Friendica instead of Facebook, Pixelfed instead of Instagram, PeerTube instead of Youtube,… The Fediverse seems to have a decent answer to many of the the commercial, siloed social platforms out there. Though the user counts of all of those wonderful platforms are dwarfed compared to their commercial originals. Here is one strong, if not the strongest, reason why their adoption is so slow:
Author: Tim Reiser
A Senior Design Lead at IBM in Germany blogging about random design and UX topics. Family guy, dog person, nuts about music, living too far away from the mountains and the sea.
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Is low-fidelity prototyping unnecessary?
It depends. 🤓
You can’t say lo-fi is generally useless. I recommend to not regard this so dogmatically, but instead recall the basic idea behind different fidelity levels: The design process is iterative, and in each iteration you explore and diverge before you converge and make a decision.
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UX design terms untangled
If you are often confused by all the weird terms designers use… This is a nice and concise summary of some key terms in designer lingo, presented by the Nielsen Norman Group that coined some of them. 🤓
And don’t worry, the vocabulary is ever evolving, as is our field. Even desigerns themselves struggle with this every now and then. ☺️
„Design is no walk in the park, design is tough work“
Hartmut Esslinger, Founder frog design, 2012
Dealing with the corporate world since the 1980s, he has got some very interesting and forward-thinking ideas – which most corporations in 2020 have either still not understood or not achieved yet.
„Designers and creatives on the executive board and supervisory board!“
Hartmut Esslinger, Founder frog design, 2012
More stories and wisdom in the full interview video shot on the Stuttgart TV Tower in July 2012 (in German though)…
And who put it best? Kurt Weidemann, a renowned German graphic designer and typographer:
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There is no “no UX”
UX is the experience a user has with a product or thing. UX is no fancy extra that you can “skip this time” to save some cycles. As soon as it is in their hands, a user has an experience with the product – whether you designed for it or not.
It’s up to you if you want to design that experience with intend. Or leave it to chance.
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Everything else is not there
In a good user experience nothing is left to chance. Things are offered to the user in the right place and at the right moment.
In a good user experience everything that is there has a purpose. Everything else is not there.
Way too many applications feature only final screens, often rotated or distorted to fit into a fancy mockup. That’s good stuff to make a first impression, maybe.
“[Logitech’s] design-driven transformation between 2013 and 2019 saw the company’s market value increase roughly sevenfold.”
“Companies that excel at design grow revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry peers.”
“Research shows that bold, user-centric strategies correlate strongly with higher financial results.”
“The user and market insights gleaned through this redesign process helped fuel Lyft’s strategic shift from a provider of rides to a portal enabling people to move through cities in multimodal fashion.”
“[…] it is best to place the design leader in a function that has a mandate to contribute to strategy and also with an end-to-end view of the organization.”
“These [design leaders] have a vague mandate to improve customer experience but have nothing more than their own powers of persuasion to convince other business leaders to get involved. The best companies give their CDOs a mandate and the authority to deliver on it.”
… and I’m only half through the article! So many insights and strong statements in just one article. Gold!
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Design is a team sport
Recently I heard a fellow designer talking about design being a team sport. Just today I found the exact same theme in “The State of UX in 2020”. Yet, this is not a cool coincidence underlining a trend. Good design has always been and will always be a team sport. Law of nature.
I can tell from first-hand experience, I worked both ways: 10 years as a poorly connected freelancer, doing everything on my own with little to no feedback from other designers. And 4 years at IBM with radical collaboration, lots of possibilities for feedback and exchange, and our design team’s own Definition of Done saying “Critiques until the design team is happy”.