Friday, 28 May 2010
Designing the Design Process
I've learnt a lot in the last three semesters which I spent abroad in Switzerland and Germany as well as in the UK, studying, interning and working in different fields of the creative industries.
A digital media module which I undertook in Zurich ignited a passion for usability and experience design. Working in the publishing industry in Munich gave me an insight into how old and new media work together (or sometimes not) and taught me traditional, analogue user interaction devices such as typography, layout or visual storytelling. When I returned to Bristol I was lucky enough to work with City ID, a renowned information design studio whose work I've admired since I first came to this city. They are a multi-disciplinary team of information designers, planners, urbanists, interaction designers, cartographers and product designers. That's an incredible mix of creativity, knowledge and strategic thinking which I had the opportunity to feed from.
I had the chance to dip in and out of different interesting projects, picking up useful knowledge and inspiring ideas to take and research further. When I was offered the opportunity to undertake a personal project--which would make a good portfolio piece and something to take home after the experience--I decided to combine what inspired me in Zurich and what I had learned at City ID and create an educational poster out of it.
The visiting lecturer who taught on the digital media module in Zurich is a user experience designer at Skype and she's not only very knowledgable but also very creative (check out her recent presentation on sketchnotes). Her lecture about the UX design process was based on the model of an iceberg. The visual part of a design is only the tip of it, the actual process lies underneath the surface. I took this model and started reading into Jesse James Garret's ideas and models described in his book "The Elements of User Experience". Talking to the interaction designers and information planners at City ID and reading through many of the great books in their library made me realise that there are a lot of models and ways to describe this process all underpinned with a myriad of principles, methods and techniques--but they all come down to a cyclical nature. A user centred design process is an iterative cycle where every step is evaluated against initially identified requirements of the users and then changed and improved until these requirements are met. For every stage of this process there are various principles and techniques that can be employed to move onto the next stage. At City ID I learnt that it is crucial to consider how a user interacts with your product. They design orientation and wayfinding solutions for cities around the world and the aim is to create an identity or sense of place through the experience that people have with the system. It is important to go through the information requirements at every stage of a user's journey to make sure that people get exactly the information they need at any given point following the principle of progressive disclosure.
Interestingly this also applies to webdesign or even editorial design. Working at the magazine in Munich, I experienced how a reader's "journey" is carefully planned and how visual cues, narratives, conventions as well as breaking with conventions impact on the reader's experience. A user centred design process is a universal principle and the key to an effective, efficient, engaging and intuitive product, interface or service in any field of design.
I'm very grateful that I had the opportunity to learn all this so far and to visualise the results of my learning. I've only just started to unravel the world of usability and experience design and I'm sure that I will learn a lot more in years to come. After I've finished my degree next year, I'd love to study either Information Design or User Experience Design at MA level.
I've set up a microsite to give you more information on the UCD poster project. You can download the poster for free as PDF or JPEG. You can also get a printed copy in A1 when you contribute a donation towards the cost of printing. What's left over goes towards my education. The poster is released under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to share it, use it or improve it as long as it's non-commercial and with attribution.
Thanks again to Eva-Lotta for the insightful workshops in Zurich and City ID for the experience and opportunity. You've started something.
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Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Commencing Phase 1

Just a quick update about how I'm getting on here. As you can see, things already beginning to look a little bit different. Note that this isn't the new design yet but rather a realigned design. Most things happened behind the scenes. I upgraded the backend and also removed the multi-language plugin. On the front end I fixed some CSS quirks (though there are still plenty of them) and changed the typography which is now using the CSS3 font-face and box-shadow properties for progressive enhancement. The logo has been replaced with the one that I've been using on my CV and printed portfolio recently. On the content side a massive search & replace mission in mySQL eventually removed all evidence that a German language blog ever existed. This was necessary so the layout doesn't break in the monolingual design. Although the parsing and display was done through a plugin, every post contained both language versions in the database and therefor would be displayed together when the plugin is disabled. I also went through the projects again and removed some embarrassing work that was left over from a certain university module. And finally I've rewritten the intro copy to keep it up to date.
In the next phase I am going to merge some areas and work on a new layout for the portfolio pages. I can't say when this is going to be finished as I'm rather busy with other work at the moment - which is still a good thing. I'll probably update the portfolio with new work before the new layout becomes apparent though, because I feel that I've held back some projects for too long now and I'm dying to share them with you.
Feel free to report any quirks or leave feedback in the comments.
Sunday, 9 May 2010
Hello and Auf Wiedersehen

With the plans for my immediate future pretty much sorted out, I've now got two projects left to do until the summer break when I'm moving down to Cornwall. I can't say too much about the bigger one of the two except that it involves a new aspect of digital design (iPhone web apps) for me and another steep learning curve. I managed to stick to my self-devised curriculum which has pretty much been about digital design. It´s very exciting and lots of fun too.
I can tell you about the other project though, the relaunch of my personal website. I've been working on it sporadically between projects and other work and have finished all the planning work that is necessary before getting my hands dirty with design. I've decided to do a gradual relaunch, which means that I'm going to implement (and test) changes in smaller stages rather than revealing it all at once with a big ta-daa. The reason for this is that although it will probably be more work and take longer to fully implement all the changes, it will still save me time as I can start posting things sooner that I've been holding back until the relaunch.
So what are the changes? Here´s the plan so far: The website will be divided into portfolio and blog, I'll drop the separate introduction, about and contact pages and include them into the other two. There´s going to be a new content strategy for the blog. I'll also weed out all the trash from the portfolio. An important change for those who are reading this in German: I'm sorry to say that I'll drop the German-language blogging. The main reason for this is that translating each and every post into German takes up too much time and stops me from posting more. Although the language switching plugin has been awesome and made multilingual blogging really fun, it´s just not worth the effort anymore, at least in this context.
This website started as a personal website in German when I went to Northern Ireland. It helped me to keep in touch with friends and family and to write about my experiences in the foreign country. It changed to a bilingual blog and portfolio when I went to university and it still made sense to be bilingual throughout my time in Zurich and Munich. However the amount of people reading this in German who wouldn't be able to read it in English too is very small. The purpose of the new blog is not merely to keep friends and family updated anymore as it was years ago. For this I'll prefer the personal contact. The new blog will therefor have a new content strategy and will be in English only.
That´s pretty much the most important change. There will obviously be a lot of visual changes, a new logo and branding, new typography, a new structure, an updated backend and modern web technologies. All this will be implemented gradually over the next weeks. Things might break now and then and it could be a big mess at times, especially when the old database clashes with the new design. But let´s hope it all goes smoothly.
Stay tuned.
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