Categories
Thoughts

The product I help to design just won a Red Dot Award

Two years ago, my design team and I set out to tackle the challenge of merging two established products in the complex space of crypto key management. During this time, we not only cared for an excellent interface design, but through our workshop facilitation and collaborative problem solving, we led the product team to a future-proof concept and unified mental model.

As evidence of our impact, I am proud to say that we recently won a Red Dot Award: Brands & Communication Design 2023 for the interface design of this product, the Unified Key Orchestrator (UKO).

Categories
Observations Thoughts

Why the Fediverse is so slowly adopted

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:

Categories
Thoughts

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.

Categories
Findings Thoughts

Design is no walk in the park, design is tough work

„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)…

Categories
Findings Thoughts

Design = intent

And who put it best? Kurt Weidemann, a renowned German graphic designer and typographer:

Categories
Thoughts

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 intent. Or leave it to chance.

Categories
Thoughts

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.

Categories
Thoughts

What I am looking for when recruiting designers

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.

Categories
Thoughts

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”.

Categories
Thoughts

Software is good when it is undemanding and predictable.

There is actually nothing else I wanted to say. ☺️