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Less is more. Form follows function. The one-size-fits-all approach to training ignores that people learn in fundamentally different ways. Most current training is highly discriminatory. Howard Gardiner
"The most outstanding design is that which is perfectly appropriate to what is trying to be accomplished."
"Design is one of the few tools that for every (dollar) you spend, you actually say something about your business." -- Raymond Turner, exec, BAA
"The designer's purpose is to stimulate curiosity, amusement and affection." Achilli Castilgioni
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Design is in everything we make, but it's also between
those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda,
and philosophy."
Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology,
cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the
world didn't know it was missing. |
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The Psychology of Everyday
Things keys to good design: 1. provide a good conceptual model 2. make things visible 3. good mapping 4. feedback
why designers go astray:
principles for design:
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A brilliant book. If you can only read just one, this is it.
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American expertise: building dreamsFrom the WSJ 7-27-92: The Cold War is won. Individual liberty and American market capitalism sweep Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union. Mickey Mouse has invaded France. The world's largest McDonald's has opened in Beijing. So pervasive is American culture that a conference earlier this year at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank, debated whether the whole world is "Americanizing," and concluded that, yes, it surely is. "As much as we--and everyone else--assume that
the French make the best perfumes, and the Swiss the finsest watches,
the suspicion will continue that Americans make the best dreams,"
said Pico Iyer, a Time magazine contributing essayist. Design Principles John Thackara recently unveiled 10 "Articles of Association Between Design, Technology, and the People Formerly Known as Users." The principles are meant to capture his reservations about the rush to build a world of pervasive computing and to challenge designers to think differently about their priorities. Here are some of our favorites. Article 1: We cherish the fact that people are innately curious, playful, and creative. Therefore, we suspect that technology will not go away: It's too much fun. Article 2: We will deliver value to people -- and won't deliver people to systems. We will give priority to human agency, and we will not treat humans as "factors" in some bigger picture. Article 3: We will not presume to design experiences for people -- but we will do so with them, if asked. Article 4: We do not believe in "idiot-proof" technology -- because we are not idiots, and neither are you. We will use language with care, and will search for words that are less patronizing than "user" or "consumer." Article 8: We will not pretend that things are simple when they are complex. We believe that, by acting within a system, you will probably improve it. Article 9: We believe that place matters, and we will look after your place. Article 10: We believe that both speed and time matter too -- but that sometimes you need more of one, and sometimes you need less. We will not fill up time with content. Human-centered design has grown out of traditional design, social sciences, engineering, and business. It is taught at ID through the highly effective framework of four human factors, which address the physical, cognitive, social, and cultural factors involved in people's interactions with products, systems, organizations, and messages. The framework of human factors supports ID's designers as they address not only the users' physical capabilities and cognitive functions, but also the cultural background and social situation of the user at the time of using the product or service. As a result, ID students learn how to modify a product for different cultures, for different situations within a culture, and ultimately, for the "market of one." In addition to the human factors framework, the Institute of Design uses
a range of methods to help gather data, analyze and understand human behavior,
and to develop prototypes to test human-centered designs. Following are
brief descriptions of some of those methods. This is hot. |
Design 101 entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem: "entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity" or "the number of entities used to explain phenomena should not be increased unnecessarily" This principle implies: 1. of two or more possible
explanations for phenomena choose the one that (a)explains what is to
be explained with the fewest assumptions and explanatory principles;
and (b) explains all, or most, of the facts that need explaining as
satisfactorily as any other theory |
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| "In the attention economy, anyone trying to connect with an audience must treat the user's time as the ultimate resource." -- Jakob Nielsen |
Instructional design
from the University of Denver School of Education: Theoretical
Sources | Instructional
Design Models
here's more on the subject... Roger Shank's delightful Top
Ten Mistakes in Education The implications of the research literature on learning styles for the design of instructional material, Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1999 International Society for Performance Improvement
Fred Nichols (This is why HPT won't work. It's Taylorism in new clothing.)
