timoni.org

Timoni Grone is a web designer in San Francisco. This is her blog.

Read more about her here, or follow her on Twitter, Flickr, or other places around the internet.

Posts about ux
February 5th, 2010
This is very simple to use… So if you can’t figure it out, well… That really sucks for you.

http://tumblrcloud.icodeforlove.com/

Why make your own web products? Because you get to write copy like this.

ui ux web design usability ftw
January 19th, 2010

product design philosophies: user-focused versus metrics

…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

design philosophies product design ui ux engineering tumblr posterous
November 17th, 2009
Last week I tossed a coin a hundred times. 49 heads. Then I changed into a red t-shirt and tossed the same coin another hundred times. 51 heads. From this, I conclude that wearing a red shirt gives a 4.1% increase in conversion in throwing heads.

Statistical significance & other A/B test pitfalls

ui ux user interface design metrics
November 4th, 2009
Maintain a coherent vision of the user interface architecture. Create the initial vision during a “sprint zero” period — before any implementation has started — and maintain it through annual (or semi-annual) design vision sprints. You can’t just design individual features; they have to fit together into a coherent whole — a whole that must be designed as well. Bottom-up user interface design equals a confused total user experience (the Linux syndrome).

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.”

ui ux
November 3rd, 2009
Mobile devices require software development teams to focus on only the most important data and actions in an application. There simply isn’t room in a 320 by 480 pixel screen for extraneous, unnecessary elements. You have to prioritize. So when a team designs mobile first, the end result is an experience focused on the key tasks users want to accomplish without the extraneous detours and general interface debris that litter today’s desktop-accessed Web sites. That’s good user experience and good for business.

Why product designers should design the mobile app component first: Mobile First, from Functioning Form

ux
October 30th, 2009

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

ux
October 15th, 2009
brit: …it would have been nice if Twitter did some automatic clustering based on common lists people will likely make like News & Celebs. And it would be even COOLER if they suggested a “Close Friends” group based on the people I frequently @reply and DM with. (Side note: Facebook lists should do this, too.) Yup. This is a great idea.

brit:

…it would have been nice if Twitter did some automatic clustering based on common lists people will likely make like News & Celebs. And it would be even COOLER if they suggested a “Close Friends” group based on the people I frequently @reply and DM with. (Side note: Facebook lists should do this, too.)

Yup. This is a great idea.

twitter ux lists
September 29th, 2009

Microsoft’s Courier Tablet | Blog | Nick Finck | UX/IA Pro, Speaker, and Community Cultivator.

If you haven’t watched this video yet, I definitely recommend it. I find it reassuring—it indicates that even if the technology isn’t currently available, we all apparently want the same kind of portable, book-like personal computer.

One thing that’s strikingly missing from this demo, though, is examples of sharing info. I rarely want to save an image just for my own personal reference; I’ll put it on delicious or Tumblr or ffffound or Twitter, tagged, with context, but available for anybody to see.

UX interaction design tables computers the future
September 1st, 2009
SXSW DESIGN / Panels for Designers

Very handy. There’s a roundup for UX as well.
sxsw ux web design
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