In late fall of 2015, I sat on the rooftop terrace of Roger Black’s Hong Kong apartment on the steep hillside above Sheung Wan, enjoying breathtaking views and an intriguing discussion about design and business. At one point bits and pieces started to click together. Read more
Design and branding have profoundly changed. We cannot predict and control everything anymore. For brands to be flexible, resilient, and future-proof, we have to design them less as architecture and more as biology.
Think of it as a Brand Ecosystem Design.
-
Intro /
Preface / Brand Ecosystem Design
Who cares about your organisational chart.
-
Notes /
The most prominently design-led company, Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, worth more than $1trilion. John Kenneth Galbraith in a way predicted its rise in 1967: “... giants had overcome laws of supply and demand by investing in big, long-term research and development projects, which could not easily be replicated by smaller competitors...”
Apple’s Trillion-Dollar World
-
Notes /
The most important Silicon Valley company you have never heard of. Their design thinking was way ahead of time. They released a smartphone in 1994 and failed. Their tech and concepts were copied by Apple and Google, their alumni have gone on to become some of the most powerful and influential players in tech. General Magic.
Trailer: a new film on Silicon Valley’s most important failure
-
Notes /
People of internet don’t speak English, they speak gibberish. The problem with implementing AI in a meaningful and useful interaction with humans is not voice recognition anymore but understanding the meaning. A real-world AI should be about solving harder problems than cat identification.
Voices in AI - A conversation with David Barret
-
Notes /
Nearly 1 in 5 of your users has a disability. Design accordingly. Most of it is common sense but thanks to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines there is a set of guidelines and standards to follow. And though it should be obvious, it is still worth to emphasise that design starts long before choosing the button colour.
Designing for disability is not that hard.
-
Notes /
“The viewpoint is memorable, the product is usable, and quality is valued over clicks”. A short film on finding a place for news media in a world that seems overrun with clickbait “journalism”, fake news, native advertising, and instant gratification superficiality of social media. Three very different players, the same approach.
Designing the news
-
Notes /
“The times of thoughtless design, for thoughtless consumption, are over. An announcement of a new Gary Hustwit film on Dieter Rams who is one of the most important designers of all times. His work for Braun and Vitsoe alone left a mark on generations of designers; his Ten Principles are a must-read for designers, entrepreneurs, and managers alike. https://www.vitsoe.com/us/about/good-design
Rams, a film by Gary Hustwit, coming September 2018
-
Notes /
The animation in UI is not the proverbial lipstick on a pig. The nature of the interaction is temporal, and transitions between stages are crucial not only to the look-and-feel but more importantly to the very way the user perceives the product itself. Excellent take on the role of motion in interaction design.
Creating Usability with Motion: The UX in Motion Manifesto
-
Notes /
Three superstar startups who failed to pinpoint and sustain their identities crashed despite their engaged user base, substantial revenues and huge VC investments. In addition to identifying your users and their needs, you should know who you are and what you stand for. It is an essential part of the “product” side of the holy grail-ish “product-market” fit.
How Yik Yak, Fab.com, and Vine Failed to Keep the Momentum Going
-
Notes /
Next time you will be annoyed with an oversharing adolescent, a phone glued to her palm, you might be a witness to a retail revolution in the making. The culture of over-edited lives streamed on social media started a crop of entrepreneurs selling directly to their followers/customers' phones, skipping computers, let alone brick-and-mortar shops.
Smartphones Are Doing to Websites What Amazon Did to the Mall
-
Notes /
The lines between online and physical commerce are blurring. Customer expectations, behaviours and values are evolving. Traditional retailers are adapting or closing their doors. Startups that started online are moving into physical space and can innovate faster than the heavyweights. New technologies and business models are emerging.
SMB Retailers Have A Unique Opportunity To Disrupt
-
Notes /
British Home Office designed a mobile app to register more than 3.000 EU nationals before the Brexit in order to cope with wast number of expected applications. Good intentions and — if done by the UK digital team — good UX, but the app won't work for half the population using iOS, and there is a high risk of ruined lives because of the app’s mistake.
