When is it appropriate to autoplay music or video on a web site?
Never! If your website doesn’t encourage people to click play on the video then you need to rethink your strategy. People now expect the option to opt-in, i.e click play on your video rather then have it play automatically for them.
What is a “UX Unicorn”?
Let’s get this straight. A UX unicorn is a mythical object. A UX unicorn can solve not just an unusable interface, but also, poor strategy decisions, lack of management vision, an under resourced development team, a woefully inadequate budget, and a complete lack of design thinking.
UX unicorns don’t exist, but this does not stop product managers from their eternal quest to find a magical solution for problems.
However, if you are determined to find a UX unicorn, here are some places to look. UX unicorns tend to live in the misty mountains next to the Portal of Unlimited Creative Freedom. UX Unicorns can also be lured into your cube farm with Large Pots of Gold and Bonuses of Unusual Size.
How can I get good at visual and interaction design?
First things first: it is a mistake to constrain the word “design” to only “making things look pretty”. That aspect is actually the least important, in my opinion.
Design is about understanding problems. When you understand a problem fully, the solution nearly always becomes obvious.
The road to becoming a good designer is the same path as becoming good at anything else: practice, practice, practice.
Give yourself design problems, both simple and complex. Think about re-solving things you encounter every day: Stop lights. Cross walk markings. Microwave oven panels. Automated teller machines. Point of sale credit card machines. Paperclips.
All around you are real-world problems that have designed solutions. Study these problems and their solutions. Research why certain decisions were made (why are stop signs red?). Come up with better ones.
Build better mouse traps, as it were.
Pay attention to details, especially with well-designed objects and systems. A great thing to study is the interiors of aircraft. Why are things locked in certain ways? Why are the cabinets sized specifically?
Understand simplicity and ease-of-use. Why do police officers carry their gear in certain ways? What is the value of having the communications nodule mounted on the shoulder? Why are sidearms never slung for cross-draw? Police and military equipment is usually top-notch for simplicity and easy of use (consider explosive charges, stamped with “THIS SIDE TOWARDS ENEMY”).
When you start to understand the problems, you understand the solutions. And you can make better ones. And, most importantly, you will be able to communicate your designs.
Practice, practice, practice.
Practice your tools. Learn Photoshop, or Illustrator, or whatever. Learn color theory and psychology.
Learn when to innovate and when to imitate. Be comfortable with stealing ideas and having your own ideas stolen.
Practice, practice, practice.
And then you will be good.
How much work went into the UX for Trello?
Joel SpolskyNeither. It was neither a happy accident, nor did we use any personas, user journeys, or prototypes. In fact I can personally guarantee that no personas were harmed in the making of Trello.Obviously the team (myself excluded) are very tale…
Is Axure RP the best tool for UX out there?
Like many others in the field, I’ve been searching for the Holy Grail of prototyping tools. Let me get something out of the way first. Yes, pencil, paper, stickies, whiteboard are the first tools one should reach for to wrangle high-level concepts and quickly iterate through ideas. I don’t think there will ever be a time when that is not considered a critical step in the design process.
Now that that is out of the way, let’s talk about how to share the experience vision with your fellow teammates or stakeholder(s), whether they’re sitting in the office next to you, or sitting 5’000 miles away, without the need to describe it with words (which is important, but much less visceral than actually clicking, tapping or swiping your way through a prototype).
If you’re lucky enough to have learned solid HTML/CSS/JavaScript (programming language) while you were also perfecting your other crucial UX skills, then you’ve got all the arrows in your quiver you need to create a killer prototype for the desktop or mobile web. But let’s face it, these people (some call them unicorns) are few and far between, and from my experience front-end development, to be done smoothly is still the task of what anyone would consider a front-end developer.
That being said, what I have seen most often are exceptionally bright, talented designers that are much more akin to hands-on film directors—or choreographers as Jason Mesut describes earlier in this thread—that know exactly what a great layout is, and how the UI should behave.
