I Am a Boring Old White Guy from Kansas
People who know me, have read more than five words I have written, seen me present, etc know that I am all about global and universal design, but here and there I get called out for a moment as some out of touch midwesterner so sure, why not list out my credentials?
First, mindset. You don’t actually have to have experienced stuff to be an advocate and ally. I can go on about this, but strongly believe it. Read a book, talk to some people, give a crap about things. Believe that progress is possible and work towards it.
But for those that think only experience counts…
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Measuring Success Through Stakeholder Management
Notes from what I presented on 26 May 2022 at the UXPA-NJ monthly meetup.
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Designing for Touch
The mobile smart device has taken over the world, and with it the touchscreen interface. There are over two billion portable touchscreen devices in use today, and hundreds of millions more installed in cars and kiosks.
Read the state-of-the-art research, learn to ignore out of date info, and get simple guidelines for how to design for how people really hold and touch their phones and tablets.
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Fitts’ Law In The Touch Era
Fitts’ Law is generally misunderstood and misapplied for mouse, but presents us even bigger challenges when moving to touchscreen devices. I explore the history and context in which it was created, the assumptions it has which apply to almost no users on any devices today, and give some advice for how to apply the old lessons to modern, touchscreen devices.
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My "Never Do This" List
Almost all widgets are fine when used properly. Dark patterns aren’t really evil widgets, but evil use of them; the big patterns book has a paragraph or two on anti-patterns at the end of each one, so you know how to avoid pitfalls and peril. Lots of people say to never use very common things like say the Hamburger Menu. But it’s fine, if used properly. Bad implementations don’t make an item bad itself.
But there are indeed a handful of truly Bad Things. Evil widgets that should be gathered up and buried in a circle of stones at midnight under a full moon. Yet, they persist:
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Principles of Mobile Design
Principles exist at a higher level than any pattern. They can be considered patterns for the patterns, if you will. Each pattern, and each detail of interactive or presentational design, should adhere to each of these principles at all times.
This resource is an evolution of an introductory section for the book Designing Mobile Interfaces. Each section and chapter in the book began with a discussion of the core principles for their sections, as well as other helpful guidelines that apply to those patterns.
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Understanding Location
While many people still talk about the constraints of mobile devices—how they have small screens and are hard to type on—I focus on the value they bring by not making users type and by doing things that no other devices can do.
Sensors are the real key to the magical appeal of mobile devices—and location is one of the first and best of these sensing technologies. Knowing users’ location is an excellent way to tie their reality to the digital experience you’re designing, and understanding the technology and how to integrate it is important, and a lot more complex than most people realize.
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My Association With UXmatters
I, and my company, cannot support in thought word or deed any organization that's assumes the primacy of one group over another in any manner. I am especially disappointed and disconcerted that your statements were delivered in the guise of UXmatters. This associates all contributors such as myself with these positions.
I will not be submitting further articles for consideration of publication by UXmatters, and request withdrawal from the Advisory Board with immediate effect.
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Color and Universal Design
In my latest column for UXmatters I discuss Color and Universal Design. Not how to pick pretty color palettes, but understanding color, contrast, colorblindness and more.
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My Experience With a "Wearable" Medical Device
Everyone who likes my detailed heuristic gripes, I got a thing for you. For non-life-threatening reasons, I am wearing this for four days, and within 5 seconds I could tell that I was going to have a lot to say.
As usual, this is not to “be mean” or just to gripe for the sake of it. It is all a case study in how we can do better than this. Don’t fall into these traps with your products, whether hardware, software, or service, regardless of market.
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Task Flows and the Process of Designing Interactions
A few years back, for this column, I wrote a series on what I called design tools, covering software, deliverables, and design methods that I commonly used. Lately, my six-year-old column “Tools for Mobile UX Design: Task Flows” has been coming up in discussions about this topic. While it’s not truly out of date, and I still agree with everything it says, it was a bit broad and offered almost too many options. So let’s dive into this topic again, and I’ll discuss some very specific tactics that really help organizations of all sorts get a handle on the design of interactions…
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Process Articles
I am a huge process nerd so have written up a lot on it over the years. Here, for starters, I have gathered them all up for when you want to know what I think of it.
Eventually I’ll likely update this to actually have some text itself explaining my thoughts on how to build — most of all — a UX team that works well with modern assumptions of speed and efficiency.
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Pragmatic Design Solutions
In the last edition of Ask UXmatters, a reader asked what to do when you’ve come late to a project, find there’s no time or budget to make maximal UX impact. This has been an increasingly important topic as everyone admits that the dream of UX really changing the business is probably over, and we need to start building formal processes within the constraints we all work in…
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Onboarding Yourself
After some questions lately on how to start your job when not joining a large and well-organized UX team, I wrote up my tips on carving out a space for your work, and creating the right environment for design-centric product development. There are some special notes on mobile issues, or how to move your existing team from traditional desktop digital into the mobile space as well.
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Greeking
Greeking is a 500 year old term that refers to any use of placeholder text or images in design, mockups, or samples.
There are many more options for greeking than just “lorem ipsum” and in fact that should almost never be used. Read on to find out why.
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Regionalizing Your Mobile Designs, Part 2
In Part 1 of this two-part series, I provided an overview of how to regionalize your products—approaching regionalization from a procedural and technical point of view—and detailed the approach you should take.
In this part I get into more details about how to design for different regions, as well as describe how to format specific attributes such as date, time, currency, names, and units of measurement…
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Regionalizing Your Mobile Designs
Regionalization means considering the entire context of people’s different needs in other parts of the world, not just hiring some service to change the display language.
Do not just let anyone write a story that says “translate the website” but think about the entire range of things that can change when you really offer your app or website in a new region…
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Mobile Is Now Everything
The mouse didn’t exist until the Mother of All Demos in 1968, and cost as much as a car until Apple decided to ship them with the Macintosh and make them mainstream in the mid 80s. The normal computer, of windows, mouse pointer, and so… on is a quite recent phenomenon.
And maybe, was an anomaly. Maybe the real normal has always been direct screen manipulation. Pens, and touch. Which is what the vast billions of computing devices in the world, from phones to convertible tablet PCs, all work like now.
Are you designing for this new world or did it sneak up on you?
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How to Criticize Design
I regularly encounter people, or posts, that refer to all criticism as bad. That it stifles creativity, especially for us sensitive artsy designer types. I could hardly disagree more. Criticism is a key part of discovering new ideas and working collaboratively. I am not brilliant enough to get by without help from others.
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