What qualities do the best UX professionals have?
Dan SafferThe ability to quickly see to the actual problem, not just the issues that result from that problem.The ability to visualize that problem.The ability to generate multiple solutions to the problem, then discuss the pros and cons of each.The a…
How to best represent a ToggleButton (representing on/off) with the ability to be locked
I’m designing a ToggleButton control that has the ability to be in a locked state in which user interaction will not be able to further toggle the control. In general I would like the button to appear somewhat natural in the …
How to best represent a ToggleButton (representing on/off) with the ability to be locked
I’m designing a ToggleButton control that has the ability to be in a locked state in which user interaction will not be able to further toggle the control. In general I would like the button to appear somewhat natural in the …
What is the best font for extremely limited space, i.e. will fit the most READABLE text in the smallest space?
I often have very limited space when creating reports and dashboards for users. I usually use Arial, or Arial Narrow, but UI isn’t my area of expertise, so I want to know, is there an optimal font for fitting the most readabl…
What is the best color combination for on screen reading?
I work at an airline as a pilot and I am involved in the “paperless” project which aims to have no more paper in the cockpit – all the data should be accessible from tablet devices.
We have a lot to read during flights (chec…
What is the difference between information architecture and user experience design?
Information Architecture is a component of User Experience Design. IA is focused on the organization and “findability” of content which are important elements of designing the overall user experience.
Save icon, is the floppy disk icon dead?
This Twitter post sparked me to ask the question:
totally! RT @damienguard: Dear UI
designers everywhere. Stop using
floppy disk icons for save. Too many
people have no idea what it is now.
So, is the floppy dis…
Save icon, is the floppy disk icon dead?
This Twitter post sparked me to ask the question:
totally! RT @damienguard: Dear UI
designers everywhere. Stop using
floppy disk icons for save. Too many
people have no idea what it is now.
So, is the floppy dis…
friendly version of date formats
The users of my application have the ability to choose their prefered date format between:
dd/mm/yyyy
mm/dd/yyyy
yyyy-mm-dd
The 1st one (which has the Java pattern dd/MM/yyyy) produces 31/12/2011.
I’ve decided that a mor…
What are the differences between UX, Interaction, UI and graphic/visual designers? Are these distinctions helpful or damaging to our field?
The new term going forward is likely to be Product Designer.
If you want to qualify it, you could say Digital Product Designer, but since nearly everything we make and buy in the future will have some sort of technology and code component, that is probably redundant.
I’ve renamed my team to the Product Design team and moved all their titles to product designers, and many other tech companies are now making that transition as well. The Facebook design team call themselves product designers, and many new startups and VCs are asking for product design. It’s a term that is better suited than UX, UI, UED, IA or IxD inside the corporate structure, and is a term that requires the designer to be focused and held accountable on the thing that they make: a product. It’s a term that also allows one to be multi-skilled or multi-faceted for their design work, so it creates a nice transition path for those whose skills may have been too siloed or walled off over the past decade. And yet the term is forgiving enough to not require those skills today while still being able to evolve as time moves on and people get better at this thing we call design.
It puts the designer on par with product managers as well for those in larger corporations, and while a lot of people say engineering or development, they really mean product engineering or product development, so it levels the playing field for designers in that context as well.
It allows business folks and recruiters to easily understand what you do while being broad enough to mean you can make something like software apps for desktop or mobile, design the Kinect, or build something like a robotic vacuum cleaner.
People get products, and in the end, product designers will be beholden to businesses in the same way that graphic designers are beholden to advertising. Our jobs exist to make money, and we exist in a corporate or capitalist environment. Otherwise we’d simply be artists.