Remember: knowledge work must be configured not prefigured. It is the day-to-day stuff of leading people, not of managing them or their work, that really affects productivity; it’s the hand-holding, the encouraging, the going to bat for people, and the sharing of the hardships, the risk, the recognition, and the rewards that tempts people to contribute and sustains them as they strive for excellence. These leadership behaviors must themselves be configured not prefigured. In other words, conformity at the executive level is as deadly as compliance at the working level. To sum it up, the era of compliance has ended, and with it has ended the dream of engineering individual human performance. The era of individual contribution has just begun and we don’t even have a vocabulary suited to discuss the issue let alone formulate decisions and then carry them out.
"Object-orientation highly values the creation of components (called "objects") that can be reused in multiple contexts. This is the fundamental idea: instructional designers can build small (relative to the size of an entire course) instructional components that can be reused a number of times in different learning contexts. Learning objects are generally understood to be digital entities deliverable over the Internet, meaning that any number of people can access and use them simultaneously (as opposed to traditional instructional media, such as an overhead or video tape, which can only exist in one place at a time). Moreover, those who incorporate learning objects can collaborate on and benefit immediately from new versions. These are significant differences between learning objects and other instructional media that have existed previously." So states the online version of The Instructional Use of Learning Objects, a complete book on learning objects by David Wiley, David Merrill, Wayne Hodgins, and a host of others. Wiley: "Atoms, not Legos." Cisco's
Reusable Learning Object Strategy. Objects of Interest, a nice intro Terms like classes or courses don't capture the essence of personalized learning. I'm starting to think in terms of learning experiences. Here, between the section on instructional Design and User Interface Design, is the ideal spot to point out a really practical site, Good Experience. |
Instructional 1. Assess
Instructional Design grew up building courses. Courses are being supplanted by eLearning experiences. A new discipline is called for, Instructional Infrastructure Design. For most enterprises, you buy this from someone else. You can build your own from components, but often that's about as practical as assembling your own Chevy from bags of gadgets you buy at the auto parts store.
The Webby Awards for Education
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Human Computer (HCI) Interface Bibliography |
...major improvements in interface design are both profitable and moral — profitable because a good interface is cheaper to implement, is more productive, is easier to maintain, has lower training costs, and requires less customer support than a bad interface — moral because it brings smiles to the faces and erases furrows from the brows of users. One can do good and yet do well by rethinking interface design. Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface |
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| "The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook" -- William James |
Graphic DesignEdward Tufte Graphical excellence consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. Graphical excellence is that which gives the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. Avoid chartjunk! Burn USA Today. See also Tufte's reading list. Patterns are a vocabulary for design. Christopher Alexander coined the term "Pattern Language" to emphasize his belief that people had an innate ability for design that paralleled their ability to speak. His book A Timeless Way Of Building defines a 'pattern' as a three part construct.
What is Contextual Design? Explanation Graphics, Nigel Holmes |
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Web & Information DesignUsable Web: Guide to Web usability resources
designing communication by bringing together interaction + information + sensory Nathan's Interaction design bibliography User-centered design: Jay's review of The Inmates Are Running the Asylum What Keeps Them Coming Back and Steps to Improving Usability, Jakob Nielsen glassdog is a delightful romp of a web site but Lance Arthur fixes his fonts at a size to small for me to read. Joe Gillespie's fine web site, Web Page Design For Designers. great list of web design resources ZDnet's dev head -- usability and more on the web "The best design list on the net" philosophe.com Thoughtful Approach to Web Design An Atlas of Cyberspaces - Information Space Maps
Information Architecture Resources, info.design Designing Information Architectures for Web Publishing, by Paul Kahn, Dynamic Diagrams, Inc. Information Design -- Tech Head Stories links Usable Web on Information Architechture Webmonkey Tutorial on Information Architecture
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"a provider's first and best chance to engage the reader is through text." Text 92%
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Minimalist visual performance support |
Software Designfrom Robert B. Rossney
