I really enjoyed Nick Stockton’s exploration of the space syntax concept in architecture in There’s a Science to Foot Traffic, and It Can Help Us Design Better Cities. He explains:

Space syntax [is] the science of how cities work. In the late 1970s, British architects Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson hit on the idea that any space within a city — or the entire city itself — could be analyzed in terms of connectivity and movement. They reasoned that a city’s success depended largely on how easy it was for people to move about on foot.

This wasn’t a huge revelation. Studies reaching as far back as 1960s have shown walkable cities have higher property values, healthier residents, and lower crime. What set Hillier and Hanson’s ideas apart was the notion that a city’s geometry did more for movement than any other design factor. They argued that every other cog in a city’s engineering depends on the walkable grid. Cars, buses, trains, and bikes play a role, too, but only as much as they transport people to places where they then proceed to walk around.

There’s some great examples in the article, including a case study on the redesign of Trafalgar Square in London.

Peter Seibel discusses data-driven design at Etsy in his post Building websites with science. After going over the dangers of relying solely on A/B testing for product decisions, he concludes:

Ultimately the goal is to make great products. Great ideas from designers are a necessary ingredient. And A/B testing can definitely improve products. But best is to use both: establish a loop between good design ideas leading to good experiments leading to knowledge about the product leading to even better design ideas. And then allow designers the latitude to occasionally try things that can’t yet be justified by science or even things that my go against current “scientific” dogma.

This echoes Julie Zhuo’s thoughts in The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data:

You can’t A/B test your way into big, bold new strategies. Something like the iPhone is impossible to A/B test. If you had asked people or invited them to come into the lab to try some stuff out, they would have preferred a physical keyboard to a virtual one. If you had them use an early prototype of the touch screen where not every gesture registered perfectly, it would have felt bad and tested poorly. […]

Data and A/B test are valuable allies, and they help us understand and grow and optimize, but they’re not a replacement for clear-headed, strong decision-making. Don’t become dependent on their allure. Sometimes, a little instinct goes a long way.

This all relates back to the difference between variation (trying out different ideas) and iteration (small changes to improve an existing idea). A/B testing is great for iteration, but not for variation. For variation we need our brains, and lots of paper and pencils.

A big thanks to Creative Labs for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week with their AXX 200 sound system!

We believe there’s so much more that your portable wireless speaker should do for you. That’s why we made the AXX 200.

The AXX 200 is a Bluetooth wireless speaker + Sound Blaster audio processor. This means a portable wireless speaker with power for real-time audio enhancement.

Intelligence. That’s what the AXX 200 brings to the table.

• Make a call. Listen to music. AXX 200 intelligently adjusts the audio settings for you.
• The Sound Blaster Central App for your iOS or Android device places the control in your hands.
• Built-in quad array microphone – That’s FOUR microphones in a single wireless speaker for 360° of clear, unmatched audio pickup for voice calls and recording.
• A wireless speaker that automatically cancels out noise during voice calls. For real.

It’s for work, it’s for play.
It can be everything you need it to be.

The AXX 200 is now on sale for a limited time at Creative.com and Amazon.com.

Cap Watkins in Just Ship*:

We work in a world now where fast isn’t good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You’re about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.

This also describes why arbitrary release dates are poison to good quality products. It forces teams to cut corners to hit a date, which puts them in a more vulnerable position than if they just took the time to do things right.

Also:

Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?

— Alan Skorkin (@skorks) April 10, 2013

Evie Nagy did a fascinating interview with danah boyd about her new book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. On how teens use Facebook and Twitter:

They’re also more likely to have protected accounts, and use it to talk to a small group of their actual friends. To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they’ve locked down to just a handful of people they care about — which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

A lot of the teens I talk to, they’ll have like 30 followers. It’s a small world for them, as opposed to trying to grow large followings. There are teens who are themselves microcelebrities, which is a different game. There are also a lot of teens who use Twitter around interests. An obsession with One Direction, and just talking to other One Direction people. That becomes Twitter, and then they’ll use Instagram with another group of friends. This one girl I talked to said, ‘Yeah, if you’re not into the things that I’m into, don’t follow me on Twitter.’

I’ve long been a fan of danah’s work, so I just bought the book and can’t wait to read it.

Related, Kayleigh Roberts wrote a very interesting article on how teens try to get celebrities to follow them on Twitter. From The Psychology of Begging to Be Followed on Twitter:

It’s not rare for a teen who is spamming to reach what is known as the tweet limit, something that the average user of the site might not even know exists. The tweet limit is 1,000 tweets per day, and many teens reach it regularly, especially when seeking the attention of a celebrity. It may seem excessive, but celebrities with millions of followers receive so many tweets, that it’s easy for even 1,000 to go unnoticed. Reaching the tweet limit can happen by accident, but it’s often a premeditated decision.

This is a world I didn’t even knew existed. I feel pretty old right now.

The small screens are coming, and we’re going to have to adjust our design processes accordingly. Emily Schwartzman does a great job of exploring how they worked through some of this complexity in Cooper, Augmedix and Google Glass: No Real Estate? No Problem:

Designing for Google Glass made us rethink the way we do software design. Many of our projects devote a significant amount of time to defining the framework of an application and developing the detailed design of key screens. When designing for Glass, we discovered that these phases needed almost no time, given the restrictive framework and visual language defined by Google. For future projects we might devote more time to refining personas and scenarios. We might even name the project phases a little differently—instead of “detailed wireframes” it might be “detailed scenarios.”

In general, Glass design projects will be focused more on flows than screens, and spending time on scenarios will help crystallize the flows.

Mark Boulton’s How we work is a great post about their design process. I particularly like his point about personas, a method that I have defended before as well:

The tool is not the important thing here, [what’s important is] how you can use something to help people think of other people. To help an organisation to think of their customers, or designers to think of the audience they’re designing for, or the CEO to think in terms of someone’s disability rather than the P&L.

What I find generally useful about running a workshop like this is that it exposes weaknesses in an organisation. If a client pays lip-service to a customer-centric approach, it will soon become very evident in a meeting that that’s what’s going on.

I also like his view on agile in an agency environment: “We make things and then fix things as we go.”

Jeff Atwood wrote a glorious rant about the proliferation of unnecessary mobile apps called App-pocalypse Now¹:

The more apps out there, the more the app stores are clogged with mediocre junk, the more the overall noise level keeps going up, which leads directly to this profligate nagging. Companies keep asking how can we get people to find and install our amazing app instead of the one question they really should have asked.

Why the hell are we building an app in the first place?

He makes some other really great points about the current state of the app ecosystem as well.