Jon Kolko gives some great advice on design critiques. I particularly enjoyed this part:

A “bad critique” is one of the most valuable things a designer can receive, because it short-circuits the expert blind spot and helps you see things in new and unique ways, and it does it quickly. But sometimes in the design process, you don’t actually want feedback at all: you want affirmation, and you want someone to celebrate your work so you feel good. Learning to understand the difference is critical, because if you ask for critique, people will give you critique. But if you ask people to tell you the three best parts of your design, they’ll probably do it. As Adam Connor offered in his IA Summit talk, “Don’t ask for critique if you only want validation. If you want a hug, just ask.”

Speaking of critiques, this is my preferred process to get the most value out of them.

Paul Scrivens:

It is tough looking back at life and wondering if you had created anything of lasting importance. The creative person’s ransom is that you usually have to sacrifice something to achieve that feeling. It is tough and not every design that we go through will even come close to being that one of lasting importance. However, I think it is vital that we continue to look for those opportunities no matter if there is a dollar sign attached to them or not. No matter if the people on the awards sites will notice. No matter if our peers praise us or not. All of those things are great, but that isn’t what you are searching for deep down. That isn’t what is going to make you smile 10 years down the road.

Francisco Inchauste unpacks the difficult process of designing simple products in Simplicity Isn’t Simple. He explains that simplicity isn’t just something you start tacking on towards the end of a project:

It still amazes me how many people ask for simplicity but don’t realize this phase of the design has passed when they’ve already listed out what they want it to do, or in the case of a Website, tell you what needs to be on the homepage.

True simplicity starts at conception. It’s infused into the being of the creators, and by proxy, in the soul of every product they design.

He also outlines some practical strategies for creating simple products.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long but interesting review of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Entitled Shift Happens, the article goes through all the misinterpretations of Kuhn’s work, as well as some of the major criticisms his ideas have received over the years. I found this part particularly interesting:

Scientific revolutions, according to [Kuhn’s book], don’t occur when an apple happens to find the head of a genius, or when enough facts have slowly painted a new picture. Rather, in yet another of Kuhn’s inversions, new paradigms emerge to explain the accumulation of anomalies: findings that do not make sense within the current paradigm. For example, if your paradigm tells you that fire consists of the release of phlogiston embedded in flammable materials, then the fact that some metals gain weight when burned is an anomaly. When a new paradigm is conceived that makes sense of the anomalies, science is in for a revolutionary shift.

There is a definite parallel with design work here. We often try to shift users to a new interaction paradigm because we think it works better. That’s fine, and can be successful - tab-based browsing comes to mind. But these are incremental changes/improvements, and they happen whenever designers approach an existing problem in a new way. They’re worthy pursuits, but rarely essential for an application to still fulfill its purpose.

By contrast some interaction changes are absolutely essential, and we need to keep our eyes open to recognize those elusive circumstances. Essential interaction changes need to happen when existing paradigms can’t cope any more, and new ones are needed. For example, clicking with a mouse isn’t a thing on touch devices, so that particular interaction became an anomaly that couldn’t be “explained” by existing paradigms any more. Therefore we are legitimately creating new paradigms for mobile design to accommodate the change from mouse to touch. We’re still navigating our way through this change, as apps like Path and Clear emerge to challenge our views on what we consider good design.

We often spend our time trying to improve existing designs, and we need to do that. But there is always the danger of hitting a local maximum - “a point [where] you’ve hit the limit of the current design”. To fight this danger, let’s remember that our energy is sometimes best spent identifying areas where existing paradigms are bursting at the seams in their ability to accommodate the design status quo. That’s where the opportunities for design revolution truly lie.

I really want to disagree with Tobias Ahlin’s defense of skeuomorphism, but he does actually have a point in Skeuomorphism & Storytelling:

Skeuomorphism is about communicating and reinforcing feelings ”“ getting an application to become a memorable experience, not just a tool. It’s about communicating the purpose of a UI, not only the functions it enables.

He gives some good examples of appropriate (and inappropriate) uses.

The Heavy Chef asked me some questions about design (and a little bit about this site). If you’re interested, you can read the interview here. Here’s a tiny excerpt:

I think the biggest epidemic in the design world right now is that we open our design software too early in the process. We have to spend time understanding the problem and user needs first, before we grab the mouse. There are so many products out there that look great, but don’t really solve a user need.

Instead, designers should raise their voices much earlier in the strategy discussion, and bring their design thinking skills to the essential practice of finding what Marc Andreesen calls product/market fit. Oh, and we need to use more paper to share those ideas. Sketches are fantastic low-fidelity prototyping tools, and it’s cheap to test and iterate on.

