Tag Archives: Problem solving

Build a Strong UX Foundation

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Quick: Explain why the long E sound in the word treat is spelled “ea”, but for the same sound in the word wheel it’s “ee”. Now explain how one-third is the same as two-sixths. Now explain why a ten-cent coin in the U.S. is smaller than a five-cent coin. But wait, you have to do all this without referencing the evolution of the English language, numerators, denominators or the price of silver in the late 19th century.

Welcome to helping my six-year-old daughter with her homework. Or, (in the universe’s constant reminder to me that everything is really one thing) helping a recently graduated designer tackle her first information architecture work. In both cases, the challenge is to build a foundation strong enough to support all the learning that comes after it.
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Design Solves Problems

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Design is what it does and what it does is solve problems.

Words and the way we use them cheapen our understanding of design. We screw it up in both directions; sometimes we add modifiers to break the granite of design down into so many pebbles, while other times it floats away from us after we over-inflate it as Design with a capital D.
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The Fall Will Kill You

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Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid are stuck at the top of a high clump of rocks. The summit was too steep for their horses, so now it’s just the two of them. They’ve spent days running from a posse and now they either have to turn back and face the lawmen or jump from their perch into the twisting, violent rapids far, far below.
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Be Russian

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Problem-solving never happens in a vacuum. Culture creates the context for our solutions, directly affects our processes, and influences how we view our goals. That’s why the 1960s space race between the Soviet Union and the U.S. remains relevant to development work done today.
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Design It Like a Petting Zoo

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Design is what it does and what design does is solve problems. Online, we concentrate on designing user experiences because the problems that need to be solved always come down to a single individual and the decisions they make. User experience could be pretty dispassionate work with such cold logic at its core, but in practice, it’s hard not to feel a bit protective of our users. We don’t want to do a Hansel-and-Gretel, abandoning folks in some dark forest full of dangerous critters. We want to create a relatively safe place where they can interact with content, functionality, and other users. We want to design user experiences like petting zoos.

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Think Visually and Design Conceptually

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It seems like everybody wants to think like a user experience designer these days. Consider this excerpt from IDEO President Tim Brown’s June 2008 Harvard Business Review article:

” … Unaffordable or unavailable health care … energy usage that outpaces the planet’s ability to support it, education systems that fail many students …

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Roller Coaster Documentation

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Nobody loves documentation like an IA, and I don’t mean that in a good way: I mean nobody else gives a crap about the bulk of the stuff we create. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that as zealots we tend to over-circulate our work. Not all documents are for everybody involved in the project. In fact, I’ve found that the development and delivery of documentation works best when it emulates the beginning of a roller coaster.

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There are Opportunities in Chaos

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I feel sorry for control freaks. I’ve been mistaken for one in the past, and while I admit that I enjoy a good, fully developed process now and then, I’m not driven by any powerful urge to control the world around me. In fact, I think chaos can produce some interesting opportunities.

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