the recognition effect

a brand experience idea: users are people, too. this is my search marketing/social media/user experience link dump/share. be sure to check out my UX RSS feed bundle. i'm currently a user experience architect at VML. if you'd like to contact me, please gmail me at tyler [dot] hilker.

[therecognitioneffect]

(via The Daily Design Quote | Interaction Design Foundation)

[therecognitioneffect]

In an eyetracking experiment comparing different clickability clues, weak and flat signifiers required more user effort than strong ones.

Pushing back on that article a bit (as i tend to do with NNG  )...

They picked some pretty bad/easy examples to work with (as I think they tend to do; they might call this confirmation or selection bias), none of which had anything to do with flat design.

The "Page Pairs with Different User Gaze Patterns" lack higher-level design considerations &  could easily be fixed without shadows, gradients, etc. The "Page Pairs with Nearly Identical User Gaze Patterns" each have strong signifiers *with* flat design elements because they properly employ affordance, focus, contrast, etc.

The real lesson of this study is that bad & unusable design can be achieved with skeuomorphic, flat, trendy, classic, or any other design style. 

[therecognitioneffect]

Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume, and space. Thinking in relationships.

László Moholy-Nagy | IIT Institute of Design

[gregmelander]

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design

Dieter Rams (via gregmelander)

[therecognitioneffect]

Thinkers from Albert Einstein to Peter Drucker have emphasized the importance of properly diagnosing your problems. So why do organizations still struggle to get it right? Part of the reason is that we tend to overengineer the diagnostic process.

Are You Solving the Right Problems?

[therecognitioneffect]

[therecognitioneffect]

But great lives are very rarely created in great comfort.

Jon Acuff, Do Over

[therecognitioneffect]

When the design system is boring, it frees designers and developers to do the new stuff, to solve new problems. The design system carries the burden of the boring, so that designers and developers don’t have to.

The Most Exciting Design Systems Are Boring | Big Medium

[therecognitioneffect]

"[In Day 2], you stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you're doing the process right. Gulp. It's not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, 'Well, we followed the process,'" Bezos writes. "A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process."

Amazon: Jeff Bezos 2017 shareholder letter

[therecognitioneffect]

"Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen,"

Amazon: Jeff Bezos 2017 shareholder letter

[therecognitioneffect]

4 reasons to invest in UX design - InVision Blog

Every dollar invested in UX brings $100 in return.

[therecognitioneffect]

A creative cannot but look at the world differently. It is part of the job. But it is more than naturally having a different point of view. I think it is about actively searching for other ways, combining ideas, trying challenging approaches, generating visions, and finding other curious people to play with.

Sam Stubblefield: Why Designers Must Think Like Contrarians - 99U

[therecognitioneffect]

When we hire, we are looking for people who have two deep practices. Deep is admittedly a subjective term, but we think of it like Pi – have two good legs to stand on. For example, a former student of mine got a degree in both music and architecture at UC Berkeley, and then she decided to create music/sounds specifically for places. She has two deep practices, but she also has a squiggle across the top – the wavy symbol which says to me that that person can figure it out because they’re entrepreneurial, creative, and not too rigid. You can put any of those people against a problem, and you’ll often get a useful solution out of it.

Sam Stubblefield: Why Designers Must Think Like Contrarians - 99U

[therecognitioneffect]

This project worked because the team followed the principles of mission command, which is based on outcomes, not outputs. Give teams a strategy and a set of outcomes to achieve, along with a set of constraints, and then give them the freedom to use their firsthand knowledge of the situation to solve the problem.

You Need to Manage Digital Projects for Outcomes, Not Outputs

[therecognitioneffect]

They launched a radically simplified version of the service, one with very few automated features. The Taproot team knew it would need more automation if it wanted the system to scale, but it also knew automation could come later. Launching early achieved two goals. First, it ensured that the team would have something to show to funders at the annual event. This was a hugely important marketing and sales goal. But launching early addressed an even more important goal: It allowed the team to learn what features it would actually need in order to operate the system at scale. In other words, it allowed the team to establish a sense-and-respond loop — a two-way conversation with the market that would guide the growth of the service.

You Need to Manage Digital Projects for Outcomes, Not Outputs

[thehilker]

(via The Daily Design Quote | Interaction Design Foundation)

[thehilker]

You’re not managing a product. You’re managing the problem it solves.

So you want to manage a product? (via thehilker)