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Design Tentpoles
Friction Isn’t Always a Bad Thing
Never lose sight of the human aspect of human centered design. Sometimes adding an extra step or intentionally making a step in a flow difficult can result in a better UX. If we remove all friction from products we design, in the long run we’ll lose skills that make us human. Steve Selzer’s (Airbnb) presentation on Designing for Friction codified this notion into one synthesized philosophy that guides a lot of design decision I now make on a daily basis. There’s a human element to experience design that can’t be forgotten as technology forges ahead with automation and services that eroding core human skills.
Obvious Wins
If you’re hiding an important information behind a tap or not giving it enough relevance within the hierarchy of a page, you’re not setting the product up for success.
Selling Designs ≥ Executing on Designs
In the vein of Mike Montiero’s “Snippet from Mike Montiero’s keynote at Interactions 2015”, it’s the product designer’s job to craft scenarios that help the audience (co-workers, stakeholders, etc) understand and empathize with the people who would benefit from the change you’re proposing. Selling may sound like a nebulous term in the context of design, but selling requires energy, anticipation of critique, and storytelling.
Rigorous Honesty is Key to Design Team Success
Difficult conversations come from transparency and as long as everyone is willing to check their ego at the door, good things result from people being comfortable speaking their mind and being receptive to feedback.
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Research on Wearables
The Psychological, Public Health Impact of Activity Trackers
Outside of work, my passion is motivating people to move more through the use of wearable technology. I’m a huge fan of products that are designed to motivate (i.e. Fitbits), rather than robbing us of opportunities to be active (i.e. Segways – don’t steal my steps!). For my semester long graduate Capstone thesis I spent three months investigating the emerging trend that people use activity trackers for up to three months before abandoning the devices. Below is a micro site I developed summarizing a 72 hour experience prototyping event I designed, organized, and executed at the end of the project. My goal for the project was to motivate a group of twelve women to walk 100 specified routes, amounting to 190,000 steps as a group in four days. Together they accomplished the goal in just over 70 hours, far surpassing their daily averages and having a lot of fun along the way…
[button link=”http://pap.sfg.mybluehost.me/puzzle/” target=”_blank”]Puzzle Challenge Summary[/button]
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