Testing one user early in the project is better than testing fifty near the end.
@skrug
Testing one user early in the project is better than testing fifty near the end.
@skrug
For every dollar a company invests to increase usability, it receives $10-$100 in benefits.
John Karat, IBM Research
Form follows function emotion.
Although his focus was on the Macintosh, Jobs wanted to create a consistent design language for all Apple products. So he set up a contest to choose a world-class designer who would be for Apple what Dieter Rams was for Braun. The project was code-names Snow White, not because of his preference for the color but because the products to be designed were code-named after the seven dwarfs. The Winner was Hartmut Esslinger, a German designer who was responsible for the look of Sony’s Trinitron televisions. Jobs flew to the Black Forest region of Bavaria to meet him and was impressed not only with Esslinger’s passion but also his spirited way of driving his Mercedes at more than one hundred miles per hour.
Even though he was German, Esslinger proposed that there should be a “born-in-America gene for Apple’s DNA” that would produce a “California global” look, inspired by “Hollywood and music, a bit of rebellion, and natural sex appeal.” His guiding principle was “Form follows emotion”, a play on the familiar axiom that form follows function. He produced forty models of products to demonstrate the concept, and when JObs saw them he proclaimed, “Yes, this is it!” The Snow White look, which was adopted immediately for the Apple II c, featured white cases, tight rounded curves, and lines of thin grooves for both ventilation and decoration. Jobs offered Esslinger a contract on the condition that he move to California. They shook hands and , in Esslinger’s not-so-modest- words, “that handshake launched one of the most decisive collaborations in the history of industrial design.” Esslinger’s firm frogdesign, opened in Palo Alto in mid-1983 with a $1.2 million annual contract to work for Apple, and from then on every Apple product has included the proud declaration “Designed in California.”
This story from Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography says a lot about how usabile products change us.
Pain is temporary, suck is forever.
/ht @jmspool
@kevinrose interviews Scott Harrison of @charitywater, a non-profit that is changing the world through design, technology, marketing, and compassion. Scott’s life story is absolutely inspiring.
Buy a Coke with a hug.
Soundcloud explores the four effects sound has on us – physiological, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral – in a concrete complement to their wonderful abstract short film, Sound.
There is little difference technically between a complicated, confusing program and a simple, fun, and powerful product. The problem is one of culture, training, and attitude of the people who make them. [...] We are deficient in our development process, not in our development tools.
Allen Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
I’m working on a new talk about brand honesty, and shaping the voice and personality of products. I’ll be debuting the talk at Future Insights in Las Vegas in April. Interested in a sneak peek at what I’ll be talking about? Check out this interview I did with the folks at Future Insights.
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Jonathan Ive, from the book, Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson
What’s clear, and it’s been said before, is that there’s an opening for a new type of designer. Someone that understands interaction design, product design and can add character to things through behaviour. A light touch. Very subtle in order to make them believable – without them being too ridiculous.
