In this interview, Ryan Singer, Product Manager at 37signals, explains how to tackle design problems and how to design for your users.
http://www.dormroomtycoon.com/ryan-singer-37signals-interview-the-art-of-designing-for-people/
robertbrook / collective / tags / interface
Tagged with “interface”
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Ryan Singer: 37signals Interview – The Art of Designing for People
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Ambient Location and the Future of the Interface
UX designer Amber Case will share insights from her research in cyborg anthropology and talk about what really makes us human.
Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist currently working at Vertigo Software. She founded CyborgCamp, a conference on the future of humans and computers. Her main focus is on mobile software, augmented reality and data visualization, as these reduce the amount of time and space it takes for people to connect with information. Case founded Geoloqi.com, a private location sharing application, out of a frustration with existing social protocols around text messaging and wayfinding. She formerly worked at global advertising agency. In 2010, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the Most Influential Women in Tech.
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Kevin Kelly | Trends and Social Consequences of Technology
Our long-term interaction with the web will be defined by six trends. These trends will will involve dramatic changes that will make computing more like what we are used to seeing in many of today’s movies. Kevin Kelly explains why he believes that soon the internet will beneficially surround us in ways that most users don’t imagine today.
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Design Critique: Products for People
Encouraging useful and usable designs for a better customer experience. /
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Christian Crumlish: Designing Social Interfaces: 5 Principles, 5 Practices, 5 Anti-Patterns
As we use social tools on the web, design patterns are emerging. Social design must be organic, not static, emotional, not data-driven. A social experience builds on relationships, not transactions.
In 2008, Yahoo!’s Christian Crumlish introduced the idea of social design patterns to BayCHI. He returns in 2010 to share what he learned over two years. With his Yahoo! colleague Erin Malone, Christian created a wiki to gather social design patterns and published a snapshot of the wiki in book form.
Among the many principles of social design, Christian presents five:
- Pave the Cowpaths: Watch what people do, then support and adapt to that behavior.
- Talk Like a Person: Use a conversational voice. Be self-deprecating when an error occurs. Ask questions.
- Be Open: Embrace open standards. Support two-way exchange of data with other applications.
- Learn from Games: Give your application fun elements, like collecting and customization.
- Respect the Ethical Dimension: Understand the expectations people have in social situations and abide by them.
Christian then describes five practices:
- Give people a way to be identified and to characterize themselves.
- Create social objects that give people context for interaction.
- Give people something to do, and understand the continuum of participation, from lurkers to creators to leaders.
- Enable a bridge to real life.
- Let the community elevate people and the content they value.
Finally, he discusses five anti-patterns, commonly-used design choices that appear to solve a problem but that can backfire and pollute of the commons. Examples:
- The Cargo Cult: Copying successful designs without understanding why they are successful.
- Breaking Email: Sending an email alert, but rejecting or silently discarding the reply.
- The Password Anti-Pattern: Asking people for their password to another service encourages poor on-line hygiene.
- The Ex-Boyfriend Bug: Connecting people who share a social circle but who have reasons to avoid each other.
- The Potemkin Village: Building groups with no members. Instead, let people gather naturally.
Christian stresses that social design is an ecosystem in which designers must balance many trade-offs. Not every design pattern applies to every application, but good designers can use patterns to strike a balance that works.
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Jeffrey Veen – Designing our way through data | Web Directions
The hype around Web 2.0 continues to increase to the point of absurdity. We hear all about a rich web of data, but what can we learn from these trends to actually apply to our designs? You’ll take a tour through the past, present, and future of the web to answer these questions and more:
* What can we learn from the rich history of data visualization to inform our designs today? * How can we do amazing work while battle the constant constraints we find ourselves up against? * How do we really incorporate users into our practice of user experience?