Tags to Richness

For the longest time I’ve been under the assumption that as the senior interaction designer I would eventually be able to define my company’s product.  Come to find out, I’ll never be able to define the product because it’s not mine, it belongs to our marketing team and ultimately our C.E.O.  The real problem is that there are things about the design of the product that the true owners and I will always disagree about.  I love what I do, I’m not complaining at all, I’m just acknowledging the fact that I realize I want to own my own product one day and that that’ll never happen as the designer.

I’m sure a lot of designers have that ownership itch.  You know you’ve got it when you spend a lot of time trying to influence the product, using every means you know, even branching into that scary world we call politics.  But at the end of the day you realize the nagging feeling is true, it’s just simply not your ship to steer and it never will be.  That’s what Product Owners, V.P.s and C.E.O.s do.

If you’re a designer and you constantly find yourself wanting to own a product’s definition and direction, I hate to tell you, but you went into the wrong profession.  Designers are still just tools for the business people, heavy influencers at best, but never owners and original creators.  If someday you want to own the product, stop what you are doing and go get an MBA or start your own business.

I recently read the Wired Magazine article The Web is Dead by Chris Anderson, and the counter post ‘New Twitter’ shows the Web isn’t dead by Pete Cashmore.  In Anderson’s article he argues that people are trending away from the web and into whatever devices will give them what they want the fastest and easiest.  Cashmore counters by saying that Twitter has seen the light and is striving to provide the best web and mobile experiences it can to survive.

The truth is, the web isn’t dead, it’s just well defined.  Anderson is right that what will ultimately drive people’s spending habits is ease of use and reliability.  People will always choose the easiest most reliable route no matter what the device.  What Anderson is alluding to is that all kinds of devices in all shapes and sizes are now cheap and easily accessible to consumers.  In other words, consumers now have an incredible amount of choices.  And their behavior says they could care less if they are using a browser, TV, tablet or phone as long as they get what they want in the fastest and easiest way possible.

Another way to look at it is that the web has it’s own unique set of advantages and disadvantages, just like TVs, phones and every other little niche device out there.  Each of these tools is easy and more reliable for certain tasks than the other devices.  For example, I’d never want to check movie times on a computer if I can do it on my phone.  But I’d also never want to type an article on a phone or a tablet when a keyboard and mouse are so much more efficient.

Anderson and Cashmore are really both right and both seeming to miss the conclusion.  Anderson is right that people just want the easiest and most reliable interface.  And Cashmore is right that websites are in fact realizing they need to be easier to use and more reliable.  But what I really learned from these two articles is that it is now clearer to us what the web is good for and what it is not good for.  And as a designer designing digital products that sell, I now have to take into account the absolute best delivery device, as well as the best UI, for the product I’m trying to create.

The August 2010 Wired magazine has an article entitled “The Master Planner” (Kelly 90).  The article is basically a question and answer session with Fred Brooks, the author of The Mythical Man-Month which was published 35 years ago.  In the article Brooks is discussing the ideas in his new book The Design of Design.

These are my two favorite quotes, I highly recommend the whole article.

How has your thinking about design changed over the past decades?

When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one.  By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach.  You build a quick prototype and get in front of users to see what they do with it.  You will always be surprised.

You’re a Mac user.  What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it.  I think that’s what Steve Jobs does.  He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Design of Design on Amazon.com

Wired Magazine’s website

In the UX community we throw around terms like delight and desirability as our design goal after usability.  I personally feel like those are just the tip of the iceberg of design potential.  Truly great product design is one that is addictive.  Something that users feel such a need for that the absence of the product creates a level of pain.

I’m definitely not advocating socially irresponsible addiction, I’m advocating the kind addiction that is more in line with “oh shit! I left my iPhone at home, grrrr” kind of pain.  Isn’t that what we’re all really trying to achieve?  Products that no matter the industry and task they are for they create in our users the same kind of product love and loyalty that the iPhone, World of Warcraft or Farmville create for their users?  That level of fervor isn’t created by just delight, it’s created by socially responsible addiction.

I was working on the fine details for my 2010 portfolio design when I decided I wanted to put in some perfect 1 pixel lines through out the design.  I tried creating 1px rectangles in Illustrator but realized this level of pixel precision was very tedious and sloppy in Illustrator and would be so much easier to do in Fireworks.

So chalk one up for Fireworks.  Illustrator was a great tool for designing the concept to a mid-range level of detail.  I find Illustrator is still much faster the Fireworks when it comes to throwing around and refining ideas.  But to get the final pixel perfect precision I want (like what you would see on BestWebGallery) I realized I had to do the final design in Fireworks.