Author: Ryan Riddle

1. How did you get started in the User Experience Design field? And what would be your advice to newcomers to the field?

I got started in 1989, basically, when I moved from a job writing satellite guidance software to a start-up making a supercomputer – they wanted to ship the hardware with an OS and some development tools. I was in charge of designing the interface for the edit-compile-debug suite. Although we were writing these tools for other engineers, it was at this point that I realized that software wasn’t always written for other people “just like us.”

Newcomers: Keep it foremost in your minds that more than one “type” of person will be using what you create, and those people are not exactly the same as you. Constantly seek out knowledge about the thinking, reasoning, decision-making, reactions, and guiding principles of the various people you hope to support, and what their overarching intents are. It will help you craft several different solutions that will be molded to different thinking styles.

2. What’s the one thing that always works in User Experience Design?

Listening. Listen to your teammates, your boss, their bosses. Listen to your users, to the people who you do not yet support, to the people who will “get by” without your design just fine. Listen. Get beneath the shallow stuff and find out what the flow of intentions, snags, and workarounds sounds like for other people. Listen to your own cognition for places where you make assumptions and judgments.

3. What product, service, thing would you like to redesign and why?

Anything. Humanity has only touched upon a tiny percentage of the possibilities that we can design. Why is there only one “app” for each thing you want to do? Well, okay, music and weather … those have multiple apps, but I have yet to see one that supports the widely varying intentions people have. Why are there no weather apps that answer questions like, “When should I go for my run today?” or “How much water should I use for irrigation today?” Why are there no music apps that link together themes or concepts that artists were exploring, and the current events that emphasized those themes – even artists several centuries ago? There’s so much more we can do.

4. Can design be a source for an important social change? How can we achieve that?

I’m not a big believer in “social change.” Instead, I like to “support” people better – in ways each type of person sees as helpful and embraceable. Some people don’t want to change much, and we need to respect and support that. So, in little ways, I focus on support: can we make a trip through a connecting airport more embrace-able by encouraging people on board an aircraft to ask each other questions and answer each other with tips about the people and businesses at the airport or at that location? And not force participation? Little things …

5. What’s your latest design inspiration?

I am inspired by exploring how lots of different people think, and being perpetually surprised and encouraged by the variety. One size does not fit all. Shatter the single-solution mindset into many pieces that support as much of the variety as possible.

I am also thrilled to be recognizing, more and more when I have an emotional reaction or make a judgement or assumption about a person. I can recognize these moments more easily now and can begin to circumvent the single-minded thinking that goes along with it.

Indi has authored a book “Practical Empathy”! Highly recommended!

“Stories are the currency of human contact”, Robert McKee said once. I guess we can find that true every time we make our friends laugh (or bored ;)), can’t stop watching Louis CK’s standups, sit up with an exciting book, or watch a keynote with Steve Jobs. So the next time you need some “currency” on a seminar, meeting or a party, you can recall one of these stories:

The Mysteries of the Cereal Box. The complicated history of how a cereal box closes

It’s happened to all of us: You open a new box of cereal or crackers, dispense as much of the product as you need, and then prepare to close the box using the package’s tab-in-slot mechanism. This requires you to press down on the die-stamped perforation that will create the slot, which is easy enough, until…

Why Are Soccer Balls Made of Hexagons?

Once upon a time, soccer balls (or footballs, depending on where you hail from) were inflated pig bladders wrapped in leather. One variation was an ancient Chinese game called “tsu chu,” using a ball stuffed with feathers. In medieval England, players used leather-covered wine bottles filled with cork shavings (…)

The Storied Evolution of the Star Wars Logo

Photo credits

Seems old? And this is not even the first version of the logo… :)

Who Made That Sippy Cup?

But Belanger wasn’t just any parent; he was a mechanical engineer. One day in 1988, as Belanger found himself cleaning up a spill again, he thought, How many times am I going to do this? And that’s when he decided to solve the problem for good.

The Origin of the Pilcrow, aka the Strange Paragraph Symbol

The fascinating study in obscure typography opens with the single symbol that inspired the entire book, a symbol that has ties to some of the greatest events in human history, including the rise of the Catholic Church and the invention of the printing press: the pilcrow.

The Secret Histories of Clippy, Comic Sans, and Other Legends of Early UI

It’s human nature to hate things that remind us of how dumb we used to be;

Who Made That Scratch-Off Lottery Ticket?

In the 1960s, grocery stores handed out free cards covered with a waxy coating that hid a possible cash prize. To find out if you’d won, you either scratched off the coating or wiped it off with a rag dipped in butter.

