Posts of the Link variety
Don Norman reminds us how humans evaluate and interpret experiences before, during and after they’ve occurred:
Rosy projection: “the tendency for people to anticipate events as more favorable and positive than they describe the experience at the time of its occurrence”;
Dampening: “the tendency for people to minimize the favorability or pleasure of events they are currently experiencing”;
Rosy Retrospection: the tendency for people to remember and recollect events they experience more fondly and positively than they evaluated them to be at the time of their occurrence.”
The insights are directly applicable to design:
Design for memory. Exploit it. What is the most important part of an experience? Psychologists emphasize what they call the primacy and recency effects, with recency being the most important. In other words, what is most important? The ending. What is next most important? The start. So make sure the beginning and the end are wonderful… Accent the positive and it will overwhelm the memory for the negative.
Here you will find a PDF of Jon Hick’s talk on icon design. The presentation reminded me of a great survey (Comparative Test of Public Symbols) and introduced me to a new resource (Iconfinder). Select slides featured below.
If you’ve ever implemented or designed a feature, this account of the process will likely resonate with you. What on the surface looks like a simple tweak easily snowballs into an avalanche of repercussions. My favorite quip comes in the end:
Applying the 80/20 rule means you will get feature requests from the 20.
A set of icons based on the visual language of Helvetica Bold. Roll over the area in the top right (the big “245″) to see the icon set preview. A very pleasant respite from the glossy, high-fidelity style of Apple-inspired icons.
This pleasantly illustrated website, courtesy of Roberta Tassi’s thesis, catalogs a wide array of design ‘tools’ used in a design process. A tool in this case can be a ‘Use Case’, a ‘Customer Journey Map’ or ‘Group Sketching’. The nice thing about the organization, once you grok it, is that you can answer a question like: what design tools can I use to examine the interaction? Or, what can I do in the testing phase?
My favorite parts are the infographics found on the about page. For example, this one maps the tools in the context of a design process as well as the people’s capabilities required to use the tool. While this one displays the tools in the context of the disciplines that gave rise to them.
