Journal.
Favourite things: December
My visit to the Dieter Rams exhibition at the Design Museum, along with pretty much every other UX practitioner in London it appears, was perhaps the defining highlight of my December favourites.
‘I think that good designers must always be avant-gardists, always one step ahead of the times. They should – and must – question everything generally thought to be obvious. They must have an intuition for people’s changing attitudes.’ Dieter Rams
Rams’ ten design principles seems very much of the now: sustainable, useful and understandable amongst other things – and his thinking has come back into my mind time and time again, whether reading Adam Greenfield’s challenge to interaction designers to think beyond purely digital modes (which references Ram’s principles), or Don Norman’s contentious take on design research and innovation.
Dan Saffer kicked off a discussion of Greenfield’s challenge on IxDA – and it’s worth reading as a follow-up, with Adam Greenfield responding in there too. On Norman’s piece, I found both Todd Zaki Warfel and Nicolas Nova’s critiques had me nodding in agreement a lot.
Elsewhere, it’s hard not to be impressed by Matt Mullenweg, and he comes across incredibly well in this hour long chat with Liz Danzico for MFA Interaction Design Fall Lectures. Disarming and inspiring at the same time, the talk is a really nice insight into WordPress and a compelling case for the power of open source.
If you’re working in the user experience field, you should have a read of Matthew Solle’s piece on To portfolio or not to portfolio, that is the question. It’s a valuable contribution on a thorny issue, and particularly useful from someone who, like me, has spent rather too much time wading through indecipherable CVs and portfolios, or lack thereof. There’s plenty of good advice, although the conversations I’ve had recently with my peers would suggest that it remains genuinely difficult for work to stand up without explanation – much of my (and their) recent work has rarely made it into a sketchbook never mind a wireframing app, but done instead in direct collaboration with designers and developers. That stuff, which is really where I often feel I make the most significant contribution, remains hard to share in any meaningful way.
To reiterate my own contribution to Matthew’s request for feedback, quoted in his piece, I’m actually more concerned and more suspicious of the lack of online presence than lack of portfolio pre-interview, although I see it depressingly often. You aren’t ‘too busy’, trust me.
‘Where’s my Googlebox?!’ – adventures in search for silver surfers
Henny Swan‘s lovely write-up of her experiences testing the latest release of Opera with older users has valuable lessons on perceptions of where content ends and browser begins, and the importance of Home (and how often these days that Home = Google). Humbling stuff. I’m currently reading the last few pages of Luke Wroblewski‘s Web form design and this coupled with Henny’s piece have served as handy reminders of the importance of what we, as designers, do in in helping users succeed. Or, as Rams put it, ‘good design makes a product understandable’.