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.
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.
I had a lovely time chatting with @JenSimmons, host of The Web Ahead podcast on the @5by5 network. We talked about interface design, working in design teams, and the joy and pain of critical feedback. Have a listen, won’t you?
We take our brand very seriously at MailChimp, not because we are hyper brand-nazis, but because our brand is our personality. It’s who we are as individuals and as a collective. We think a lot about how to convey our personality consistently while adapting to different contexts. MailChimp’s Content Curator, @katekiefer, has been pondering how to shape the MailChimp voice while adapting tone to the emotional state of readers. We have a lot of people writing for us, and guiding them into the voice of the brand can be tricky. That’s why we’ve created a simple little website that shows our writers how to use the MailChimp voice. It’s called Voice and Tone.
Nearly four years ago I stumbled onto a topic that I just can’t get off my mind. As we’ve started to share more of our personal lives online and the barriers of our public personas have begun to crumble, we’ve started speaking with a more authentic voice. The blurred line between personal and professional is starting to influence our expectations of the products and services we seek.
I recently spoke with A Book Apart editor Mandy Brown (@aworkinglibrary) about design, psychology, branding, and finding a place for emotional design in our professional workflow. Our conversation has been published in .net Magazine.
Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s research on emotion and its evolutionary origins provides fascinating insights and foundational theory for those of us exploring emotional design.
I travel a lot, so I end up spending more time on travel booking sites than I’d like. When you’re planning for a trip there’s just so much on your mind. You’ve got to figure out your schedule, who’s going to pick you up at the airport, what the weather’s going to be like, and you have to make plans with people at your destination. All of these things have some bearing on the flight you need to book. If you’re like me, you wait until the last minute to book your flight because it’s just such a hassle to figure it all out. It’s a lot of stress. When I go to book a flight, I just want to find one that is going to inflict the least amount of pain.
The workshop was so perfectly timed as the UX Sketchbook I’ve been working on had just rolled off the presses, and it was time to take it for a serious test drive. As I mentioned earlier here, the UX Sketchbook was really designed to support quick ideation, and specifically, sketchboarding.
I’ve noticed a trend happening not only in my day to day work as a user experience designer, but throughout our industry. UX work requires a great deal of diplomacy, and a mastery of the languages spoken in many sub-disciplines of web design and business teams. UX designers are becoming translators, and diplomats as well as designers.
I’ve written a short article on UXMag.com about this issue. An excerpt follows:
As UX designers, our role in our industry is more important today than ever. Our medium is maturing into a broad, multiple-platform, always on, multi-context, center-of-our-universe conduit for information. Our clients and customers are demanding more of us. We’re not just designing web experiences anymore. Our designs have to adapt and respond to a variety of devices with different input methods that are used under very different circumstances where user goals and expectations change as well.
BetaBrand makes hipster clothing, each piece with its own story and witty micro-brand. The interaction patterns on their ecommerce site are equally as clever. Add something to the shopping cart and watch it peel out in a flaming blaze of glory.
BetaBrand has obviously been checking out Photojojo. Would love to hear from BetaBrand about how emotional design has influenced sales and marketing figures.
