August 24, 2010 – 8:56 am
It’s become de rigeur for blogs to publish lists of advice, or rules to live by gained from the author’s years of experience. After reading several of these, I’ve compiled my own list, a much shorter version.
- Don’t take advice/rules lists too seriously, they’re all made up of people’s personal experiences and aren’t law.
- Empathy will make you a better designer, especially when you’re not designing for yourself.
- Develop your own list, based on real life experience, not what other people have told you.
The first problem I keep having with these lists is that many of them are so definite, as if the author’s experience fits the reader’s perfectly. It may be a pet peeve, but there are no absolutes, and passing down an individual experience as an absolute isn’t helpful, it’s constricting the world view of the person who takes it as gospel.
The second problem, is that by sharing their life experiences as rules or advice, the list becomes about ego. Granted, most blogs are about the author’s ego to start with, but when these lists are shared, they become the Fox news of blog posts – quick snippets taken out of context that are easy to pass around and share without putting any critical thought into them.
What I’ve found is that everyone needs to develop their own list, and that means taking other people’s experiences and your own, and factoring in context. We all owe it to ourselves to think through the rules we follow, and to keep that list of rules changing for our whole lives.
August 10, 2010 – 8:11 am
Twitter has a new feature, similar to the Facebook recommend feature, where they recommend people you might want to follow. An acquaintance summed it up as, and I paraphrase from memory: “recommending people I’ve already chosen not to follow”.
Out of curiosity I’ve been checking through their recommendations just to see if I’ve missed anyone, and kind of to see who they think I am, based on who they think I should follow. I’d guess 98% of the time I’ve been hitting hide, rather than follow. One of those times I meant to hit hide, I accidentally hit follow. I was in a groove, hitting “hide” without moving my mouse because as you click, the person disappears, moving the next person into that place. My browser had a little burp and didn’t quite move it up all the way, and I hit “Follow” instead. Now I’m embarrassed and don’t want to un-follow the person I had no intention of following to begin with.
*queue social media guilt*
There was a very basic usability problem in the twitter interface, they put the two actions directly attached. They’ve done some good by making the hide link text, and the follow link a button, but they are still so close that people have got to be clicking the wrong button often.
The problem:
A better solution:
Why not separate them enough that they wouldn’t accidentally be clicked? It seems like a minor issue, but this is the kind of interaction detail that is necessary to create a smooth flowing experience, without making the user think or precisely aim.
This weekend Missy saw an ad she liked on television, so she turned to the internet to find more about it. Her first stop was YouTube, a step that I thought was pretty logical, but it turned out to be unsuccessful. It would take her another half hour of searching to finally find the video.
Why aren’t agencies putting all their work on YouTube by default? Every spot we make should be automatically uploaded and properly keyword written. There is no excuse for running a spot on television that can’t be found online, especially when that online component is free.
Missy ended up finding it here.
I’m on vacation, so I won’t spend much time thinking about this, but I absolutely love the NASA logo re-imagined by BaseDesign.
It’s simple, which is already miles ahead of the current NASA logo, but I think it says much more. It has a timeless look, but at the same time is totally saying “this is a step ahead”.
There are a bunch of versions at the Base site.
So I was thinking about why my wallet is wearing a patch in my jeans, and I realize it’s because I am carrying about 20 cards, the majority of which I don’t necessarily need to carry, I just need the number. From there I figured the ideal way to fix this would be a phone app that I could use the phone camera to scan the card’s barcode, and it figures out what card it is and stores the number and barcode for me. Then I can just pull out my phone at scanners, say the airport, or for the number when I need to input it somewhere.
I sketched it up and then played a little with the design, and this is what I came up with. Then I bothered to look and saw there is already an app for that.
Oh well, fun times.
