Hey designers. How often have you designed this…
…and had it show up in the product looking like this?
More often than you’d like, I’ll bet. It’s very frustrating, especially when you’ve spent days getting your comps pixel-perfect. What can be done to prevent it?
Are you a design researcher, interaction designer, product owner, or other product-maker-type person? Have you used personas to represent your customers on at least one product you’ve been involved with?
Then you may have run across personas with names like: Harry Hobbyist, Denise Designer, “Jay Vah the Java Developer”. You may even have created some of these personas yourself.
Stop that immediately.
Personas are stand-ins for real people. No real person has a name like “Harry Hobbyist”. You’re not describing a real person, you’re describing a role.
I came across this library of motion design patterns recently via my buddy Dan Saffer.
I love the stylized vignettes paired with real-world examples. It reminds me of some of the work we did on the Flex Interface Guide, which never quite saw the light of day, unfortunately.
All design projects start with an idea. Sometimes it’s a big idea – a new product, service, or business. Sometimes it’s a small idea – a minor tweak to something that already exists. But big or small, the quality and clarity of the idea can put the design project on the path to success or send it immediately into a tailspin of endless revisions and unmet expectations.
Unfortunately for designers, good quality, clearly communicable ideas don’t just pop into the world. Someone has to do work to refine a half-formed idea before it’s ready to inspire design. All too often, that someone is the designer himself, whether or not the idea originated with him.
Even more unfortunately, I’ve found there’s little guidance in UX design best practices on how to do this. What sorts of questions should a designer ask about an idea before he starts in on designs? The answer seemed to be the ever-frustrating “It depends”.
Some of you have probably seen Nest, the learning thermostat. For those who haven’t, I’d strongly recommend taking a look and watching their (short) intro video.
I’m impressed by Nest, and not just by their elegant design and eco-friendly overtones. What impresses me most is the strength of their core insight. Although it’s going to seem pretty obvious, its the kind of insight few companies in the tech industry seem to get. It goes something like this:
This morning I came across Jared Spool’s article about the $300 Million Button.
To summarize, Jared’s team worked on an ecommerce site that required a login/registration to complete the checkout process. They did some design research and found out this step was chasing away huge numbers of potential customers – first-time users were resistant to registering, and even repeat users frequently forgot their usernames and passwords, causing frustration. When they eliminated the registration requirement, sales increased by $300 million in the first year.
“Well, duh,” I thought. Registering with a new and possibly unknown site is a serious commitment for many people. Of course it would chase them away. If the designers were any good, they wouldn’t have needed a research study to tell them that.
Business folks like to talk about the “Minimum Viable Product“, generally defined as the smallest product (in terms of functionality) that will still be accepted by the market. It’s an important concept – possibly the most important concept in new product development. Unfortunately, it’s often understood in a way that leads teams to failure. In this incorrect sense, MVP is understood to mean “what’s the least amount of work we can do and still succeed?”
The problem with focusing on “least amount of work” or “smallest number of features” is that it can simultaneously lead you to do less work than you must to be viable and more work than you must to be minimal. Let’s look at each.
In my four-plus years of being a professional design researcher, I’ve worked with a fair number of other design researchers. As part of my own professional development, I’ve reflected on what makes the great ones so great and the mediocre ones so mediocre. I’ve noticed that there are four personality traits that constantly crop up amongst the great design researchers I have known.
A great design researcher is always…
I recently accessed my Paypal account to fork over some money to a friend for buying me a few bottles of wine. I had also recently upgraded to Firefox 3, without spending any significant amount of time looking over the new feature list, as usual. I was pleasantly surprised when the following object suddenly decorated my address bar (which I have circled in red):
Rob Adams makes products people love. He is currently employed as a design researcher by Adobe Systems, Inc.