A brief history of the US government’s awful graphic design

Too much even for Edward Tufte…

Dreadful spy-PRISM deck sets new record for most header logos per slide: 13
washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special… #powerpoint #ppt http://t.co/KUUyRikE2l—
Edward Tufte (@EdwardTufte) June 07, 2013

The Unlikely Evolution Of The @ Symbol

Some of the very first computer video games (called roguelikes) used @ to represent the player as he explored rudimentary ASCII dungeons. “This is you, and you are at this location within our cyber world.”

Heineken’s Lost Plan To Build Houses Out Of Beer Bottles

While visiting the island of Curaçao, Heineken was bothered by the mass amounts of trash–including his own bottles–and the lack of housing. His solution? Make a beer bottle that could serve as a brick when it’s finished.

How We Decided What The Internet Looks Like

Andrew Lih, then in his first year teaching at the Ivy League school, proposed a different idea. “I said we should abandon this CD-ROM stuff and try this wacky new technology called the World Wide Web and we should use a browser called Mosaic,” he recalls. “They kind of looked at me and said, ‘Are you sure? We’ve never heard anyone talk about this stuff before’. And I said, ‘Trust me, we gotta do this.’

An Oral History Of Apple Design: 1992

If there is one thing that CEO Tim Cook doesn’t want people to know, it’s what dwells behind his company’s “signature.” As a result, most efforts to explain design at Apple end up reducing a complex 37-year history to bromides about simplicity, quality, and perfection–as if those were ambitions unique to Apple alone. So Fast Company set out to remedy that deficiency through an oral history of Apple’s design, a decoding of the signature as told by the people who helped create it.

Additional parts:

An Oral History Of Apple Design: 2000
An Oral History Of Apple Design: 2001
An Oral History Of Apple Design: 2004
An Oral History Of Apple Design: 2013

How much research has gone into developing the Facebook ping sound

I designed most of the audio currently in the product today. There are a few major components that make up the audio identity. First, is the base chord which is an Fmaj7 chord. For you music nerds out there, yes, these notes actually spell out “FACE”. There are a few reasons I went with this chord

Hilariously Bad Ads That Were Rejected

You know, not the simply-bad-ads kind… this kind of ads ;)

Photo credits

The story of Polaroid inventor Edwin Land, one of Steve Jobs’ biggest heroes

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest heroes is Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid. Former Apple CEO John Sculley describes a meeting they had years ago and how both Land and Jobs felt that products existed all along — they just needed to discover them.

How Facebook Used Science To Design More Emotional Emoticons

In 1872, Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, a book that cataloged emotional expressions in humans and their link to the animal world. In the book, Darwin described more than 50 universal emotions. Now Facebook, with the help of a psychologist who studies emotions and a Pixar illustrator, has turned some of the emotions Darwin described in the 19th century into a set of emoticons.

So which one is your favourite? :) Sign up for the newsletter to keep them coming!

1. How did you get started in the User Experience Design field? And what would be your advice to newcomers to the field?

I sneaked into the field before they put up all the signs.

I came from publishing, having worked as an editor, author, agent, packager, and publisher. When the web came along, I at first viewed it simply as a great new form of publishing. Because I worked on tech books, I had already formed some opinions about how to improve user interfaces but until I hit the web I lacked any formal process or techniques or avenues for becoming involved in the making of software.

The web democratized all that and gave me a chance to teach myself what we now call information architecture and to build interfaces out of HTML (and later CSS and scripting languages, etc.).

Continue reading A Gaze at the Stars. Interview with Christian Crumlish

We had a chance to catch up with Russ Unger and to talk about the user experience design:

1. How did you get started in the User Experience Design field? And what would be your advice to newcomers to the field?

I started making websites around 1993 when Mosaic was the web browser I knew of, pine was my email client, and my email address started with the letter z and a string of numbers after it. Up until then, I’d been running a multi-line DOS-based BBS for a while, and thought I had been pretty cool and informed. Once I got my first Mac, all I wanted to do was figure out how to build stuff on the web. I also started learning print design and started tinkering with Future Splash (which later became Flash) and Director along the way. I got pretty consumed by it all. I dedicated every spare minute that I wasn’t working or sleeping to the exploration of this new playground I had discovered. I found myself to be a pretty mediocre visual designer, however, I was fascinated with the understanding of what all the interactions would/could/should be, how content should be organized, and how data-driven sites were working. I even taught myself ColdFusion, some PHP, and ASP, tinkered with databases and “building” my own CMSes for a bit so I could have more informed conversations with developers when talking about design. Then, I remember one of my bosses asking how come we didn’t have any information architects… and not in a nice way; more in the “I just heard this term and I should have heard it from you first” ways. It stung a bit. Okay, a lot. A Polar Bear Book and job change later, I stumbled into an entire mailing list of IAs…

Continue reading A Gaze at the Stars. Interview with Russ Unger