March 24, 2009
Leisa and I have spent a good deal of time looking at how we can define the audience for Drupal 7. A couple of weeks ago, we spent a day trying to come up with an effective model to use throughout the design process. Not just a model that we could use, but one that could be available to the whole Drupal community as we embark on the challenging task of looking at the user experience for Drupal 7.
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June 02, 2005
I’ve got a several large projects ahead of me at the moment and it’s at that stage where you are mentally planning out how to go about certain things with the end result in mind.
There’s a fair bit of talk about modularisation at the moment, not only for content, but for the HTML and CSS, and this is the way I’m currently going for the projects. This is partly based on past experience, but also I believe it’s the right thing to do, especially on large projects.
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May 26, 2005
For a few years now I’ve had a bit of an interest in signage. Recently I was the only person to get a bit excited about a road transport exhibition in the Design Museum in London. Why? Well, signs are really interesting when you start thinking about them. So, here’s some thoughts about signs and how we, as designers, can look at them differently and incorporate some the ideas behind signage into what we do.
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March 29, 2005
This has been rattling around my head for a good 9 months now and I think it's high time I went into labour so to speak.
About 18 months I got into the whole User Centred Design approach. I championed the use and creation of Personas on particular projects, got into user flows and scenarios, conducted user interviews and performed other research. This was all before any design was done. This really got me thinking and Jeff Veen's latest post sparked me into action.
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February 04, 2005
I thought it would be good to conduct a bit of research for an upcoming article i’m writing. Guidebooks are a kind of book I just can’t do without when going to a different country or, especially, on a city break.
On a city break, if you’re doing the whole cultural thing, you generally need overviews on what’s available, but then more information if you want it. You also need maps, and good ones.
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September 07, 2004
Had an interesting discussion today at work, mostly based on branding, but it made me think about some interesting things about user orientation. How many times have you asked yourself “Does this navigation work?”, or how many times has a project manager/client/boss asked “how does the user know where they are?”. My guess is quite a few.
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March 29, 2004
Users don’t read. I’m not just talking about web users either. Ever spent more than 1 second reading a road sign? Ever spent more than 1 second reading a direction sign in a public building? Ever spent more than 1 second trying to use a websites navigation? That’s my point.
Designers for the web need to look more at systems design, semiotics and wayfinding for cues for their interfaces.
Take iconography for example. Iconography, especially in computing, has arrisin with the advent of more complex GUI’s, BUT it has risen primarily because of a series of common tasks which need to be illustrated in some ‘real world’ way.
This Image shows a number of icons displayed which show a number of common tasks. As you can see the design of these icons vary, but only subtly. There are some in each set which ‘feel’ right however, these are the successful icons which tap into the unconsious cues associated with semiotics. I question icon design and it’s validity within design. My experience of ‘icon’ design (and i’m not talking branding or logotypes here, just icons) is thay are a) Are not thought about in enough detail b) They are almost always decorational, therefore their function is often secondary to how they look. c) Most icons are so badly designed they need words with them in order to decifer their meaning. Not good.
Here’s a good essay on iconography and semiotics. Have a read, it makes a lot of sense.
Talking of system icon design, this is a great resource for comparing operating systems and their iconography.
Probably more on this later, when i’ve thought a bit more about it.
November 18, 2003
Scott Hirsch at Adaptive Path has written an interesting article on User Experience Accountability.
As designers we’re all too aware that we are under scrutiny on how a project runs. These metrics generally define a projects success but Scott points out that they are not metrics by which we can judge User Experience and therefore an accurate ROI indication.
I'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for