Category: Design
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 4: Research as Bullshit
(This is Part 4. Please read Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3 first.) Okay, in this post I’m going to get a little down and dirty. I’ll show some examples of research which do not seem to really enable a design team to learn more about their users, nor convince stakeholders about correct…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 3: Research as a Political Tool
(This is Part 3. Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.) Explaining it to the boss. Next time you read an article about a user research success story, ask yourself if the conclusions of that research weren’t just common sense (or at least common sense to good UI designers) to begin with. Ask yourself…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 2: Research as a Design Tool
(This is Part 2. Please read Part 1 first.) An eyetracking “heatmap” showing in red where users’ eyes were pointing for the longest time during a page-view. There is a limit, I think, to what a so-called “empirical” user interface test can tell you. At some point, the results must be interpreted in order to…
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User Research Smoke & Mirrors, Part 1: Design vs. Science
Research-based design is a noble and widely-admired approach to building good products, especially in the web design field. Like a great many other user experience design firms, at Behavior we conduct research whenever possible, to whatever degree our clients’ budgets and timelines will allow. Our projects frequently involve usability testing (both lab-based and informal), card-sorting…
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The View From the Other Side of the Microscope
Photo by Liz Danzico The AIGA is currently in the throes of a major web site redesign. Liz Danzico, the AIGA’s Experience Strategy Director, invited me and about 7 other design industry types to attend a card-sorting exercise to help their design team understand how the AIGA’s users think about the types of content and…
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The Vicious Cycle of Web Redesign
Do we really need to keep all this stuff? Can we throw some stuff away before we move in? When we pack our belongings to move to a new apartment or house, we often take stock of our posessions and choose to throw a lot of useless stuff away. We lighten our load so that…
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USA vs UK Cycling
The ads below are both for an innovative new type of bicycle, the high-end “townie”. These are bikes that are designed for everyday use by people wearing normal clothes, but unlike traditional city bikes, these townies use high-quality parts and materials, and are elegantly and stylishly designed. When I first started seeing ads for these…
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Mom’s Design Advice: Take One Thing Off
Prince in “When Doves Cry”. He may have taken a minimal approach to some of his music, but his wardrobe, well, that’s another story. My mother gave me some good fashion advice once when I was an overdecorated punk rock teenager. She delivered it kind of indirectly, me being a boy and all, telling me…
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A Tale of Two Libraries 1: Mapping and Thinking at the NYPL
Yesterday I took my FIT students on a field trip to see the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library of The New York Public Library. It’s a modest little show consisting of several dozen examples of maps, globes, and information graphics — as exemplified by Edward Tufte’s much-beloved…
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Science vs. Art: Visualizing Alien Life
Long-lost Yes album cover. I recently saw a documentary about the search for extraterrestrial life, and I was struck by how even hard science is sometimes fueled at least in part by pure imagination and creativity. And I thought about how design itself is, at its best, as much based on raw, unfiltered inspiration as…