Jonathan Jeter

Director of Application Development

Home Archives for good design

The Science of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea at #SXSW2012

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Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #Dangerous #SXDangerous
by Ben McAllister (Assoc Creative Dir – frog design)

Richard Feynman - Image via Wikipedia

Research is about informing decisions.

“The Research” – the data doesn’t speak for itself. Someone should interpret it.

The Science of Certainty vs. The Science of Wonder

Scientism vs. Science

The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty by William Byers

Different kinds of research are very different from each other, there is a broad spectrum.

Hard sciences have laws that predict things with a large degree of certainty.

Social Sciences have experiments.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have “looking at stuff”. In design, we don’t do a lot of real scientific studies.

Cargo Cult Science – Richard Feynman’s Commencement Speech at CalTech

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Coming Soon – The New Google +1 Button

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New Google +1 buttonThe Google+ Developers group announced today that the next update to the +1 button is strictly a UI change, with no functionality differences. I like the look of the clicked button, after you have activated it by using the plus one functionality.

However, the +1 button itself, not clicked, seems a little too camouflaged to me. It blends in with the surrounding area and doesn’t yell “click me!” like a good “call to action” button should. We talk a lot about the difference between what good design looks like and good design that actually gets user interaction, so I’m sure the good folks developing the Google+ button have tested the new design and found that the new design outperforms the old. They wouldn’t just change things to keep changing things, would they?

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Jared Spool – The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles

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UIE Web App Master’s Tour – Seattle, Washington – May 24, 2011

Jared Spool, CEO & Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering and co-author of Web Anatomy, started the session by showing examples of web sites that had serious usabilities. Some of the designs were attractive, but did not serve the users needs. In most examples, the user had to click multiple items or jump back and forth between pages or flyouts (a process he referred to as “pogo-sticking”) to find the information that would help them make the decision they were supposed to make to allow them to continue with the process. The takeaway was that when we encounter a problem in our application that hinders users, we should strive to help people make a choice in the easiest way possible.

Dieter Rams

Dieter Rams was the first person to create a standardized set of design principles, which are as follows:

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