Sources / Additional Reading
Vox + 99% Invisible - Norman Doors: It's not you. Bad doors are everywhere.
Digital America - A Tale Of The Haves & Have Mores
UK Getting rid of analog clocks
Signal To Noise Ratio
Key Takeaways
- BE FAMILIAR: Do what people expect. Don’t fight inherent beliefs.
- ITERATION: Think of the process as constant improvement of an idea, not solely removal of bad ideas.
- ASK WHY: When you hit a block ask why many times to figure out the root cause.
- RESPECT DATA: Design is becoming a data-driven field. Embrace this, don’t fight it in favor of subjectivity.
Lecture Outline
- Norman Doors
- A door where the design tells you to do the opposite of what you’re actually supposed to do.
- A door that gives the wrong signal and needs a sign to correct it.
- This is an industrial design term that also applies heavily to interface design.
- Design roles continue to evolve and shift as technology changes the design landscape
- Iterative Improvement
- Don’t think of designs as having an end, but just a point when you decide to stop.
- Desire Paths are a Great Example of Data-Driven Design
- Following where people actually go instead of trying to pave paths where you want them to go.
- University of Toledo walkways
- Descriptive vs. Prescriptive design
- Descriptive: What DID happen, based on observations.
- Prescriptive: What SHOULD happen, to achieve certain outcomes. (like Prescription medication. Take 2 a day to get better.)
- Shifting your thinking from Descriptive to Prescriptive will help you explain designs, and rationalize decisions
- The Illusion Of Completeness
- Happens on digital designs when more is available off-screen that isn’t intuitively shown to be there.
- The Progression Of Technology:
- The progress of technology is outpacing our ability to adapt to it.
- The job market is going to be disrupted a lot in the next decades. New markets. New skills needed.
- Skeuomorphism:
- A design concept of making items represented resemble their real-world counterparts.
- An analog clock represented on a digital screen. Nothing about the screen requires that depiction anymore.
- Yellow notepad with red lines on a digital device
- We gravitate toward familiar things in a shifting landscape
- No such thing as a digital native. Only people who have becomes used to a repeated behavior
- Signal-To-Noise Ratio:
- Design is not decoration, it’s communication.
- Descriptive design avoids noise
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