Usability & Beyond
Musings on Design, Usability and much more.
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The Happy Mac icon has become a cult figure for Mac enthusiasts like me. It was designed by Susan Kare in the early 1980s and remained unchanged until Mac OS 9, when it was updated to 8-bit colour.
When the Macintosh boots into OS9 or lower, it makes a chimes and the screen turns grey. After a few seconds, a Happy Mac icon will appear, followed by the Mac OS splash screen.
The Happy Mac icon was removed with the introduction of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar which replaced it with a large grey Apple logo.
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Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what’s right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
This list of design manifestos was buried in a previous post but deserves its own permalink. It is largely drawn from Mario Piazza’s presentation at the Più Design Puòconference in Florence, though I’ve edited and added to it. I’ve also added links where I could find them.
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“It’s important to come up with the best text possible, because despite the term graphic user interface, many of the user interface elements we actually design—as opposed to those that are part of an operating system user interface or framework—are text elements.”
- Pabini Gabriel-Petit—VP, User Experience, at scanR, Inc.; Publisher and Editor in Chief, UXmatters; Principal User Experience Architect at Spirit Softworks; Emeritus Member of Board of Directors, Interaction Design Association (IxDA)
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- Make information easy to find with clear headings and meaningful sub-headings (not ‘clever’ ones).
- Break up the information into manageable pieces.
- Put the pieces in a logical order for your readers.
- Keep your sentences short and employ one idea per paragraph.
- Use the ‘inverted pyramid’ style: conclusion (context) first, results later.
- Talk to your readers. Use “you”.
- Write in the active voice (most of the time).
- Put the action in the verb, not in the nouns.
- Use your readers’ words.
- Use half the word count (or less) than conventional writing.
- Use bulleted lists where appropriate – for a list of items and for parallel “if, then” sentences.
- Employ scannable text like highlighted keywords.
Excerpted from IT Solutions Blog
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- Importance to the business: Just how important is the project/application in meeting organisational/business goals?
- Importance to users: What will happen to users if you mess up. Will they be harmed, or will they just go elsewhere?
- $$: How much is the project going to cost? (i.e. how much will be wasted if you mess up)
- Profile/politics: What sort of profile does your project have? Is there a political implication? (e.g. is the Minister going to get hauled up in Parliament if you mess up. Will your work reflect badly on your industry?)
- Convincing others: How much work will you need to do to convince other people that your ideas are good?
- Existing knowledge: How much (real) knowledge do you have about your users?
- Ability to iterate: Can you make changes quickly if you make a mistake, or is it a one-shot deal?
- Feedback: How easy is it to collect feedback from your users?
Excerpted from Making desicions about user research
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What have I been doing? It turns out there is a phrase for it, and it’s been around a while.
“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site.” Courtesy Avinash Kaushik
HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.
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Six ways to be more agile and better integrate user experience and information architecture into agile development teams.
