STUCK ON AMBER

Upside Down Design

Rio Karma MP3 player (2004). 

This was before touch screens, when we had to rely on hard keys provided somewhere around the screen. The huge majority of hand held devices come with the controls at the bottom, below the display.

The Karma did the opposite, and that was daring. It was surprisingly comfortable, as the thumb would effortlessly meet the wheel and buttons located at the top, making the player very natural to use. But not everyone liked how it looked.

An example of product that didn't sell as much as it deserved, just because we're usually not ready to buy things that look too unusual, even if they're a delight to use. To be fair, the Karma was probably not ideal for lefthanders!

A Restaurant Bootstrapped With 1 Dish

The menu of Xiaodiao Litang, a cute little restaurant in Beijing. They started the business without any menu: they had a single dish to offer (a delicious mushroom and pork rice soup), so there was no need for a menu!

Week after week, customers started to crowd the place, which soon became known for the quality of the soup. Today the restaurant is very successful, and the menu offers a broader range of dishes.

Observing how this business grew was a good lesson: dare to start ridiculously simple; focus on your single dish and make sure you do it really well; add other dishes progressively, when the stress of the first steps is gone and the core of the business is secured.

Whatever we're doing, there WILL be complications to cope with. So starting with over-simple solutions does not mean you want to look cool and trendy; the fact is it's just easier to manage when we're not too sure how well we'll do.

Straightforward Help (It Will Never Work, Episode 1)

We spend so much time striving to design perfectly self-explanatory interfaces. Instructions seem to get old-fashioned nowadays. Probably because we know nobody likes to read text on a UI anymore; everything should flow like magic. 

This application decides not to care, and provides all written instructions at first launch; bang! But that works fine, because the style is daring to the extreme and catches your attention efficiently. 

It will never work, they said? Perhaps 'poor' ideas like that should always be tried if that's cheap to do. We may have good surprises and save a lot of time.

 

The Weakest Link Principle

The weakest link principle is a way to protect critical elements of a system, by exposing parts that are here to receive the potential damage. An example is car bumpers.

I have a nice pair of earphones that I use a lot. Since my music player is always in the front pocket of my blue jeans, the other day the cable finally broke at the jack level, due to excessive and hard to avoid friction on the pocket border. Upset, I grumbled and packed everything. Could my pricey earphones be dead just because of a damaged connector?  

At the end of the day I remembered the cable was in fact in two parts. The main part of the cable, welded to the expensive earphones, was actually intact! All I needed to do was to replace the lower part (the weakest link), which cost me about 1 euro.

Don't Get Too Fond of Designing

When a user or client tells you he wants a certain feature, ask why he wants it–determine his immediate goal [...] Keep asking until you move well beyond the boundaries of the immediate design problem. Why should you ask these questions if you have clear requirements? Because if you love designing things, it's easy to get caught up in an interesting interface-design problem. Maybe you're good at building forms that ask for the just the right information, with the right controls, all laid out nicely. But the real art of interface design lies in solving the right problem.

So don't get too fond of designing that form. If there's any way to finish the transaction without making the user go through that form at all, get rid of it altogether.

– Jenifer Tidwell (from Designing Interfaces)

I think I'm going to pin this on my wall in the office. It's harder to keep it in mind than I imagined. There's almost always a more straightforward solution, that works well too.

See also in this blog: Plain Red and Plain White, the Coca-Cola Redesign

The Elegant New Air France Logo

Actually I really like this new logo. At first glance, I found it had nothing special. Now the more I look at it, and the more I find it's... an aircraft. With a nice red tail. Peaceful and dynamic at the same time. Really nice. Staring at it, I really can't find anything I'd like to improve here. That's a pretty good feeling.

Google Earth Street View, Drunk... (Episode 2)

New shots of my new favorite game.

See also in this blog, the first series.

Distilling an Idea... Please Don't Disturb

Before I opened the studio I worked for many companies, large and small [...] And I have worked for studios that were ten, 20, 30 people. And I feel that when I look at the work emerging from any of these entities, the really good work was done by three people. When 20 people were involved, it mostly sucked. So for me, it never seems that size works in favor of the client.

– Stefan Sagmeister (from How to think like a great graphic designer)

An obvious reason has nothing to do with the design discipline or creativity: it's just that communication overhead increases when new people join the project team.

Another reason is that the success of a design is much related to the consistency and clarity of the concept. It must speak to you, it must have a personality that you get easily. And all that begins to turn into a mediocre compromise when too many people influence the design. The best way to cook a delicious cake is certainly not to ask 10 guys to throw their favorite ingredient in the mixture!

I don't think that involving extra people in a creative process is a bad thing per se (often an external contributor adds a key element that was missing), but it inevitably triggers more discussions, often about emotional aspects that can be debated endlessly anyway.

The problem is that it disturbs the refinement process, which is critical. When we enjoy the beauty of a nicely designed thing, we don't see the refinement steps that led to it. But if we don't allow that distillation to run in peace, and stay focused, we might never see that nice product come out at all.

So while creating, it's great to have a few external eyes, but not too many–and above all, not continuously! And you need a decision-maker.

See also in this blog:
Conceptual Integrity

Conceptual Integrity

I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.

– Frederick P. Brooks, Jr,The Mythical Man-Month

Conceptual integrity is the principle that anywhere you look in your system, you can tell that the design is part of the same overall design.

– William G. Griswold

Terrible Calendar Design

So when is that dentist appointment, Mr Outlook? 19th or 26th?

Top feature expected from a calendar: show me clearly what occurs when.

Of course you could argue "obvious, events are hanged just right under their date", which puts my dentist appointment on the 19th.

But consider the case where you want to add an event to an empty day. By selecting the white cell, are you 100% sure the upper label applies to it, rather that the lower one? Same problem with days full of events. It would help to make very clear which label comes with which cell, through a better visual association.