Oct 20
An Event Apart 2008, Day 1, 12:15pm – 1:15pm
Read the previous talk in this series, Storytelling by Design by Jason Santa Maria, or view An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
Design Criteria: Actionable Ideas
- Design Criteria are: a set of 5-7 short, memorable strategic directives your team can use to focus design activities. And… design criteria emphasize specific rules your team will follow when tackling the problem at hand.
- Working within constraints: contraints are freedom.
- Constraints help us to:
- generate ideas
- evaluate ideas
- make decisions
- move forward
- Sarah Nelson hates the phrase “Think outside the box.” She prefers “Innovation”.
- The box helps innovation. The box is a constraint, and it engenders innovation.
- In her dream world, she would work alone, create the box, and no one would have to know the box except herself.
- Unfortunately, not one person has the box. Everyone has a small piece of this box.
- To make the implicit constraints explicit… Design Criteria!
- The Creative Process
- Every creative process goes through the same arc: divergence to convergence
- Say, planning a trip… Divergence: Pull out the list, where can I go on vacation? I can go to 27 places, but let me narrow it down through this following convergence stage. Brainstorming = divergent. Narrow = convergent.
- Examples of Design Criteria:
- Diabetes study
- Google calendar
- set out a vision statement before even starting (vision statement, design criteria, same-same)
- design criteria item: “Drop dead simple to get information into the calendar”. It’s constraining, but it’s not super-duper constraining, like “Must add an item within 3 clicks.” That’s just silly. Get the point, and leave it at that: “Drop dead simple”.
- Having that written gives you justification for making a specific type of design decision. Goes back to Zeldman’s previous talk, of creating a paper trail so you have a foundation to go back to with the client.
- Flickr
- http://www.flickr.com/about/
- Very simple goal, and keep in union with that
- PayCycle
- “We need to increase conversion rates” – this is not actionable! Need to have something actionable!
- photo of all the papers around the office – those were all the steps in the set up process. People were failing to follow through because it was such a monster.
- Is primarily a wizard, you go and go and go.
- Their criteria that was bad:
- Be Human
- Work the way your customers do
- Set expectations
- Show progress
- (These things aren’t really that actionable)
- The design criteria Sarah wrote:
- Come from anywhere
- Start from the start
- One brain, many brains, one brain
- Art, not science
- Support with evidence
- Criteria everywhere
- Art, not science
- Don’t make things too open-ended but not too concrete.
- Support with evidence
- Show progress. “Everything is like, next, next, next. It never says ‘You’re almost finished’”. Let them know where they stand.
View the next talk in this series: On-the-Spot Usability Reviews by Robert Hoekman, Jr., or skip to An Event Apart’s Table of Contents
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