The Home Office's bungled Brexit app is already a total disaster
-
Notes /
Disposable chopsticks, X-Acto knife and Scotch tape. Minh Uong, a visual editor for The New York Times’s business section on using modern tech in his creative process. The tech saves a lot of time and offers numerous expression and production possibilities, but usually thought process still starts analogue and in some cases still, the rudimentary analogue techniques deliver the best visual expression. (And help catch the deadline)
How Technology Is Changing Visual Art
-
Notes /
“We don’t need to wait for the second coming of Christ, a couple of geeks in the laboratory can solve it…” On immortality perceived by some tech elites as a purely technical problem and where is humanity heading now, after famine, plague, and war are not anymore in the god’s hands, but can be “designed” by humans. Homo Deus — one of the most important books of 2017 — author Yuval Harari talks to Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar.
Homo Deus: A conversation between Yuval Harari and Azeem Azhar
-
Notes /
Chatty Voice assistance bots are an equivalent of the skeuomorphic design of the early touchscreen apps. Though skeuomorphism helped people adopt unfamiliar new tech through familiar metaphors, conversational interfaces should focus more on getting things done than appearing smart and cute. And by assigning too much character to robots, users will expect them to be way more 'clever' and capable than they really are. UX equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.
Stop the Chitchat. Bots Don’t Need to Sound Like Us
-
The concepts toolbox /
Six steps before design
Do the right thing, not only the thing right.
If a problem is not identified, or just isn’t worth solving, forget about design. If the criteria for design isn’t agreed upon and set before designing starts, designers and clients can go back and forth endlessly with more or less pretty ‘designs.’ Neither the client nor designers will have sound arguments why something should or shouldn’t be tried. Read more
-
The concepts toolbox /
Stop wasting time designing and start thinking.
Design is sometimes perceived as a magic wand but is often just the proverbial lipstick on a pig.
I’m fed up with idiotic products that nobody needs, but they got humongous exposure because some wunderkind venture capitalist, followed by his lemming colleagues, invested a ton of their investors’ money in them. Read more
-
Where we are and how we got here /
Technology, design, quality, and price are commodities.
No matter if a product is physical, service, content, digital or a combination of them, we should think of them the same way.
The advancement of technology, design, and production processes brought the unprecedented level of quality products and services at affordable price. The name of the game today is to provide customers with a product, service, or a combination of both, that has enough value for them, that they are prepared to pay a price for it. Read more
-
Where we are and how we got here /
On externalities of good UX design and some brands saved by the web
Good UX design may be bad for you and the web, disastrous for some traditional companies, might save some others.
An externality in economics is a negative or positive effect of actions of one party to the other party that didn’t choose to be a subject of it. For instance, manufacturers can cause the pollution to their local community (negative externality), but can bring an educated and satisfied workforce to the community, as well (positive externality). The same goes for the effect of UX design. Read more
-
Where we are and how we got here /
Coping with the overload. Artificial inteligence (AI) in design.
Service design, predictive design, and the artificial intelligence used in design of products and services.
In the age of ubiquitous computing, when computers are embedded in the world that surrounds us – from wearable devices to houses, cars, all kinds of connected devices and services – technology might quickly become quite demanding and overwhelming. Designers should predict the user’s needs in certain situations to achieve a normality and unobtrusiveness of the technology. Artificial intelligence in design is here to help. Read more
-
Where we are and how we got here /
Design follows technology. 2/2
The user interface design (UI). Where we are and how we got here.
The development of the industrialised world accelerated with the invention of the computer in the 1940s and went ballistic with the emergence of the web in 1990s. Read more
-
Where we are and how we got here /
Design follows technology. 1/2
Graphic design and industrial design. Where we are and how we got here.
Design has always followed the latest technology. Of course, the development was influenced by a myriad of other factors as well, but somehow it is the technology that enables development in the first place. Read more
Subscribe to The Newsletter:
(∗ required)