Nice article by Aubrey Johnson: Hollow Icons on why hollow icons are just more work for people. This is yet another reason why the iOS7/flat design style just isn’t fully baked; removing too much affordance requires more cognitive load on the user. His thesis: “Don’t follow bad design decisions to appease a platform.” Obviously nobody […]

Continue Reading: Hollow icons = cognitive load

Great post by Christina Wodtke on change: User don’t hate change. They hate you. The first point is critical: user’s don’t hate change. This knee-jerk explanation is almost always wrong. What people don’t like is to have to re-learn something they already knew. They don’t like starting over. They don’t like being forced to change […]

Continue Reading: Designing for change is about keeping users in control

I think the future of sharing design work will be more about story and less about visuals.

Continue Reading: Tell your design story

I thought I was the only one who thought about user requirements like this…a nice insightful piece by Alan Klement: Replacing The User Story With The Job Story. Alan points out that with user stories it’s not as clear a connection between what someone wants to do (their goal) and the task they’re doing to […]

Continue Reading: User Story vs. Job Story

Amazon has designed themselves into a Local Maximum but mobile and tablet use will help get them out of it.

Continue Reading: A thought on Amazon’s new product page design

Fred Wilson, on reading the Steve Jobs biography and observing how Jobs brought product focus to Apple: “(Jobs) brought focus to the product line, and thus everything else. There’s this great scene in the book where Jobs draws a classic four quadrant chart, consumer and pro on one axis, desktop and laptop on the other. […]

Continue Reading: Finding Focus

Great post on Serious Pony about cognitive resources: Your app makes me fat. This post retells the story of feature bloat in terms of the cognitive effort it forces upon the people who use our design. As we add more features, we add additional friction to the user’s day, and not just while they’re using […]

Continue Reading: Can an app makes you fat?

Great post by Ryan Singer: Vital elements of the product design process. He outlines a simple way to think about the pieces of a product: the job it does, the design patterns you use, and the resulting product concept. Lots to like in this article, including this gem of an analogy: “When the job isn’t […]

Continue Reading: Singer’s vital elements of product design

A nice piece by Chris Dixon on why ideas matter…they are part of a plan. “In response to this pop culture misconception, it has become popular in the startup community to say things like “execution is everything” and “ideas don’t matter”. But the reality is that ideas do matter, just not in the narrow sense […]

Continue Reading: Get the idea?

Great post by Rian van der Merwe: Hey Marketers, making a website is not about you on getting the frame of reference right about your website. It’s not about you, or getting people to do what you want, it’s about providing a place where people can do what they want. Classic inversion problem…similar to the […]

Continue Reading: What is a website for?