Five Sketches™

I’m sure Douglas Bowman’s blog last week was widely read. His post was a kind of public exit interview, titled Goodbye Google.
As Bowman left Google, he pointed out the pro-engineering bias in its approach to problem solving—including problems of design. Two of several examples he gives:
[…] a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 […]

Series 3 of the user-experience trading cards debuted at the 2009 IA Summit this week. Five Sketches™ is included in this set:

The trading cards are a growing set—each card lists one method or technique useful to our industry—and are provided as a perk wherever one of nForm’s speakers presents. The whole set is useful to:

help provide consistent terms.
illustrate the range […]

We know that human brains use patterns (or schemata) to figure out the world and decide what to do. This kind of cognitive activity takes place very quickly, which means we can react quickly to the world around us, as long as the pattern holds.
Here’s a pattern (or schema) that your brain may know: to put a card […]

I’m presenting the Five Sketches™ ideation-design method at the March 2009 Vancouver User Experience event, in Vancouver, Canada. The presentation is titled: Creating Usable Software Without Designers: It is possible!
I think the title is a bit provocative; the organiser wanted the topic to sound spicier. If it primes the audience for a good discussion, then that’s fine. […]

Leah Buley talked about generative design at the South by Southwest Interactive conference, today. Buley feels design methods are lacking in the set of professional tools we use for software development: “We don’t have so many good, reliable, repeatable design techniques.” I agree with her.
Buley tells how, in her first design session at Adaptive Path, she was handed a pen and […]

I’m a big believer in following the standards for GUI and interaction design. But when do you copy or reuse an existing design, and when do you design something new? Here’s my guideline for when to design and when to reuse or copy the GUI and interaction:

Reuse
When…
Design

…there is an external standard.
For example: the Vista UX Guide recommends […]

When businesses buy software, rather than choose the software with the lowest purchase price, they ought to consider the total cost of ownership—including the added productivity and enjoyment that usability and user-experience provide.
Every software company will say “our product is usable,” so how can you prove to prospective customer that you’ve really got usability?
Your product has […]

On the IxDA’s discussion list for interaction designers, Liam Greig posted his “human friendly” version of a heuristics checklist based on Nielson’s originals and the ISO’s ergonomics of human-system interactions.
Here are  just the headings and the human-friendly questions, which are useful at a project’s design stage.

A design should be…

transparent. Ask: Where am I? What are my options?
responsive. Ask: What […]

Today, Joel Spolsky blogged about development process and design. He makes a couple of points I agree with. As an example, he says that developers don’t know how to do everything. He says it first by describing his lack of skills in an early job at Microsoft, and later by describing the lack of skills in very experienced developers:
Your […]

Agile methodology can produce usable products, as long as you know what you’re doing. A common pitfall in agile is this incorrect assumption that you’ll get a usable product simply by building what the client tells you to build.
When there is some question about how to make a feature usable, customers may have something to say, but […]