1) Use Occam's Razor. Corollary: if the answer you find isn't an obvious one, keep looking until you find another non-obvious answer and compare the two. One will be more right than the other. 2) If some aspect of your program gives you a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, it needs to be rewritten or redesigned. If it resists rewriting and redesign, it is probably unnecessary. If it is necessary, there's probably something wrong with the program as a whole. Good software doesn't make you queasy. 3) Don't surprise, constrain, confuse, mislead, or worst of all lie to the user. Take the user seriously. The unorthodox, spiteful, and just plain stupid things that users do would tax the patience of a saint, and they'll tax yours too, but think of what you'd do without them. 4) Any time you hear yourself saying "Oh, that'll never happen," give some serious thought to what your program should do when, not if, it (whatever it is) DOES happen. 5) Approach the hardest part of the design first. Putting this off until later will only subject it to the constraints imposed by your solutions to the "easy parts" of the design. 6) Fight off constraints to your design as long as you possibly can. The sooner you accept a constraint the more integral it will become to your design, and the greater the pain when the absolutely fixed immutable constraint has to change for the next revision. 7) Don't write anything down until your head is so full of ideas that it can't hold any more. This will mitigate the natural tendency of ideas to vanish the moment you try to express them. Don't code until you can't bear not coding. Existing code is a design constraint. (See 6.) 8) Always code as if you were writing the final, production version. Develop standards and follow them. The most brilliant programmer on earth is nothing but a menace if s/he doesn't follow standards. 9) Comment your code so that a drooling idiot could understand what you're doing. Someday that drooling idiot will be you. (See 10.) For some reason programmers document the obvious and leave the kludge unspoiled by explanation. 10) Do not disdain the simple, nor exalt the clever. Simplicity is often a blessing. On the other hand, whenever you're tempted into cleverness, imagine yourself sitting behind the keyboard staring blankly into the screen at three in the morning trying to figure out just what you meant by that. 11) For Christ's sake, pay attention. When you can't explain your neat new feature to the marketing people, when the users at the beta site ask you the stupidest questions imaginable, when a byte or two of garbage appears in the lower right-hand corner of the screen every hundredth time you use an option, the universal mind-consciousness is trying to tell you something. Don't ignore it. the Dark SideFrom Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas Are Born, by Denise Shekerjian: New things put a tremendous strain on old opinions. People are slow to change; the resistance to throwing out one's entire stock of old opinions is iron strong. The public is likely to appreciate something creative that stirs up, even cracks apart, the status quo only when they recognize some tiny part of their own agenda being championed. And if the timing is propitious and enough people appreciate some part of the new work, it will be deemed Good and will stand as a creative new contribution to the culture. Quality AssuranceQuality assurance is greater than quality control or testing. Testing describes the use of tests for some purpose. Quality control describes the process of measuring something against a standard of quality, with the result that anything that passes a quality control process is of a required level of quality. Quality assurance describes a process that seeks to improve quality by increasing the standard of quality, the quality of what goes into the production process, and the quality of the components of the production process.
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Everything comes in layers. Atop invisible reality come meta-, meta-meta-, meta-meta-meta-, etc. Good design doesn't confuse one layer with another. --Jay
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Industrial
Throughout this process, Braun Design is guided by a set of enduring
values which find expression in the following attributes of the finished
product: innovative, distinctive, desirable, functional,
clear, honest, aesthetic. |
web without a weaver
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Charles Eames: the intersection that maintains the designer's enthusiasm.
Charles and Ray achieved their monumental success by approaching each project the same way: Does it interest and intrigue us? Can we make it better? Will we have "serious fun" doing it? They loved their work, which was a combination of art and science, design and architecture, process and product, style and function. "The details are not details," said Charles. "They make the product." A problem-solver who encouraged experimentation among his staff, Charles once said his dream was "to have people working on useless projects. These have the germ of new concepts." from Charles and Ray Eames |
Internet
Time Group 
Training
magazine's April 2000 issue has a wonderful article debunking the effectiveness
of traditional instructional systems design (ISD). Why is ISD obsolete?
Argus
Center for Information Architecture, 
Robert
E. Horn
