Design

Nov

2015

Keeping up with the cutting edge

One of the things I’m loving about self-employment is the opportunity to continuously learn new things. From changing technologies, to new projects, it seems like every week presents a challenge that I have never conquered before.

Last week, I worked my way through some social media best practices courses that served as a refresher course for me as I launch into a social media project for a client. This one in particular from Hootsuite has a series of videos and quizzes that help you work through the changing landscape of social media.

It was great for two reasons:

I refreshed my knowledge, staying up-to-date on the latest best-practices for social media
And, it reminded me of the items that I needed to describe to the client to get the best elements for their profiles and posts

Now that I’m working for myself, doing these kinds of things can be hard. While I’m running through these courses, those are not “billable hours” for me. But it improves my work across many clients and lets me reset my brain for new projects.

How about you? How do you balance the need to do continuing education and research with the need to create billable work?

Nov

2015

Can Design be Hostile?

This is the sixth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

Sometimes when you’re at a conference, you go to a session where you think you’re getting one thing, and what you get is totally different. This is that session.

Hostile Design, a talk given by Shopify Lead UX Designer Cynthia Savard Saucier, was one I was looking forward to. In her session preview, she used the phrase “bad design can kill” and I thought she was going to talk about how poorly designed sites and projects can be painful to use (metaphorical pain here).

Her actual presentation… more of a tirade really… was about how a company’s clever promotion or user experience can actually hurt people (not metaphorical pain here) and how the poor design of her building’s evacuation alarm would lead us all to burn in a fire (not metaphorical fire here). Having trouble following her line of thought? So was I.

But there were a couple of key takeaways that I can get behind.

She started off with “the best designs don’t require instructions.” That is something I’ve been preaching for many years when it comes to web design. I had a client once who wanted instructional overlays for new users. Instead, I advocated for using standard web icons with tooltips, along with a simplified user experience.

The other thing I loved was the explanation of Dark Patterns, which are essentially web practices designed to trick a user into doing something that is in the company’s best interest, but not necessarily the user (Savard Saucier would be so mad about my repeated use of ‘user’ but that is what I do…). An example of this is opt-out email signups on checkout forms, or opt-out subscription services on a free trial signup.

This is the kind of hostile design that I’d originally thought of, and one that we can actually effect change on.

Nov

2015

Open Source is Ugly

This is the fifth in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

One of the themes of the design track at All Things Digital this year was how to add design to Open Source projects. Apparently, design has not been a priority for Open Source in the past, but is becoming an important part of a lot of projects.

The session called Open Source is Ugly on the UX/UI track gave a good overview of why design is important for projects. All projects have users. Sometimes these are the general public, but often in Open Source, these are internal, or specific users, like developers who work in a specific technology, or users who are already using another project that can be extended.

For this reason, developers often don’t think about design as a top priority, but user experience is very important, from Branding to User Interface.

This speaker, Garth Braithwaite from Adobe, talked about choosing a styling platform, integrating design to your project, and giving developers a crash course in design using free online tools, which I plan to check out soon.

You can check those tools out here: Speakerdeck

(Garth and I, incidentally, had a very funny twitter interaction the next day about why my four hour drive should take precedent over the after party. You can check that out and follow me onhere.)

Oct

2015

Constraining Design

This is the second in a series of nine posts on the All Things Open 2015 conference I attended in Raleigh in mid-October. For more information on the conference, along with videos and slides from the presenters, check out the conference website.

The first session I attended at All Things Open was in the UX/UI/Design track. The speaker Shay Howe from Belly described how design constraints can actually free a designer to do what they’re best at. Good constraints include a grid, font/typography choices, color choices, and any existing branding for the site, if it’s available.

“Narrowing your options can clarify challenges,” Howe said, and allow a designer to use fewer resources while maintaining consistent styling across iterations.

As someone who is working on a system to create design as good as my development, this really hit home. It is the reason I always suggest to clients that they should start with a style guide, or even a mood board, to give me constraints to work with. Taking away the basic decisions of font, color, and button styling allows me to spend my limited design resources on interesting elements that really customize a site.

Getting clients to see the importance of these style constraints is also an important part of the process. Clients want to jump right in to seeing a website in progress, and sometimes feel like developing these standards is a waste of time. Done correctly, however, it makes the development process much smoother and faster than the code first method.

“Constraints do not equal sacrifices,” said Howe.

Oct

2015

Design at the Speed of Digital

The web changes quickly and clients expect us to keep up. In this always on age, clients often want design projects turned around within a few days, if not hours.

The traditional agency is used to having a lot longer to do its work. Print deadlines are set many weeks in advance and work is signed off on a weekly basis, not hourly. But when you’re talking about small graphics projects for digital properties, or even iterative web design, those timelines may no longer work for your clients.

But how can you continue to produce excellent design work while working within these newly compressed timelines? Sometimes you just have to wait for inspiration to strike, and sometimes that doesn’t happen overnight (or over the next hour – whatever the case may be).

First, be honest with your clients about your workflow. Especially if you are single-person shop, like I am now, you need to let them know not only that it takes time to produce design work at the quality that they hired you for, but also that you have other commitments, and, at least in my case, you can’t rush the process or you’ll get flawed work that makes no one happy. No one, NO ONE is less happy with flawed work than I am. Not even the client who is paying for it.

Second, you need to re-evaluate your processes and see where efficiencies can be found. Some clients don’t need three mood boards, let alone six. The curse of digital can also be the benefit. You can check in with clients more often which means you don’t have to do unnecessary steps to hone in on a design.

Design

Keeping up with the cutting edge

Can Design be Hostile?

Open Source is Ugly

Constraining Design

Design at the Speed of Digital

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