So, assuming that most of us in the field that are tasked with designing experiences do not have the front-end dev skills (and please correct me on that one if you see it differently), we need a way to rapidly convey our vision, without getting bogged down by becoming experts in the front-end technologies of the day, which are ever evolving.
What has worked for me and the teams I’ve led?
In the past, I led a small UX team that was OmniGraffle-centric. But there came a point when we realized we were doing way too much work using static wireframes (I love graffle, and use it for sketching things here and there, but no longer use it for prototypes).
We made the switch to Axure RP, and never looked back. This was after exploring the other options out there:
- Balsamiq – great for quick UI sketches, but not great for anything too deep.
- ProtoShare – beautiful UI, beautifully clean HTML output for prototypes (not production-ready) but ran into many walls with the components and the interactivity that can be achieved with the tool. I wanted to love it more, but it just didn’t make the cut.
- Fireworks – just way to clumsy. It’s still got too many Macromedia-esque UI design patterns and although our design team used Photoshop and Fireworks for visual design, it still did not move quickly enough in the prototyping phase.
- InDesign – Using EightShapes “Unify” system. Turned out that using Unify for design deliverables is amazing, and I use it every day, but for wireframing and prototyping it’s just not the right tool at all. Way too complex, and the widgets you end up creating are static and cannot handle multiple states.
So far, Axure RP has been the workhorse tool. It’s got incredible team collaboration and has a SVN client built into its core so team members can check pages and master widgets in/out (very powerful). The HTML output can be saved directly to a public Dropbox (product) folder (how I’ve been doing it for years!) and become immediately available to all team members and stakeholders across devices.
I’ve used it to prototype very complex websites, iPhone apps, iPad apps, 10ftUI (ten foot user interfaces) for set top boxes and connected TVs. There is nothing else out there like it, and most of the juice that can be squeezed out of it is not out-of-the box, so there is a learning curve. I’ve found a way to prototype nearly everything I’ve envisioned, and whatever cannot be done in the prototype, gets a supplemental written spec (which Axure RP also handles gracefully via inline interaction notes that can be turned on/off depending on the audience you are presenting).
Since Axure RP exports to HTML, and can run in any browser without the end-user needing to install a special viewer applications (like Antetype seems to require), it makes user testing super easy. We have conducted internal user tests as well as unmoderated remote user testing with services like Usertesting.com. You can build something in a day, have people testing it the next day, and have the updates done the same day. VERY powerful.
So my vote goes to Axure RP (at least for now) for the reasons I’ve stated, as well as for the reasons others have posted earlier in the thread (like industry acceptance/popularity, range of fidelity possible.)
Enjoy! I’m happy to help anyone trying to figure out whether to make the move to Axure.
BTW, I’m not affiliated with Axure RP in any way. Just a happy user!
How many designers work at Twitter?
Right now, there are around 20 people on the design team, including our creative director, several product designers, a few interaction designers, two interns, and two design researchers. We’re growing fast, too, and looking to add another 10 or so folks in the coming months.
The @design team is a distributed team within the company, meaning nearly every designer sits with his or her team. For instance, our designers on the Clients teams sit with those engineers and PMs.
If you’d like a bit more details, feel free to email me and I’d be happy to share a bit more.
Why doesn’t the iPod Devices have a stop (■) button?
Because it is redundant. There is nothing you can accomplish with a stop button that can’t already be done using the pause, menu, next track, and/or previous track buttons.
This is not the case with media players that are physically interacting with their storage, such as VCR’s or DVD players. According to ecoustics.com [1]:
On a VHS machine, pausing the tape kept the same segment of tape rubbing against the playback drum, which if done for a long enough time could wear that spot in the tape. This could cause any number of picture and sound hiccups, or worse, cause the tape to break.
With a DVD, there’s little mechanical difference between pause and stop unless you keep it paused for more than a few minutes, after which a stopped DVD motor will spin down but a paused one will continue to run [1].
Do designers ever do any kind of web work in Illustrator?
Yes, I only use Illustrator!
