Pirijan talks us through the design principles underpinning Kinopio, a tool I like very much:
- Embrace Smallness by Embracing Code as a Living Design System
- Building for Fidget-Ability, hmmm
- Embrace Plain Text
- A Single Interface for Mobile and Desktop
- Refine by Pruning
- Violates User Expectations
- Causes Motion Sickness
- Reduces Accessibility for Disabled Users
- Inconsistent Performance Across Devices
- Impairs Usability for Power Users
- Increases Page Load Times
- Breaks Native Browser Features
- Makes Scroll Position Unclear
- Adds Maintenance Overhead
- Disrespects the User’s Control
I do not want any software
I believe that this mindset is the healthiest way to design and build things that people will use and not hate us for building. For me, it’s a way to remind myself that all humans have a whole rich, challenging life outside of the little screens I’m making for them. So that even when I’m focused on user needs and user problems, I can keep it just out of the corner of my eye: the person I’m making this for doesn’t actually want to be here, and that’s OK.
We want speedy internet and fast-loading services because we want to stop pushing buttons and opening accordions as quickly as possible.
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.
Now apply that to software:
Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the new redesign of WebPageTest is lovely!
Flat, minimalist, clean, material - whatever you want to call it - is an annoying antipattern. Computers are here to make life easier for humans. Removing affordances is just a nasty thing to do to your users.
A problem shared is a problem halved. And the web has a big problem with awful overlays.
An emergent theme at An Event Apart Seattle 2019.
A presentation at An Event Apart Seattle 2019.
Trying to get the balance right between discoverability and intrusiveness.
Form follows… another form.