Dlod

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’.

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Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience

Posted: March 23rd 2010

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?

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Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience

Posted: March 4th 2010

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 …

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Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience

Posted: December 23rd 2009

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.

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Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience

Posted: November 26th 2009

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.

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Graphic Design, Interactive Design, User Experience

Posted: November 4th 2009