Just in case you thought: “the developer is not the user“, so get to know them!
August 5, 2014
June 12, 2012
Double-sided touch
That looks interesting. It can optimize usability e.g. in case of reading and therefore scrolling a lot on smartphones.
February 7, 2012
Design then develop HMIs
Recently I changed the title of this blog because I want to broaden the spectrum of articles in this blog from mainly technology oriented (HMI – Human Machine Interface) to add a bit of a psychological point of view (UX – User Experience). These are topics I’m interested in and so I’m reading a lot and want to write about them.
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When we discover UX we have to do some design for web pages, in industrial sector and so on. Cameron Koczon wrote an interesting article at alistapart.com where he argues that it is An Important Time for Design. As he says there are too few startups with designers in a partner role rather than a required appendix or even no designers at all. In my point of view the output is primarily driven by developers and their technology and only “The products that take design seriously and incorporate it from the start are going to be the ones that connect with people in a way that really makes an impact in the world.”
We need to have some designers on board who knows how people perceive, interprete the informations and act based on that. So designers have to analyze user groups, e.g. build personas on that and extract user needs with this technique. Or let them do user interviews to gather what users really need or want to change. To get the most usability problems out of your product you only need five test users as Jakob Nielsen says. But “zero users give zero insights“. (Actually there may be a distinction between a user experience researcher and a designer but I’m considering both jobs in designer in this article.) Furthermore startups (beside all other companies) need to have designers to transform this knowledge into real prototypes in an iterative way so that the products will become more useful and hopefully more emotionally touching. Because emotions are the big part of UX, they connect people to technology – to products. Developers instead often think in functions which can cause bad user emotions which in turn are able to disconnect user and product. So let’s make an impact in the world – with designers and developers at eye level.