Three Perfect Tools An Article by Tim Bray www.tbray.org There is a particular joy in a product that just does what you need done, in about the way you expect or (thrillingly) better, and isn’t hard to figure out, and doesn’t change unnecessarily. Here are three to learn from. toolsperfectiondesign
Apps Getting Worse An Article by Tim Bray www.tbray.org Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products. ...Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process. We need to stop breaking the software people use. Everyone deserves better. It begins with craft uxsoftwareproducts
Skeleton, Organs, Circulation, Sinew, Skin An Article by Dorian Taylor I’m concerned with how I witness the work of user experience practitioners getting treated: like it’s just a set of motions toward a product’s all-important implementation, and one that we try to compress, due to its ostensible superfluity. Once the implementation is finished, the UX work appears to usually get discarded. Tracing the answer backThe UX coral reef ux
Tracing the answer back I submit that the materials that form the precursors to a product’s implementation have considerable value on their own. My vision is that I will be able to ask a question as mundane as one about the wording of a single button, and trace the answer all the way back to the overarching business strategy to see that it makes sense. decisions
The UX coral reef It isn’t a site, or a service, or even an identifiable product at all, but rather a system for creating a skin around and connective tissue between things like: Demographic studies Contextual inquiries Stakeholder and user interviews Surveys The business ecosystem Personas Scenarios Sketches, storyboards, wireframes Mockups, models and prototypes Email and IM conversations Meeting notes Content inventories and audits Concept schemes, taxonomies, thesauri A UI style guide A branding and visual identity guide A voice and tone guide A code style guide ...etc The individual elements of such a corpus represent the work of half a dozen specialist sub-disciplines, and are useful for realizing a product’s implementation. But if you hook them all up together, they merge to become a strategic artifact that transcends products and operates as a critical control surface for the business. This is because what such an artifact represents is a coral reef of deeply-considered and hard-fought decisions, and a story of the process that yielded them. connection