“Design has nothing to do with art”: Design legend Milton Glaser dispels a universal misunderstanding Although I went to art school and took design classes in the Art + Design building, conflating the two as practice areas is a problem that plagues us. The belief is that anything visual is art, art is opinion based and nice to have, so any other opinion will do (the bosses can make up their minds) and it can be done without. Wrong. Here's another well-stated take on it worth remembering, or printing out and putting on the wall.
Inclusive Design at Microsoft Microsoft has a nice Accessibility site now, with some guidelines, downloadable activity cards to get teams on board with this, and more. I have added their chart on temporary/permanent disability to the accessibility deck.
Smartphones and people with disabilities: the power and the promise A summary of how digital inclusiveness used to be hard and expensive, but now is almost the default. Almost. Worth reading anything by Robin Christopherson (MBE!), as I've said before. If you can see him speak, do so.
Number of Internet Users by World Region One of my regular gripes is that we need to stop designing for ourselves. Not everyone is on a PC with good WiFi in a cubicle in a cool office in the Financial District. The data increasingly supports this, and today I share not just the smartphone percentage, the dominance of not-at-all-iOS, but the rise of the rest of the world as connected people. 20 years ago the Internet was an American phenomenon, but no more. Half the world is online now, and they are not overwhelmingly Americans. Who are you designing for? Why?
Full Year 2016 Smartphone Market Top 10 Numbers, and OS platforms and Global Installed Base, all here. Oh, and Q4 market data as well The new numbers are here! So much good stuff from Tomi, and the yearly summaries are the best. My favorite here is the ability to mock Apple fanbois. Now you know I think OS is more important, and Apple is really, really secondary so building for only iOS is not a good default. But Samsung keeps on beating them in total units by a whole lot so if brand is the only thing that matters, Samsung is mobile.
Example Motion Design Docs already in A11y deck as reference... do we put a slide in as the animations???
Stranded 6 miles from home, 2 miles from cell service Teslas can get turned on, as many home devices can now, with your phone. No need for a key. But, it requires internet. Requires. Stop your car with no mobile service at your car? Too bad. Guess you are stranded. Someone tell the Tesla people to read my article on Beyond Airplane Mode, please.
https://twitter.com/eamesoffice/status/821070224225173505 Great quote, from: An Eames Primer (pg 192, 2001 edition) by Eames Demetrios.
worst thing about the nikko was the robot toilet... now going to get some standard icons, so at least learning one learns them all https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/18/japan-to-end-tourists-toilet-trouble-with-standardised-buttons-olympics
How changing the settings on your iPad and iPhone can help people with tremors and other dexterity difficulties by Robin Christopherson...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/accessibility go ahead and click. Whitehouse on the day Trump took office took off the spanish language links and the accessibility links. Oh, and not just the links, but the accessibility page is poof, 404 and redirects.
How Marketers on Facebook Can Convert in a Mobile Minute (Report) Lots of data, but the best is that more than half of all holiday shopping was done on mobile. Read that again. Tell your boss. Desktop is not preferred for much of anything, including sales. Mobile first? Mobile only is increasingly a plausible way to go.
You remember how we've talked about latency, right? Say you have a 1MB web page. If your webfonts, your CSS, the five JS files, your images, etc. are all separate calls, that can take 20x longer to load than putting it all in one file. This is crucial for mobile because latency (the time to get a call resolved is very high, no matter how fast the transfer is so even 4GLTE has bad latency. Well, the same is true for many other bits of the mobile communications chain, like this. Turning the radio on and off is very wasteful. This is old info and I think Pandora doesn't do this now, but still very true. Lots of other good tips in High Performance Browser Networking which you should get if you are a web developer. There's lots of tech behind the scenes which you have to understand to make experiences good.
Are You Solving the Right Problems? More a "right on" and a gripe than a solution, sadly. I keep being annoyed with changes to UX processes as they all assume we're the problem. We're not. Most of us know very well how to do our job, how to collaborate with others to make it work in the organization, etc. But business? Well they call the shots and they do it wrong a lot. This article gives examples and talks about tactics businesses can take to reframe problems. Of course, it doesn't say "give the problem to the UX team" but that would work as well. We can take tactical complaints and get to root causes and come up with other answers very well, when asked. Maybe leave a copy of this on your boss' desk?
Desktop dies on weekends We've known for a long time PCs are used for work, or in work like ways. Mobile is used otherwise. But increasingly mobile is being used simply all the time. And desktops? The same. Even smaller form factors, touchscreens, convertible tablets, they all are used the same old way, left on their desks evenings and weekends.
https://medium.com/assist/theres-a-dozen-ways-to-order-a-coffee-why-do-dumb-bots-only-allow-one-27230542636d#.o2gcjiow8 interesting point about non-linear nav totally lost in all the implementation details so it will be ignored or irrelevant soon...
Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet Pew Research tells us, among other things, that white Americans (78%) are more likely to have home broadband than blacks (65%) and Hispanics (58%). So when I rant about designing for everyone, I don't just mean that people in the third world have less connectivity; but that people on the other side of town do. When you say it's worth designing for your home market first, are you? Or are you designing for your neighborhood or class only?
Why Nothing Works Anymore From The Atlantic, a well thought out rant on why we keep making digital solutions to things that do not need them, and how it's making people distrust technologies and work around them.
http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-rules-for-modern-navigation/ interesting... data so need to dig into it.
https://www.slideshare.net/cczona/schemas-for-the-real-world-madison-rubyconf-2013 from a discussion on how to refer to genders, but covers the intersection of data schemas and human behavior well. Must look harder into that and put it... somewhere. A11y deck, as a section on treating humans like humans???
https://laofutze.wordpress.com/2014/01/03/e-t-hall-proxemics-understanding-personal-space/ overview of proxemics, and how cultural differences are striking, cause issues with space considerations for VR/MR/AR... "One of the complexities of proxemic research is the fact that not only are people unable to describe how they set distances, but each ethnic group sets distances in its own way..." great line from here https://twitter.com/acuity_design/status/839191606091730947 which is actually from p63 of this http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_Chapter/0631228780/001.pdf
Add to deck 1? also, as key data about the density of the mobile "The lower your income, the more likely you are to rely on a smartphone for internet access—to jobs, education, etc:" https://t.co/0SKbePsVXQ https://t.co/93An2HUwFh
(https://twitter.com/YAppelbaum/status/839121805554089984?s=03
MUST UPDATE:
- Deck 1 - Slide 8, 10, 11, 13. New numbers in the notes, need to re-narrate them is all.
- Deck 1 - Slide 22. With new phones I carry, why, and new photos.
- Accessibility I think. Need to add slides on vrestibular disorders and my worry that relying on not just parallax but AR/MR/VR may leave out a huge chunk of the pop.
- Deck 1/2? - Early slides? Add the desktop/mobile usage chart (Desktop dies on weekends) maybe? I recall something there, this may be another good one to add.
https://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/iphone-keyboard-secrets/?_r=1 Touch deck. Or even article? How apple (and google) knows their targets are too small... Ponder what to do with this: "Although you don’t see it with your eyes, the sizes of the keys on the iPhone keyboard are changing all the time. That is, the software enlarges the “landing area” of certain keys, based on probability."
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