The Adventures of Cindy Li

SXSW 2006: Dogma Free Design

March 14 , 2006

Speakers

Goto
Grossman
Wrobleski
Knemeyer

• 1. web design shuld be controlled by designers
• 2. ajax is fthe future of the web
• 3. every big company should have a usability lab
• 4. All web apps require ethnographic research (going into people’s environments)
• 5. 99% of flash is bad

Joel: Dejavu when they started talking about the approaches are mainstream.
Product dev. innovation.

Goto: background is design, research design started to try and incorporate what we believe in. Ethnogrophy. Someone needs to support the good things. Like vitamins.. do we do the good things enough? These are good.

Wroblewski: Startered in graphic design, then human factors, and then taught information. T shape people.. horizontal skillset then deep in one thing.
Design is going to save companies.The way products came to be.
Part of the product.  How did we get here? What’s the path or the dna of how we dvelop things today.
Software design became as an engineering driven.. then to biz-driven-artist?business? engineering?
The focus was cut by the business. Little bit of a mess of bringing design into it.

Apple computer has done really well.

Savant

Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service
-Steve Jobs, Apple

Scientific method

Introduce cautous, well-measured changes and introductions of new features and products [...}UI is a science not an art.
-Marissa Mayer, VP Product, Google

These two different processes

They are trying to minimize things a slight killer of innovation/creativity. These large tests are bucket tests.  Tested like crazy. Not really doing design per se. Web application design. Are you barely innovating testing.  You cannot test a mcdonald’s burger vs mcdonald’s burger with cheese, and onions.

Goto:Although we’ve been looking at web apps we want a reality check. We want feedback for best practices for the methodologies.

Grossman: freelance designer.. give it to me now. How do we respond for the things that we tore off? Things that work for us.

RFP process….

The chart.. for criteria of user experience.
How do we abstract this to personas?
You absolutely can’t design to this.

If your product is about human interaction and you are doing it against a survey. Then you aren’t doing it properly. You need to talk to peeps.

Did you get a usabiility test result that was percentages..
and bad…
The blue header is preferred by aging hispters by 13% over the green header. Soccer moms liked it too—23%

How many are in product development?
personality and lifestyle-driven,
appropriately designeed and targeted to user needs?
how do we apply it?

What about the content? The web mentality has overtaken a more rich and enformed way of building products.

Wrboblewski: the check list.. is scary
Did you do this.. check…check..

Design communicates, tell you what it is.

Design as commucation a strategic value-add on

Goto: process… been blasted on this.
Cut out as much documentation but maintain communication.
W: change the language
The checklist for the dev process

If you are measuring against personas vs. spreadsheet

Who can define the problem can define the solution
If you can articulate the problem design vs biz.. then you can define the answer.

Meanwhile..

JEREMY KEITH is creating am I hot or not.. about peppers/curry.. doing api feed next to me. Cause he’s uber geek. I say that adoringly cause I can’t do that. :)
Trying to convince him.. to get ISTHISHOTORNOT.COM.
Maybe if I can figure out how to do the api feed.. we can have a Jeremy Keith feed of pics for adactiohotornot.com or jeremyhotornot.com.

A devil whispers in my ear.. :) I can help you with that..

I’ll keep his name out of this so that Jeremy can just blame me. http://www.indyornot.com (indiana jones reference)...

Will post the link later.

Goto:
www.gotomedia/goto/lifestyle/process
It’s not done btw… the next few weeks.
Start off w/the first release…technically feasible. We have our bizness needs…

This thinking needs to be introduced to take some research and testing, feedback outside of dev cycle.