Matt Gemmell posted some interesting reflections on the difficulties of translating paper-based media to digital devices. It includes another reason (not that we need any more reasons, mind you) why skeuomorphic design practices are so problematic. From Augmented Paper:

It’s so easy to saturate electronic representations of paper with what I call “digital artifice”; the gratuitous and ultimately heavy and objectionable skeuomorphisms and decorations that betray a simplistic thinking process: let’s just make this look the same. That’s a damaging frame of mind, because it enforces a false dichotomy between the real and the virtual. Software should be an enhancement, not a replication.

Tom Creighton, making us feel better about work that ends up in the trash can in Design is an Action:

Finding out what doesn’t work is still worthwhile work.

Design isn’t the end result, it’s the process of cutting and pasting, reconfiguring and recontextualizing the raw materials. Design isn’t a thing. Design is where things come from.

Jan Chipchase is writing a series on Design research in big corporations. In Part 2: A Backgrounder for Corporate Design Research he succinctly captures the benefits that Design research methodologies have over traditional Market Research methods:

The basic premise of design research is that spending time in the contexts where people do the things that they do can inform and inspire the design process with a nuanced understanding of what drives people’s behavior ”” which can then be used as a foundation for understanding and exploring the opportunities for new products and services.

I don’t think you can overstate the value that in-person, observational research brings to product design.

I’ve never seen an industry as intent on un-defining itself as the field of User Experience Design. There’s a long list of articles proclaiming the death of this term that most us identify with at the moment. Just in the last few weeks we saw articles like User Experience Design is Dead; Long Live User Experience and Can We Drop the Term UX Design Already?.

I understand and appreciate the arguments these designers and writers are trying to make, but as someone who teaches introductory courses on User Experience Design, this plead to call ourselves something else (or nothing at all) is problematic. To people new to the industry, the term User Experience Design makes sense once the basic elements are explained to them. Even with all the arguments against it, many of us don’t have the luxury to wait around until we come up with a better way to describe what we do. So I’m going to go the other way and do something decidedly uncool: I’m going to spend time defining User Experience Design.

This short post is my simplified definition of User Experience Design, meant as an introduction to those who come to it from other areas of expertise. It’s not exhaustive by any means, but I find it useful in getting people into the flow of what we do, and interested to learn more. That said, I’d love to hear from you if you think I’m missing something, so please send me a tweet or an email if you have something to add - or, of course, write a response on your own site so we can all share in the discussion.

So, here we go.

User Experience Design, defined

User Experience Designers solve problems by uncovering user needs and helping to create products that meet those needs. If you break it down to its most basic level, Design is a set of decisions about a product.

The diagram below shows the primary elements that make up the process of User Experience Design.

Strategic foundation

To provide a solid strategic foundation, User Research is a set of methodologies focused on users’ interaction with a product. Through mainly observational, task-based techniques, user needs and usability issues with a product or idea are uncovered.

Product Discovery uses the learnings from User Research, among other things, to ensure the right product is being built for the right users. By framing the problem, exploring multiple solutions, and then prioritizing and planning for the implementation of the best solutions, Product Discovery lays down the guiding principles for the product that is being built.

Structural interior

The inner workings of a product usually has three main components.

Information Architecture maps out the paths between the different pieces of information on a site. We usually associate Information Architecture with site navigation, but below the surface there are activities such as information organization, information relationship building, and customer journey mapping that form the backbone of a usable product.

Content Strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of content. This doesn’t mean that we should always have content ready before we design, but we should at least know how the content will be structured. If done right, this usually includes a non-dickish SEO strategy.

Interaction Design defines the structure and behaviors of interactive products and services, and user interactions with those products and services. The outputs of Interaction Design are artifacts like flow diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Interaction Design is mostly concerned with layout, structure, and flow; not typography, colors, and aesthetics.

Sensory Exterior

Once the structure and flow of the product has been defined (and even while that’s still happening), we get to work on the part that most people associate with the word “Design”.

Visual Design is the art and profession of selecting and arranging visual elements — such as typography, images, symbols, and colors — to convey a message to an audience. The goals of visual design are to set the visual hierarchy of a page or flow, and elicit appropriate emotional responses about the product.

The Complexity at the Other Side

Once we understand the basic concepts of User Experience Design, the journey can start. True User Experience is more than the sum of these parts. It’s a “seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines, including engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design” (from the NN Group definition) to provide efficient and enjoyable experiences to users. This takes time, continuous practice, and an understanding that we’ll never know everything there is to know about Design. But keeping these basic elements in mind ensures that we never think of Design as just eye-candy, or something we tack on to the end of a development process. Without these building blocks, the house collapses.