I love this answer from Poke founder Nik Roope on what designers can bring to organizations:
Businesses are built on concepts. Ideas structured to extract or create value in some way. These ideas, famously penned on napkins (although more likely Evernote theses days) are by their nature abstract and intellectual. “Design” takes a central role in the step from the intellectual to the manifest and when the process is working this isn’t a verbatim translation, it’s an active process that structures, orders, tunes the components into a compelling working system. Broad-minded designers with solid structural sensibilities are thus critical for success.
[via @domgoodrum]
Voxpop - What can designers bring to organisations? | News | Design Week
This whole Core77 article about the design of Google Maps is pretty excellent. It’s a great breakdown of the insane challenges of building a map of the world. Beyond everything else, though, I found this especially shocking: “In recent months we have introduced a few more regional changes to our color palette adding 3D building shadows to indicate local time-of-day.” 3D building shadows … Who knew? (I can’t seem to track it down myself, but it’s in the screenshots on the article.)
Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas - Core77
One of the things I’ve been saying lately about what we’re doing at Percolate is that from a design perspective our competition isn’t other enterprise software tools, it’s Twitter, Tumblr, and the like. Because so many community managers (the most common user from the brand side) are heavy users of social media personally, they have come to expect consumer interfaces across all their tools. Or, as Sarah Lacy put it, “millennial entitlement”:
Millenials are coming into the workforce and the generation has an amazing capacity to demand the world revolve around their desires, whether that’s reasonable or not. Millenials will just start demanding better software from the companies they work for, and if they don’t get it, they’ll start installing their own skunkworks implementations.
Sure, I guess I feel entitled to well-designed software even in a business environment …
designenterprisesoftwareTechnologyFebruary 12, 2012
Just in case you thought things couldn’t get any nerdier, here’s a good piece from Slate on what it takes to make a great map:
According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied—by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line—the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced—sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
Who knew?
The best American wall map: David Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” - Slate Magazine
I always thought the most compelling part of driving a Prius was the little screen that showed you when you were using gas versus electric. Sounds like Chevy has taken that idea a step further with their Volt interface:
Its designed to give you real-time feedback on your driving style. When the car is happy i.e. being driven efficiently, the ball is green and in the center of the gauge. Stomp on the accelerator, and it rises to the top, changing color to yellow. Brake too hard so youre bypassing the kinetic energy recovery and it dives to the bottom, again changing color to yellow. The more time you spend in yellow, the fewer miles youll go before you have to start burning hydrocarbons.
For all the stupid talk about gamification, this seems like the real thing: A feedback loop that naturally helps you get better at something.
carschevydesigninterfacevoltNovember 28, 2011
The gist of the argument here is that asking your users to do a bunch of organizing is a bad idea (see: Twitter Lists and Google+). I completely agree when it comes to G+ and completely disagree when it comes to Twitter Lists. Let’s start with the latter: For most people lists have no use. But that’s okay, Twitter doesn’t ask you to make them and doesn’t seem to be bothered if you never even know what a list is (which I assume is the camp most users are in). For a very small group of power users, lists are incredibly important (I’m not one) and in return Twitter gets enough data to organize millions of users into useful categories. Power users products have value to those users (and in this case the company). On the G+ side, building an entire product around making users work to put people into lists seems silly (and I agree is shit work). I still contend that G+ is a perfect strategy and a terrible product. Everyone has said at some point that social networks should behave more like their “real-world” equivalents, allowing you to sort and filter friends. But then you quickly realize that people do all that sorting without thinking and if they had to spend a bunch of time thinking about it they probably just wouldn’t bother. It’s a perfectly logical thesis except that it ignores the real way humans behave. Then again, maybe I don’t know anything … They seem to have a lot of users.
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work
I’ve never seen anyone make this point about the relationship between the screen size of designers and that of users, but it’s a good one: “The weird thing is this: On the one hand, web designers seem to work on increasingly large monitors; on the other, the displays used by readers tend to shrink as more people browse the web on notebooks, tablets or smartphones.”
News website design is plagued by too many ads | Media | guardian.co.uk
Muji gloves with a conductive finger for touchscreen technology. Who’s in charge around here again? We now need to buy new clothing with additional pockets for devices, holes for headphones and materials to allow for interaction. We design tools and then the tools design us. As an aside, I was doing some research recently and in the ten years between 2006 and 2016 the smartphone market is estimated to shift from being 7 percent touchscreen to 97 percent touchscreen respectively. Not sure if that’s impressive or just a sad statement about the industry’s inability to think beyond what’s happening right now.
MUJI Gloves
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