Reading Time: < 1 minDesign is a tricky thing, and it’s often misunderstood. Most people think of design in terms of “beautiful colors”, but design is less about how something looks and more about how people respond to it. As he often does, Steve Jobs put it perfectly: “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s […]
Design
Is it clever or self-indulgent?
Reading Time: < 1 minThere is a fine line between a design that is clever and one that is self-indulgent, and they often fall to the latter. As Don Norman said in “The Design of Everyday Things“: “Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.” Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter which […]
Good design is hard to notice
Reading Time: < 1 minA few days ago I shared the concept of Norman Doors, which are doors that can be confusing to open. When you come across a typical door and push the flat plate to open it, it just works and you don’t really notice it. However, when you come to a door with a handle on […]
Norman Doors are everywhere
Reading Time: < 1 minI recently finished reading Don Norman’s excellent “The Design of Everyday Things“, and I highly recommend it. He mentions in the book something I’ve heard about a bit before that he coined decades ago call “Norman Doors”. As he explains: Somehow, when a device as simple as a door has to have a sign telling […]
The magic is in the mundane
Reading Time: 2 minApple tends to do something very special with their products that other companies miss — they get the tiny details perfect. I disagree with some of their larger features and goals, but when they do something, they do it right. Going all the way back to the Apple II, Steve Jobs insisted that the chips […]
People aren’t tennis balls
Reading Time: 2 minFor an official Type 2 tennis ball, which weighs between 1.975 – 2.095 ounces, dropping it from a height of 100 inches should bounce back up between 53-58 inches. If you take the same tennis ball and do the same test, you’re going to get the same result. People are quite different than that, which […]
“Make it darker” is not an acceptable form of feedback
Reading Time: 2 minFeedback can be a wonderful thing, as I’ve shared many times on here (like “Feedback is a gift“), but only if it’s the right kind of feedback. If someone says “I like it“, that’s not very helpful, because our clients are not the people that we build websites for. Their liking it or not is […]
Make the complicated simple
Reading Time: < 1 minMaking something simple can be a very tricky thing to do. Historically, Apple has been fantastic at this, with hugely complex products that have a very simple and intuitive UI. As I shared a few years ago, many things start out simple, gradually become more complex, and then need to put in some work to […]
Set them free to do their thing
Reading Time: 2 minWhen building websites, or really any kind of marketing deliverable, we have to strike an interesting balance. On the one hand, we have a tight scope of work and a clear directive on what needs to happen. On the other hand, we’re not always sure exactly what that looks like. If someone needs a new […]
Keep it simple: Sonder to Empathy, or Experience to Work
Reading Time: 2 minI’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that. Sonder First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading […]