Critical facets of a design

Every design has three fundamental facets that serve as a framework of analysis when identifying opportunities to evolve the design further, or extend it into families or standards for related designs. What is inherent: This pertains to the product’s DNA that define its character/persona/voice and its reason for existence. Strongly correlated to product/company brand. Concerns […]

Design needs a (project) runway

To properly take flight and thrive in the upper levels of product/user experience excellence atmosphere, a design needs a significant amount of runway (to use a very extended airplane metaphor :-)…What do I mean by this? Simply put, there’s need to be thorough time, discussion, collaboration, and exploration of possible solutions before settling on “the […]

“Tomorrow” is not a schedule

Ask a Prod Manager or Engineer when a “design is due” and the response is usually “yesterday” or “tomorrow”, with little hint of sarcasm. The fact is, that is utterly useless info and counterproductive to deep multi-disciplinary collaboration towards solving problems in a meaningful way that actually matters. Indeed, such a glib approach to time […]

Designers as triathletes?

Recently this past spring the Bay Area held the annual running of the “Escape from Alcatraz” Ironman Triathlon, which some good friends performed and successfully completed. It’s an incredible, arduous experience from the looks of it (and NO, I have zero intention of running it! :-) But I couldn’t help notice the parallels between that […]