a brand experience idea: users are people, too.
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i'm currently a user experience architect at VML.
if you'd like to contact me, please gmail me at tyler [dot] hilker.
“Now you aren’t just using words that hold no meaning for your target audience, you’re also labeling important navigational elements in a way that provide little context within your target audience’s frame of reference.”
xkcd.
this is pretty much every project: what you want to show isn’t necessarily what the audience wants to see. get over yourself and do some research.
Why Designers Should Declare Death to the Post-It | Fast Company
Jamer Hunt expounds on the “cliché” of post-it note-covered walls as evidence of a successful process by saying, “It’s time to put that ubiquitous design photo of the Post-it to rest. Give it a break. Retire it.” Later, “The problem is that in serving as a substitute for the whole of design, the Post-it represents only a small fraction of what makes design uniquely effective.”
Welcome to Adventures in Missing the Point.
I use Post-it’s a lot. A lot. (I would’ve bought 3M stock years ago, but I didn’t have a Post-it to remind me.) Never, in all of my use, have I ever looked at a wall covered in yellow squares and thought, “Whew! I’m glad I’m done with *that* design!”
It doesn’t matter what you use; every process must begin somewhere. When beginning to define the content, organization, and process of a system there are many ways to go about it, yet few are as effective as Post-Its. They’re cheap, ready-made, familiar. They can be placed on vertical and horizontal surfaces. They are permanently temporary: they won’t blow away like glue-less paper.
The first commenter has it spot-on: “Seriously, you’ve got disciplines confused. Interaction design and UX — those are the hogs of Post-it notes. Good design thinking leverages visual thinking techniques, and building prototypes — ‘trying’ stuff out.” Hunt is suggesting that we “retire” an extremely helpful piece of the design process in favor of another piece of the same process that relies, at least in part, on the outcome of the Post-It process! They have two entirely different yet dependent functions! Has Hunt never worked with an information architect before? Does he simply push pixels into navigation hierarchies and define processes?
I’ve worked on projects that begin with “the act of making a mark on a page or pushing pixels on the screen;” every single time the designs communicate the organization and process incompletely. Which drives the team back to the Post-It process. Which forces a redesign.
Hunt concludes: “If design wants to maintain its place in the value-chain, it’s going to have to find a way to make its contribution more compelling than a pretty picture of a Post-it pasted to the wall.” If Hunt views loads of Post-Its on a wall as substitute for design, Post-Its aren’t the problem; his myopic take on design is.
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