Never critique single screens
It’s a big red flag if someone sends just one or two mockups for review. Make sure your team is always reviewing full stories. …
-
-
Journey modeling, experience mapping, customer journeys, or whatever you want to call it - documents that explore a long-term relationship between an individual and a system, service, product, brand, or organization.
— Journeys
-
The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder
[…]
“Pretty much every large tech company today,” Karp said, is essentially “metrics driven.” Google, Twitter, Facebook: they’re obsessed with “optimizing” services, design, functionality and aesthetics through constant testing and tweaking.
[…]
Karp chose not to operate that way. Rather than monetizing clicks, he wants advertisers to view Tumblr as a place to promote particularly creative campaigns to an audience whose attention is worth paying for. -
if you want to build a product and you want to build a product that is relevant to folks, you need to put yourself in their shoes and you need to write a story from their side. So, we spend a lot of time writing what’s called user narratives of this user or this person. He is in the middle of Chicago and they go to a coffee store in the middle of Chicago. This is the experience they’re going to have. It reads like a play. It’s really, really beautiful. If you do that story well, then all of the prioritization, all of the product, all of the design and all the coordination that you need to do with these products just falls out naturally because you can edit the story and everyone can relate to the story from all levels of the organization, engineers to operations to support to designers to the business side of the house. So, that story is very, very important for us.
-
September 28, 2010:
To anyone curious about #NewTwitter proportions, know that we didn’t leave those ratios to chance.
-
Comparing Collaboration and Individual Personas for the Design and Evaluation of Collaboration Software
Collaboration personas are a tool that can be used to design for groups. Prior work posits that collaboration personas can improve tool adoption by helping designers create collaboration tools that are better targeted to the goals, needs, and interactions between members of collaborative groups. We present a comparative study of design and user experience practitioners who used both collaboration personas and individual personas. Participants conducted a cognitive walkthrough and provided redesign suggestions for a collaboration tool. Our results show that the focus of the cognitive walkthrough and redesign task differed, with collaboration personas showing more group focus. Collaboration personas led to a more complete discussion, as indicated by a greater amount of time spent on the task compared to individual personas. Despite prior experience and training with individual personas, collaboration personas were preferred and better supported the task, since they focused on groups of people and their interactions.
-
Designing Social Experiences, by the Facebook UX team (Half-Day Workshop)
They provided their framework of design considerations around bringing new features and applications into their insanely-heavily-used social media platform. These considerations are:
- Social value: what positive purposes to bringing people together does [x] offer?
- Identity: what does [x] say about who I am? Does it position me in the best light?
- Distribution: how will [x] spread, and to whom?
- Feedback: what affordances for [x] will drive engagement?— My Interaction12 Recap : as long as it’s gotta be // February 14 2012
-
Make a prototype.
What stories will it create?
How might it show who you are?
How might it provide feedback?
What will the privacy defaults be? -
We have a saying at Facebook: Photoshop lies
-
Felton says the main lesson he learned from the experience of designing and iterating Timeline is that “Photoshop lies.” “You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,’” he says. “But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks.
— Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul
-
The takeaway message for designers is to map out the behavior chains you need — the user flow you want to happen. (You will likely have more than one.) Then figure out how to get people to do the first behavior in a chain. If people don’t naturally take the next step in the chain, then figure out how to get the next step to happen.
