The second article in the series on the Timeless Scalable Design process has been published. I invite you to read the article here: Scalability in the Design Process. The first article covered the common misconceptions about the design process and how the design process is currently misunderstood in a way that has led to unprofessional…
All posts in Design
One Way Passage and the Pre-Code Hollywood
I see design from many different angles and one of them is how different mediums deal with constraints. Since I feel mastering constraints is the most important (and most liberating) task for the designer. One of my fascinations with the cinema is the effect censorship had on Hollywood, especially examining the pre-code films, which seemed…
Something AI can’t beat: The Design Process
Contrary to much press, AI is not replacing design, it is rather ferreting out the incompetent from the real designers. I will write more about that phenomenon in a later post. For now, suffice it to say one of the biggest differentiators–and why AI will never replace design (though it is quickly becoming an indispensable…
The UX Designer’s Charlatan Test
A First Step towards UX Sanity Checking ABSTRACT This paper proposes an introspective test to see whether the reader of this paper is a charlatan UX practitioner. If so, it points ways the reader can professionalize their practice. For the non-UX professional this questionnaire can act as an interview script to ascertain how professional a…
Taking the Fast RIDE: Designing While Being Agile
A new year and a new post in my less than active blog, here is an article that originally appeared in interactions magazine. While many design methods are practiced “in the wild,” the most prevalent one appears to be “Design first and ask questions later”—also known as “Throw it over the wall and see if…
The mythical 80/20 rule
In a sad day for most digital products and services, an italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto, observed that 80% of Italy’s wealth was owned by 20% of the population. From that economic observation has come a torrent of the most far flung interpretations of a non-existent 80-20 rule. There is no 80-20 rule. There never was…
Confusing a Heuristic with a Moral Imperative
Heuristics are excellent assistance in identifying potential problems with a given user interface design. The trouble lies when people come to rely on these as the sole input, that somehow they can come and overtake the more rigorous and far more accurate methods of evaluation. So please don’t read below as being anti-heuristic but rather…
Measuring the User Experience
This weeks post is a review of the book Measuring the User Experience by Tom Tullis and Bill Albert. From time to time other book reviews will follow. Why a book review The current state of books on UX is deplorable. Many UX books can’t make up their mind if they are about a given…
Misleading Designs
(Adapted from a previous editorial I wrote for interactions Magazine) This editorial is from a controversial issue on measuring usability. This special issue covered CIF usability testing (a seemingly innocuous if important topic). Upon publication many took strong esxception to our coverage of CIF testing. But perhaps these critics also took exception to our criticizing…
Results Are In: Fidelity Deception Ranks High on Usability Problems
This editorial is from a controversial issue on measuring usability. This special issue covered CIF usability testing (a seemingly innocuous if important topic). Upon publication many took strong esxception to our coverage of CIF testing. But perhaps these critics also took exception to our criticizing a practice all too often employed: how to lie with…