Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery. Brasília is a remarkable, bizarre city. The vision of architect Oscar Niemeyer, it was built in just four years, from 1956 to 1960. More than 50 years later, its beauty and elegance are renowned. But Brazil’s capital city is known for something else as well: how difficult it is to live there. A “shiny citadel” from far away, as The Guardian once wrote, up close Brasília has “degraded into a violent, crime-ridden sprawl of cacophonous traffic jams. The real Brazil has spilled into its utopian vision.” This problem echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where the needs of ordinary users spill constantly into designers’ utopian vision. Why can’t some interactive products find enough users to be sustainable? Most importantly, what can we do about it? The rise of usable, useless products#section1 One of the major problems that new products in particular run into is a lack of product/market fit, as Marc Andreessen has noted: Why products fail to fit#section2 Step 1. 1. 2. 3.
Interaction-Design.org. Designing Screens Using Cores and Paths. Imagine you’re on one side of a grass lawn and you want to reach the bus stop on the opposite side. Do you walk on the sidewalk around the edges or cross in the middle? Assuming the grass is dry and it’s not prohibited, you’d probably take the shortest path and walk across the lawn to the bus stop. If others have done so before, you may see a beaten path that you could follow. Such unplanned paths connect the shortest distance between two points, and we can find them everywhere in our surroundings. In urban planning they are known as “desire paths” or “desire lines.”[1] They are an indication of the gap between natural human behavior and contrived routes.
Architect Christopher Alexander recognizes desire lines in his renowned book, A Pattern Language (1976)[2]. To lay out paths, first place goals at natural points of interest. In principle, Alexander’s approach is to begin with the goals—the things people ultimately want—and then link them together in the most useful way. 1. 2. 3. Summary. UX Ideas | Barnabas Nagy. The Principles Of Gamification. » Experience Design Models: Minding the Gap Between Ideas and Interfaces Johnny Holland. I have never, ever, had an original song or melody pop into my head. I frankly think it would take me a lifetime to become a one-hit maker; let alone a one-hit wonder. I have however, had numerous occasions when I’ve heard a song and then imagined a movie scene play out.
For me, the inspiration needs to first come in the way of a soundtrack. I can then fill in the blanks with a storyline. In becoming mindful of my own personal nature, I’ve recently started paying more attention to how others around me think as well; and more specifically, how they approach design problems. In thinking about the differences between these types of personal attributes, I’ve also started noticing that we designers sometimes leap from nascent ideas to interfaces far too quickly when faced with a design problem.
So what can we do to better communicate experience design vision during that window of opportunity between raw ideas and design deliverables? What? What exactly is an experience model? Why? When? Post-Artifact Books and Publishing — by Craig Mod. — Craig Mod, June 2011 "Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three. " — Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History1 What is a book, anymore, anyway? 2 We will always debate: the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display; the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting; location by page, location by paragraph. Stop there.3 Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot.
In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. The future book — the digital book — is no longer an immutable brick. The book of the past reveals its individual experience uniquely. For those of us looking to shape the future of books and publishing, where do we begin? The way books are written has changed. We have an opportunity now to shape these systems. 1.