design
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Where do we go from here? User centricity helped us build software, but what comes next? The past: the genius designer design through ideology Vignelli, Da Vinci, Le Corbusier etc. master designer will intuit problems and find solutions, a moment of genius designing with atoms The present: the user-centric designer designer has a toolkit to…
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The void between users and builders of software is seldom considered. A software builder sits in San Francisco and hopefully talks to and observes user needs and behaviors in order to build a product that has some utility. This sounds trivial, but anyone who has conducted user research knows how lossy this process is. YC…
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As designers, we focus on the core interaction and forget the bits and pieces around it. The stuff that some people refer to as ‘polish’. Here is a brain dump of my top easy to forget but important design stuff. defining which events should be tracked did we consider loading states, especially for users on…
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Michel de Montaigne, in his ‘Essays,’ recounts the story of a friend who fell sick. Despite consulting doctors and trying different treatments, nothing worked. Resigned to his fate, the friend finally gave up all treatments and stopped eating. Surprisingly, this led to an improvement in his health. This incident illustrates the concept of ‘improvement through…
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After speaking to PM’s and designers over the holidays I was surprised to learn how scarcely prototyping is used in product development. Of my small sample size (+/- 10 people) only 1 designer regularly prototyped before sending a design ‘over the wall’ to engineers. Note: For scoping this post, ‘prototype’ will simply refer to an…
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To quote Ryan Singer, author of Shape Up “every design file is destined for the trash.” To take the notion even further, all (digital) products are designed for the trash. Software is never done. For disciples of iterative development, current production software is just a prototype. App > design files Karri, co-founder of Linear (design…