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Design Process

Responsive design: don’t stifle debate with dogma

The responsive design debate was set in motion around a year ago, but seems to have reached something of a crescendo of late. Some commentary borders on the totalitarian, others’ input is philosophical, while some contributions attempt to navigate a practical way forward. Fact is, there is a veritable scramble to coin the phrases that will become tomorrow’s industry-standard vocabulary.

Designers are just plain excited about responsive design, and it’s easy to see why. We have arrived at one of those industry-defining moments which precipitates huge leaps forward in practice – think HTML 3.2 & 4, CSS2. You can perhaps forgive the piousness of some commentators. As new practices bed in, you can always rely on designers to get sanctimonious about how inadequate our practices were up until a day or so ago.

Get up, stand up

Exciting as it is, there is also a huge challenge for designers to step up, not something we have always distinguished ourselves by. As the mass-market web came into being, designers (by and large) stood idly by waiting for someone to make it easy for them, instead of just getting in there, learning some basic markup and meaningfully engaging with a new communications medium.

A shared future

Things couldn’t be more different today; a new generation of designers are falling over each other to experiment, test, share and move the practice of online UI design forward into a new era. This time the catalyst is not a new markup specification, but advances in hardware: a critical mass in use of web-enabled devices has been reached. The rules of the game have changed. Mobile access is no longer an afterthought, or a box to tick, it has parity with desktop and laptop access.

Papa don’t preach

The volume of the debate is rising, but those preaching too loudly or broadcasting their opinions on who is or isn’t doing it ‘right’ are demeaning themselves, and missing the point. We are all in this together. Our internal industry dialogue will continue and something will emerge from all this, almost certainly not in the form of a single proposal or approach. Thought leaders will get us in the general vicinity, but best practice emerges from the efforts of many, and continues to evolve, as we evolve both as designers and as a community.

The new reality

Subscribing to new thinking is one thing, but deploying it on a relevant, commercial project is another. I’ll readily admit to being right at the start of the transition and pursuing a trail-and-error approach; much preferable to breathlessly following anyone who screams they have ‘the answer’. Plus, attempting to stay ahead of the curve on this issue looks like the path to madness when even the originator of the term ‘responsive design’ has identified somewhat inevitable grey areas.

In conclusion

This is as fresh a challenge as we could hope for in our industry, and these are exciting times. The least helpful contributions to a discussion tend to be the most vociferous, but we’re off and running, on the road to best practice and the community will win. Let’s enjoy the ride and look forward to what emerges on the other side.

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Design Process

Sometimes wireframes won’t work

Wireframes are a pillar of best practice in any interface process, but what happens when they get in the way?

What happens when say, the client has no interest in them, or doesn’t feel empowered to take decisions based on what they see, what then? Should a principled designer hold firm until the client sees the ‘error’ of their ways… or alternatively, do we graciously step down from our pedestal and move on, acknowledging that adherence to an idealistic idea of best practice can occasionally get in the way of progress?

A quick reality check: clients know their business best, and will care most about that. They are not hugely concerned with what constitutes best practice for designers; they simply want effective results. In at least one recent project, wireframes became either a barrier to progress or a literal waste of time, completely failing to elicit the responses and decisions they were designed to achieve. And yet the “client education” card is played all too often by elements of the design community as the fix-all solution to allow us to work the way we would like.

Having have long since accepted that designers are not artists, and rightly so, we should accept also that we are not surgeons, or nuclear engineers. Call it ‘agile’ if it makes you feel better, but the fact is that our processes should be mature enough to accommodate a degree of compromise, and still produce effective outputs.

If wireframes can lead to a more effective end solution, then their benefits will be apparent to all and their use a formality. If not, then maybe, just maybe, they are not appropriate or required.

Investment in design services is a huge leap of faith for so many clients. While the ROI on considered and well-executed design might be a given to those of us in the industry, it remains a significant outlay for clients who already have budgets stretched to breaking point by many other aspects of their project. Heard through that filter, the sound of a designer labouring the benefits of wireframing might easily sound like “that’s just how we do things around here, although of course you wouldn’t know this stuff, being a client and all that”.

From experience, winning confidence is the most effective path to what we sometimes rather demeaningly term client education – and has far more value than that. Ditch the designer vocabulary and pretensions and earn the trust of your client. Once achieved, rather than having made your client feel slightly patronised, any project is guaranteed to run more smoothly.

Wireframes or no wireframes.

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Community Design Process

Real life design: an imperfect process

I think I had watched one too many design conference videos on Vimeo, or read one too many utopian blog posts on perfect design practice. And something went *click*.

