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Mike·
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Design Thinking Considered Harmful

Not long after the recent Fast Co article by the bigtime Pentagram designer about how Design Thinking sucks, here's that bastion of both design and progressive thinking, the... Harvard Business Review? The thing that the author is mad about does not seem to be the kind of design thinking that I have either implemented or learned.

The whole point of "human centered design" is to eliminate the concept of the designer dictating from on high. The version the author refers to, where a holy anointed designer filters the input of the unwashed masses, is something I'm wholly against as well. After all, I went to a two-year for-profit design school. Iskander has the right idea: we should be democratizing design and acting on the bottom-up, boots-on-the-ground perspective that we get from users/customers/beneficiaries and from non-designers in our organization. Unfortunately, it feels to me like she's been given a tainted version of design thinking -- one that I think a lot of other people have also received.

My cognitive dissonance here is that these articles written by people named Natasha can't both be true. Jen, highfalutin Pentagram partner, can't be right about design thinking usurping the dominance of designers like her while Iskander is simultaneously right about the methods actually maintaining that dominance.

At the end of the day, design thinking is, as Iskander says, a dumbed-down scientific method. So to my mind, what you do with that hypothesize-and-test framework can be conservative (blarg), innovative (bleh), or serve people well, depending on your hypotheses, the makeup of your team, and the projects you're working on. Keep the tools in your toolbox, keep serving the people you're designing for, and you'll be fine.

DiscussOct 8, 2018
Mike·
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Is the golden age of UX really over, and what does that really mean

Maybe the "golden age of UX" really is over. I think a better way to put it is that we've been discovered out here in our clubhouse and now we're gonna have to grow up and play ball with everyone else. But this widely-shared article from Marvel (a tool I like a lot) has missed the mark in a couple fundamental ways.

First, strategy is not for everyone. We did what I think is a great job designing strategy at D&B, and it was in itself a design challenge. But not everyone on the team was involved or wanted to be involved. Disparaging non-strategic UX as a "production" role is an insulting mistake. This is skilled practitioner stuff, and there are still very few people who are actually good at it. The fact that there are exponentially more UX designers out there doesn't mean there are infinitely more good ones, especially since new folks are being raised on hot takes. So trying to convince the relatively few good ones to move on to strategic roles in companies that still need their user advocacy is not gonna help those companies.

Especially if your next aim is to get those designers on the growth or marketing trains.

"Growth hacking" is what UX designers are destined for now? Or social media marketing? Turn me into glue now, then, thanks. UX efforts are necessary in all of these worlds, and product marketing is inextricably tied to product design — but the core tenets of UX are unaffected by Valley trends (like "growth hacking") or marketing efforts, which are famous for attempting to subvert the true needs of the user.

Let's not lose the voice of the user in an attempt to stay relevant to a fad-driven Product Hunting world. And if the going wisdom is "we solved that, time to move the talented designers on to growth hacking and marketing," then I'd consider that all the more reason why UX is still badly needed on the ground.

DiscussAug 23, 2017
Mike·
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On Mistral

I think the article itself disproves the thesis that Mistral is patently hateable— in fact the piece eased my own distaste for it. I am plenty old enough to remember a time before Comic Sans and Papyrus when Mistral was the only typeface to loathe.

One point that I think is key is that it was one of the few extant fonts, let alone ones that business owners had access to, that would approximate handwriting or graffiti. It's a big reason Comic Sans persists, and presumably why sites like Creative Market are flooded with handwritten custom typefaces. I find it hard to hate on small business owners who wanted their signs or truck stickers to be less brutalist. A world where an otherwise solid piece of art like Straight Outta Compton can be packaged in crap design is a more fun world, anyway.

DiscussJul 31, 2017
Mike·
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Stealing your way to original design with Dan Mall

Mall is a capable, arguably influential designer and writer on the web. It's always cool to see how the sausage is made, but even cooler to see that a person with his credentials has a framework for creative "theft" as a basis for starting new designs.

When you're experienced, you start to internalize these kinds of layout patterns. But while recently working on a website, I realized I hadn't designed one in a very long time and was pretty unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of a site these days. This would've been a great way to get rolling, and I might try it for the next iteration.

DiscussJul 4, 2017
Mike·
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Inline validation considered harmful

Just kidding, this article didn't really use that word. And rather than an alarmist view, this is a fairly measured take. However, most of the arguments are actually against realtime (onblur) validation, not inline validation.

I spent two years dealing with some serious problems that were born entirely out of the fact that an application used realtime+inline validation. And that was primarily in a series of wizard-like dialogs, which really didn't make any sense (the pattern of "disable the continue button until validation is cleared" would've worked well).

Our problems included:

  • forms that didn't require a certain order to filling them out, but validation that did
  • false positives triggered by mouse actions that left users in an unresolvable state if they clicked "wrong"
  • field groups often in a false-positive state (point #4 in the article)

This isn't the same as saying that per-field validation is wrong, and I still strongly believe in that, but this article has a lot of solid points.

DiscussJun 27, 2017
Mike·
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Type on the web

Some great fundamentals here. Other than the wide trend toward cranking the size that's been going on for a few years, really solid type work on the web is only recently coming into its own. It's kind of like when Khoi Vinh popularized grids a few years back; it made me wonder how many folks in this business have even studied design. I think it's great when people with more formal knowledge spread it to the web.

When it comes to type though, it's only been recently that we've been able to have a real level of control over it.

DiscussJun 10, 2017
Mike·
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Front End Style Guides by Anna Debenham

I'm still pretty into design systems and style-guide driven design, and I'm encouraged that the faddish nature of the conversation around these methods is passing into general wisdom and best practice. But there's still a lot of knowledge that has yet to be put "out there."

Brad Frost and Anna Debenham, who co-hosted a podcast together last year, are two of the biggest public proponents to recently release books on the subject. Whereas Frost's focuses more on the "why" and the philosophy of style-guide-driven design, Debenham's is very much a "how" book.

She first goes through some of the methodologies and techniques that help break designers of the nasty habit of designing by pages: style tiles, element collages, and component libraries. Then she covers the advantages of style guides.

From there, it's all practical. She focuses most of the book on the step by step process of implementing your first style-guide-driven redesign or creation of a component library. Throughout, she answers questions that real people doing real things with real style guides are going to ask: how rigid should I be, what tools should I use, what about maintenance once it's built... etc.

Overall, it's a short read but dense with useful, practical information from that rare breed — a developer who can write and explain concisely and clearly. If you've gotten on board the philosophical train of style guides but aren't sure where to start, it's a good buy at $8. Get it here.

DiscussJan 13, 2017