneducated and ill-informed guesses, but first an example to illustrate what I’m talking about: The Microsoft Kin phones.
Posted: August 25th 2010
Writing is hard. Well it is for me because I’m a poor writer. I don’t enjoy writing and what should take me a couple of hours takes me a week as I grit my teeth and beat away at my words to make them make sense. My posts tend to be too long and over explained, I repeat myself. They are a nightmare.
Unfortunately like most ill-informed people I have a lot to say, so motivation to write is actually quite high. I’m not even that worried that only a handful of people read my blog, the process of thinking about what I’m going to write is really useful and enjoyable for me. It helps me to clarify my thoughts and work through issues. It’s just the process of writing itself that does my head in.
I persevere anyway because I’ve found it so valuable, but now that I have a new baby there is an increasing danger of not writing at all because I no longer have the time to bash away at something all week in my spare time. The funny thing is when I started this blog I thought the writing would be easy and I worried about the decision to do a new drawing for each post. But the drawings are the easy part, the literally take about 15 minutes each. Less than that even because since the aforementioned baby arrived I’ve just been rehashing older drawings. They would be better if I had more time to spend on them of course. So I’ve been wracking my brain trying to think how I can say just as much, just as often but spend less time doing it.
Posted: June 14th 2010
If Google is a lean sprinter (actually sprinters are a bit cool, maybe a roller blader, in chinos) then Dlod is an overweight reality TV enthusiast, feeling a touch of panic at the thought of running out of cheesy snacks. And the way Google is eyeing up my poor fatty of a blog and making tut tut sounds is making it nervous.
Google are now incorporating page load speed as one of the factors they measure in order to determine the relevance of pages in their search results.This is probably … fine. Google still seems to me to be the best performing search engine out there, consistently delivering relevant search results. Most probably they have figured out how to intelligently incorporate this factor into their voodoo and everything will be business as usual.
But it makes me nervous. It makes me nervous because page load time has nothing to do with the relevance of a search result but everything to do with the quality of the experience of the website that contains that result. It means Google are trying to measure the quality of a website’s user experience.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Jetsum, User Experience
Posted: April 27th 2010
Design rules are a great way to navigate a world of infinite design possibilities using hard learned lessons from other designers. But if we take our rules as religion without thought to how those rules came about and whether they are relevant we restrict our design practice and become unbearably tedious pedants at the same time.
The design rules we adopt usually come from the experiences of other designers we respect, revelationary experiences that have helped us in our work, a reaction against bad practices or ways of thinking that ring true to how we think about and execute design.
But in trying to turn these experiences into practical rules we can use to help our work we sometimes focus on the rules at the expense of what we’re trying to achieve. An excellent example of this is consistency. Anyone who has been flummoxed (or watched users become flummoxed in testing) by links that change style, menus that move around or any other factor that changes just when we think we have figured out how an interface works knows that consistency is vital in making something useable.
But the consistency rule can (and often does) take on a life of it’s own. Once a way of doing something is set it often becomes mandatory that this is consistently implemented across a system. But if in a specific context on that system the usability improves if that consistency is broken, then we are short changing ourselves if we carry on for consistencies sake. We’ve lost sight of the fact that consistency in this case is a way to enhance the usability of a system, it is not a goal in itself.
I’m sure this all seems blindingly obvious, in fact I initially questioned if it was even worth blogging about. But despite the seemingly obvious nature of how to use rules when we are designing I constantly come across designers defining good design with absolutist words like ‘never’ and ‘always’.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience
Posted: March 23rd 2010
Are you a poor designer because your specialisation is too narrow? Or are you unemployable because you’re a jack of all trades, master of none?
There seems to be a of conflicting advice around for interactive designers about how we should shape our careers. You will hear some people tell you that designers who are highly specialised are correspondingly more high valued in the market place (For an example see this video at about 21:20). If a business is looking for a graphic designer, then they want someone who is an expert at graphic design. Rightly or wrongly someone who presents themselves as a coder/designer is suspected as being not as good at either as someone who puts all there energy into mastering one or the other. There seems to be suspicion that the hours required to reach a high level of ability in one area can’t be be clocked up if you are distributing your time amongst various disciplines.
Conversely, other people will tell you that too narrow a specialisation leads to too narrow a thought process in that discipline (For an example see this ‘work with us’ page). They say that an understanding and experience of different disciplines makes you stronger and more creative in all of them. These people will reject someone who is too focused on only one area. They question how you can design for a complete experience if you don’t haven’t practised all the disciplines that are required to create that experience.
So which is it then?
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience
Posted: March 4th 2010
In the first blog post about transitioning from print design to web design I used the variable size of the browser window as an example of how designing for the web requires a slight shift in thinking for print trained designers. To follow that up I thought it might be useful to talk a bit more about specific strategies for designing for a frame with variable dimensions.
The strategies for designing for the variable width of a browser and the strategies for designing for a variable height require quite slightly different approaches, so I’m going to handle them in different posts. This post focuses on how to handle designing for an unknown width.
Fixed Width Layout
The easiest option to implement technically and design wise is to constrain your content inside the browser window by setting a fixed width. Your design effectively sits in a block and in a larger window either floats in the middle or sits on the left or right edge.
Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Print to Web, User Experience
Posted: February 15th 2010
Imagine what you could do if you applied your collective imaginations and intelligence into fighting human rights abuses, or world poverty, or global warming. Now stop imagining because all that guff is going to have to wait. I need to use your accumulated knowledge, experience and wisdom to help me chose what kit to get instead.
Basically my faithful computer has had it and I need to replace it. Normally I would just get a new Macbook Pro but I’ve had a bit of a tiff with Apple and now have no idea what to get.
Here is what I need to be able to do:
- Run Adobe Suite. I can’t run an alternative because I’m almost always required to produce and work in Adobe formats. It’s pretty much the industry standard much to my software budget’s dismay.
- Run Microsoft Office for the exact same reasons above, although potentially I could fudge it with a product that produces MS format documents.
- Record music and edit video, do 3D rendering and animation. This isn’t work but is just for yuks, so I do all those things in a lo-fi crappy sort of way. I use Audacity, Garage Band, Blend, Flash and After Effects.
And here are my options as I see them …
Posted: February 1st 2010
The transition from print to web isn’t as straight forward as it may first appear. With a slight sense of burning shame I offer up one of my very first web failures so that you may be spared my pain.
I’ve been thinking about my early experiences of applying what I learnt at design school to the web. I majored in photography and got an excellent but very print orientated education. After I graduated I started doing a lot of web work and looking back I fell into a lot of pretty obvious gotchas for traditionally trained designers.
So maybe it’s worth writing a few posts about making that transition. A good place to start I think, is to look at a fundamental mistake in approach a lot of us make when we first take on web projects. Although basic visual design principles are the same in both web and print scenarios, a lot of the specific techniques we develop to apply those principles in print rely on manipulating graphic elements that are unpredictable a web environment. The problem is that often our first reaction isn’t to rethink those techniques but to try and manipulate the web environment to make it more like the print one we are familiar with.
Fail, Graphic Design, Interactive Design, Print to Web
Posted: January 19th 2010
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