MS Project != design happiness

I was having lunch today with a former Adobe design manager at House of Kabobs in Sunnyvale (I highly recommend it!) and we wandered onto the topic of UI schedules and MS Project in particular. I’m just not a fan of MS Project: it’s bloated, ugly, tedious, heavy, bespeaks of micromanagement and bureaucracy (death by […]

The value of a designer

Just in case there’s any doubt :-) The designer adds something important that technical experts may neglect—the ability to bring grace and elegance into forms and devices that are humanly engaging, often exciting and sometimes unexpected. Designers add marvel, and that can make a product more deeply usable, reaching beyond the prosaic or pedestrian. — […]

Part 2: Interpretations of beauty as a value of user experience

[Second in a series of postings about aesthetics and beauty as they pertain to interaction design, and beyond…] When we think of beauty, certain things come to mind: art, nature, physical and sensual qualities of the human body. But what about the artificial or digital, those interfaces/services/systems that are conceived and planned and designed by […]

Part 3: Towards an integrative aesthetic experience

[Third in a series of postings about aesthetics and beauty as they pertain to interaction design, and beyond…] So what then is the result of this investigation into beauty, as a value of user experience and beyond? In terms of pragmatic product development, where the designer must collaborate and communicate with non-design peers leery of […]

Where’s… the spec?

(To be said in the same tone as the classic Wendy’s television ad tagline, “Where’s the beef?”) It is inevitable for UI designers to be confronted with the question, “where’s the spec?”, usually posed by the product manager (PM) or engineer/QA leads. I’ve faced this at every in-house software design scenario to date, including Oracle, […]