For developing designers the profusion of inspiring blog posts, videos, tweets and community activity can be hugely helpful, motivating… and not a little overwhelming.

The thrust of much of the material available, authored by designers for designers, appears to be polarised between near-utopian visions of how the design process should work, how we should design and the other extreme of ‘Clients from Hell’-style rants. The conference talks by the great and the good of our industry, while inspiring us to reach, to stretch ourselves and improve our practice, also tend to paint a picture of working with dream clients who ‘get’ designers and have limitless budgets to allow designers to do what they do best.

But how many projects actually go down like that? I’m guessing less than 10% for the average designer. Much less. I’ve seen enough to know that when things all go perfectly on a project then you can check in the sky for a blue moon if not a flying pig.

The fact is that bringing a design project to a successful conclusion is very, very difficult. But to be able to stand over a project, knowing that you perservered and overcame every last hurdle put in its way is a fantastic feeling. What I have yet to find is a conference presentation that tells it like it is: that being a designer can be frustrating, maddening, to the point of making you wonder why you ever got into it. But also that working through the problems is worth the effort.

So many articles and blogposts are overly academic in their approach to the practice of design. Academic, in the sense that they are abstracted from the reality of working with clients and budgets and deadlines. It is in this light that I wanted to add a little reality to the mix. This is the first in an occasional series of articles on this blog under the category of An Imperfect Process, based on experience gained in the (surprise, surprise) middle ground of the design industry.

I adore every article on A List Apart and hang on every word written by the thought leaders in the world of design. I fully subscribe the quasi-science of UI design, and thrive on the positive messaging of the big speakers. However, there is a real world out there that we all have to work in, where projects won’t necessarily be conducive to textbook design practice. Consider these posts as postcards from that other reality – real life design.

We deal with an imperfect design process, one that integrates as much as possible of the best of design thinking, both past and present, but which deals with the realities of design in the real world.

More to follow.

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Design Process

The Moleskine meme

mehYou don’t have to follow too many designers on Twitter for too long before seeing Moleskines touted as the ultimate in note-taking, sketching or idea capturing.

I tried Moleskines for a whole year – even dubbed it ‘the Moleskine Experiment’™ – using a week-to-view notebook, a squared notebook for wireframe thumbnails and a blank notebook for sketches.

After a couple of weeks in use however, for me they became… just another notebook. The quality of the paper became immaterial, the ideas no better or no worse for being committed to Moleskines. I also discovered something cheaper of comparable quality – the ASDA executive notebook (reviewed here and here) that offered a similar feel, quality and, if you must, “experience” that a Moleskine offers for around a third of the price.

Moleskines are a meme amongst some designers; you’re not a real designer until you’re using them, right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m no hater. Moleskines are more than pleasant to the touch and there’s no disputing their quality. They have managed to establish themselves as the Apple of the notebook world and for that, I congratulate them.

For the record though, the Moleskine Experiment™ ended with the conclusion that notebooks shouldn’t be that expensive. To paraphrase a previous post: if a particular brand of notebook makes you more productive, buy it. If you think it makes you more creative, you’re doing this whole design thing wrong.

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Design Process

Changing the way we work

We’ve recently been working on a major project with a client whose main office is 100 miles away. While physical visits are not an issue, sometimes we want to build up momentum working, and ask the client for feedback on the way. To facilitate this, we’ve elected to use two online apps for different sides of the design process.

For interface design visuals we’ve been working with Onotate, built by the folks at Rumble Labs. We’ve been using the just-out-of-beta app for feedback and collaboration with up to 6 other reviewers and editors. Onotate shows interface designs in the relevant context – a web browser – and notes can be added by dragging cross-haris across the desired area of the screen.

On the other side of the process, HotGloo has been our weapon of choice for wireframing and interactive prototypes. A brilliant tool, it makes creating interactive prototypes a breeze and, like Onotate, it can accommodate feedback in the form of onscreen notes.

We’ve found a number of benefits to using these tools, which apply to both of them.

– They encourage brevity: the comment boxes are just the right size and discourage lengthy essays on particular point
– They encourage more immediate feedback: it’s simple for the reviewer to leave a comment there and then rather than have to switch to an email window and remember everything there
– They help keep debate transparent: with multiple reviewers, it’s often too easy for the real discussions to take place in multiple emails, or in some other ‘unofficial’ forum. Threads can be created there on the tool, and keeps everyone focussed.
– They save on confusion: If someone else has already made a point, another reviewer is unlikely to repeat it

We had only made moderate use of these tools before now; beyond this point though, there is a good chance that the way we work will have been permanently affected, very much for the better.