Category Archives: Design Process

Ideal Mix – thoughts on the UX design process

Retro Book cover featuring David Byrne of Talking Heads

Introduction

The explosion of management theory in the 1990’s as pointed out in ‘One market under God’ by Thomas Frank, has created a situation where every one has a better theory than the previous person. This makes me nervous about writing a few posts about UX processes. So I don’t want them to be too theoretical but practical. I also want to credit lots of people along the way, because there are so many clever people out there who have already solved these problems. But I think as a manager you are always looking to find a better way of working. I think as new software becomes available you can practically solves some of the old recurring problems.

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Visual Analysis 1924

Kazimir Malevich portrait

Nearly  a hundred years ago, from 1924 to 1927,  Kazimir Malevich was using charts to explore art styles, movements and techniques. When I saw the charts at his Tate modern retrospective in 2014 they reminded me of so much of my professional work. Where rather than trying to create understanding through words and reports, as a designer you hope to bring research to life through diagrams and charts. Obviously I am not trying to compare myself to a master of modern art, but it was really exciting and unexpected to see these amazing pieces of visual analysis.

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Material Designs

google_material_009

Google has announced a new design language for Android’s UI design. Matias Duarte, the head of Android design at Google, talks through Android L design features, creating a new design language called Material. I have pulled out my highlights from his talk. The stand out was the trouble they had taken to create delightful animations to provide clear feedback on touch devices. He said ‘its delightful when your touch is rewarded with animation….’ and I haven’t considered how important this was before. But this presentation really made the point. Its a very confident piece of work.

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