Fascinating list of standard user behaviors & interfaces that hy3lxs’ mom just doesn’t get.
In a sense, you could say that the brilliance of a good designer is not defined by her ability to represent the world as she sees it, but by her trained ability to represent it as others expect to see it.
…For a design process to produce an extraordinary product, two conditions must be met: stakeholders and participants must unequivocally accept that they aren’t designers, and trust the real designers’ abilities.
Nishant Kothary, Predictable Design | UX Magazine
Interesting discussion on Quora.
Is this one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/friends/
(I am a designer at Flickr. This post is largely taken from a proposed redesign I sent out last year.)
Virtually every time someone asks if I’ve seen a new photo on Flickr, I first cringe a bit, then reluctantly say no—it’s always no, because the page dedicated to showing new photos on Flickr, Contacts > Uploads, makes it impossible to easily browse those new photos.
There are a lot of problems with this page. For brevity’s sake, I’ll mention the big ones.
And remember, these are just the biggest problems. The page fails on a fundamental level—it’s supposed to be where you find out what’s happened on Flickr while you were away. The current design, unfortunately, encourages random clicking, not informed exploration.
The page isn’t just outdated, it’s actively hurting Flickr, as members’ social graphs on the site become increasingly out of sync with real life. Old users forget to visit the site, new sign ups are never roped in, and Flickr, who increased member sign-ups substantially in 2010, will forego months of solid work when new members don’t come back.
The ideal redesign would, at a minimum:
For the TL;DRers, every suggested improvement supports these two goals: clear context, and easy navigation. Users want to know what* they’re looking at, and then easily go wherever they want to go next.*
Flickr can have a serious competitive advantage if they make photo uploads easy to see and navigate: everybody likes photos, and likes seeing themselves in photos, and it’s even nicer to see photos all arranged on a page without visual cruft like status interruptions and article links. It’s also crucial to have different ways of viewing the photos: chronological is important, but so are groupings by date and contact type.
In other words, Flickr still has the ability to kick ass in this arena. They just have to build it.
*By which I mean what, who, where, when, and who else, usually in that order.
*Usually scrolling down to look at more photos, to be honest.
—Timoni
http://tumblrcloud.icodeforlove.com/
Why make your own web products? Because you get to write copy like this.
…Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
…everything about Tumblr is better designed. I used the landing page as one example, but there are tons of features where Tumblr shines by its gorgeous design.
Meanwhile Posterous is typical of the Silicon Valley engineering mindset where everything is measured, ranked, weighted. It’s like Google. And having terrible design like Google is great if you have a technology edge. But if you’re in a market where what matters is design edge, that’s not enough. There needs to be great design, by which I don’t mean looks (though they’re important), but how it works for the end user.
Meanwhile, Tumblr is typical of the new New York startups, that have great engineering talent, but care about design, UI and UX.
—Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass, by PEG on Tech, via Daring Fireball
I don’t necessarily agree with Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry that the divide between engineering and design is strictly SF/NYC, but I do agree that the there certainly are two different philosophies for product design that are as immediately apparent, looking at a website, as comparing the difference between Apple and Dell hardware.
Scribd (my last company) is a very engineering-based company, and I am a very user-focused designer. Both focuses are legitimate ways to build a product, but as you can imagine, working for a company or hiring employees whose product-building philosophies don’t match your own is usually frustrating. Compare this random Scribd doc page to my proposed redesigns and you’ll see what I mean.
Gobry’s closing remarks:
…for consumer web apps today, design matters more than technology. Much has been written about how the cloud, accessible web frameworks, etc. have dramatically lowered the cost of getting a startup to market, and that’s certainly true, but it also means that since everyone is on EC2 and Ruby on Rails, technology is no longer what differentiates most consumer web apps. What does is design. UI/UX design. Social design…To be sure, technology is and always will be very important. I don’t want to go back to the startup where the MBA bosses around engineers. And some of the best designers will be engineers (like David Karp, or Mark Zuckerberg). But you can’t just engineer anymore. You have to design.
This is absolutely true, but he doesn’t mention the major trump card of social media sharing sites: having the most content. I don’t know anyone that really loves YouTube or considers it a favorite site. It is, frankly, way too ugly to love. But it is tremendously popular, and has an extraordinarily high brand recognition, because it has the most good content. In terms of design, Vimeo blows YouTube out of the water, but because Vimeo has chosen to focus on higher-quality indie videos, YouTube is still the first place people think of when they want to watch kittens falling asleep in hilarious ways.
—Timoni
Agile User Experience Projects, Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox
In my experience, maintaining UI fidelity is the hardest part of working with agile programming. I find it surprising that Nielsen’s only advice is to “decide it all in advance.”
Why product designers should design the mobile app component first: Mobile First, from Functioning Form
As a brand experience designer, I’m often charged with bridging the gaps between our clients’ engineering, marketing, design and sales teams. It’s not uncommon for each to have different ideas about what their company does, or at the very least, why they do it. In less mature companies, the CFO and CIO may step into product development and create an ideological tug-of-war.
When it’s a technology or digital media company, an engineering culture may dominate decision-making. While that’s a great environment for solving technical problems, it’s terrible for introducing a new product, or worse, a new brand to the marketplace. Without a clearly coordinated effort to ensure that your online experience is a real reflection of your brand promise, a torrent of off-brand details pockmark the experience and send the wrong message.
…The online experience needs to continuously deliver on the brand promise to generate the trust people extend to the brands that consistently meet their expectations. This is how tangible brand value is created that’s built for the long term.
Bridge The Gap Between User Experience and Brand Value, in MediaPost Publications