Switched over a few years ago from Photoshop and never looked back.
Why the switch? In one word, Agile. The process begs for something a bit more quick, open, and lightweight – whilst at the sometime offering great scalability to take graphics across different mediums (electronic & print). A definite must if your working towards an RIA output, there are now many plugins that output to XAML and even HTML5 – I’m currently outputting for Flex (or SWC’ing)
With the added capabilities of pixel locking and pixel preview. It makes it the perfect tool for application design. Combined with all my brand and iconography work which would be vector based anyway – everything becomes seamless.
Illustrator also offers the ability to design multiple GUIs over several artboards that can be outputted to PDF (I’ve ditched the .ai file format altogether!) This is great for quick presentations, emailing, sharing, collaborating, etc.
In fact, its changed my whole teams workflow where architects and designers all build within illustrator and develop wireframes and increment fidelity to final design in the one application. No need for Balsamiq > Omnigraffle > Photoshop round trip – just way too many file formats!
Its now got to the point where I wonder why most ‘designers’ (especially web) still use Photoshop? Quite simply, its an image retouching tool for bitmap/raster graphics. Not a design tool.
What do people think of Color’s interaction design?
This is hands-down the worst UI I’ve ever seen in an iPhone application, and I’ve seen a lot.
They seem to have done everything backwards. They’ve started from a UI that typically comes from years of usage where most of your users are power users. Normally, when you launch an application, you start with a UI tailored to people who have no clue how your application works.
When you present such a novel interface, you should do some hand-holding, especially if it isn’t self-evident. I personally don’t believe in UIs that are not self-evident, but at least provide instructions if you’re going to hide the functionality from people. They have taken a mystery meat approach to the navigation. I keep accidentally discovering new areas or functionality in the most bizarre ways.
Follow the human interface guidelines.
In an attempt to to be unnecessarily innovative, they’ve defied all of the standard navigation paradigms of the meticulously designed Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). This would be fine if it was an improvement upon an already existing notion within people’s minds, but, instead, they have chosen a very abstract UI that doesn’t make sense in any world.
Those are my major complaints. The idea behind it is worth exploring, but please, please, bring the UI down to earth.
How do you explain user experience design to a layman?
My strategy involves three things:
- Connect UX to personal experiences with things UXers design
- Distinguish between something they understand (eg, what engineers and programmers do) and something they don’t (what UXers do)
- Describe UX in terms of what UX designers do for them (make something they love that improves their lives) instead of what UX designers do (user research, wireframes, strategy, card sorting, persona, etc)
In practice, my approach is as follows.
First, I ask people to name their favorite information thing. I get them to think of something they can’t imagine living without. Something that came into their life in the last ten or twenty years. Answers vary, but people usually mention something—website, app, device, service, etc.—that involves information, interaction, networks, and the digital realm. Typical answers are Google, iPhone, Facebook, Kindle, Xbox, GPS, eBay, Netflix, and so on.
Then I distinguish between 2 kinds of people who created that thing
- The engineers who made that thing work. I say these people make sure that thing, whatever it is, does what it is supposed to do. We call them programmers, developers, and engineers. But no matter the title, this person’s highest priority is making it work.
- The UX designers who made that thing work in ways people love. I say these people don’t make the thing work. Instead, they make you love the way that it works: what it looks like, how it feels, how to use it, how it’s organized, etc. We call them information architects, interaction designers, usability engineers, and more. But no matter the title, this person’s highest priority is making things work in ways that people will love.
People get this in my experience. They immediately understand the value that UX has for them. They don’t how that value is created, but they understand that there is value and, roughly, what the value is.
Of course this is a vast simplification of UX. It deliberately overlooks business, marketing, support services, and so on. It also lumps a whole group of creative people under the title of UX and doesn’t make distinctions between types of UX practitioners.
But when the point is to help someone outside UX to understand UX at a high level, I’ve had more success with this than anything else. And it’s a good gateway to deeper conversation about how good UX happens.