Designers at Moment have a wide variety of backgrounds, from graphic design to film to architecture and I am no different with a background in industrial design. While the products we’re designing now are produced in a very different way than those that I worked on as an industrial designer, the core of what we’re doing is the same – trying to design something that is valuable to the people who will use it and the business that produces it.
The design process of industrial design has heavily influenced our process here at Moment, and as the digital product design space matures, the parallels between industrial and digital product design appear to be growing stronger. Designers have been applying their skills to the development of software for thirty to forty years and in that time the process has come a long way. However, designers have been creating manufactured products for at least a hundred years longer. So with that history, what have we learned? And what else can we still learn? Read More »
The classic Swiss Army Knife: A few essential tools in a convenient package. via bobvila.com
A lot of effort in digital product development goes into making products fully featured. This notion seems like common sense – teams are working to make sure that their product has all of the features the person using it might possibly need. In addition, many digital product development teams are now following a design and development approach where they are working to incrementally improve their product with short release cycles. As they scope and design each release they try to improve their product by adding more and more new features.
If you’re on one of these teams, I’m writing this to ask you to stop. Stop trying to create a fully featured product! What should you be trying to do instead?
Create the perfectly featured product.
A product that is fully featured is loaded with capabilities to accommodate anything a user might need, but a perfectly featured product provides precisely what’s wanted and no more. Perfectly featured products are easier for people to understand, more satisfying to use, and I’d argue, simply better design. Read More »
It’s been just about a week since we returned from our excellent adventure that was Interaction 12 in Dublin. As the memories of excellent Guinness and conversation fade, the reaction to the content of the conference is sharpening. In discussions with colleagues here at Moment who were there in person and those who were not a couple of presentations stand out for me:
I’ve already written about how much I enjoyed August’s talk and the concept that designers create states of mind, and I found complementary messages in the other two presentations. Andrew challenged his audience to see the people they are designing for beyond what their goals are – illustrating how designing for goals is actually very narrow and specific, while the real world is a much more complicated place. Jeroen reviewed Aristotle’s framework for story telling including explaining how plot, character, and theme is central to narrative and asked his audience to consider how they could be applied to digital experiences. Read More »
This morning at Interaction 12 I had the opportunity to sit in on Augusto de los Reyes great talk about modernity in design where he took on the question “What is The New Modern?” As my friends and colleagues will attest, there’s little I enjoy more than a good debate, and I love modern design, so this was right down my alley.
As it turns out, I have very little to argue with what Augusto presented because of two reasons. Read More »
