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Download Data Driven Design: How Today's Product Designer Apprally Innovative Digital Products by Philip A. Harris


Sinopsis


This is a book about digital design and how user experience (UX) is changing that field radically. I am a digital designer and I see the effects of those changes every day.
At one time, almost all digital designers used methods that depended on ideas coming from the top. These ideas would then filter down through a process of design, production, then, at the end, entering the marketplace. Products were presented to consumers as finished entities. If changes were going to be made, they had to wait until the next model or version. This design-production model was hardly perfect. It came from another era when our economic life was still limited to bricks-and-mortar enterprises that built physical products—often big physical products.
Then, as now, it made sense for an architect to design a building by creating a blueprint that was as close as possible to the final product. If architectural blueprints were to have any meaning, they had to express something close to the physically finished building. If huge changes were necessary, especially after the start of actual construction, the architect had failed. Once a building is framed up, basic alterations become incredibly costly, difficult and time-consuming. Tearing down the partially completed wing of a house, and rebuilding it from the ground up, can cost as much as the whole house, adding months to construction schedules.
Design has always been a part of consumer products. A few decades ago, as the technological age began, there were already many mass-produced products like cars, TVs and washing machines on the market. All of these began on the drawing board. These larger, physical products were, and still are, designed within a framework of historical precedent and well-known consumer preferences. If these goods perform the basic tasks they’re supposed to, then the different design elements are mostly in the extras, and in variations on well-known themes. We judge them by a combination of criteria based on fundamentals like longevity, comfort, and day-to-day performance, and on frills like backseat DVD players and leather upholstery. When a designer draws up specs for these kinds of products, he or she is working in a long tradition of experience—that of millions of previous users and thousands of previous designers.
This from-the-top design method still works for the really big stuff, like homes, cars and household appliances. But retail websites, online games and mobile devices are different. We can design and post a website, attract users, get feedback, revise components, and even totally redesign the structure and content in hours. When you can get accurate feedback from users, then analyze and revise in a virtual instant, it only makes sense to do it. Consumers are (impatiently) waiting for the result. When a product is a commercial failure, it’s simply in the users’ instruction that change is needed. That’s the potential of UX: the creation of products and services aimed directly at the user.
This book looks at UX from various angles: how it came to be, how it works, who employs its methods, why they do it, and who it serves. Though digital designers might be its most obvious audience, I’ve written it in language that should be accessible to all readers, even those who have only a smattering of digital knowledge. If you can perform basic digital tasks, such as successfully completing an order from Amazon or eBay, you should be able to understand most of what’s here. If you’ve ever created a web page, no matter how basic, that experience will give you the context to understand what I’ve written in a different way. Even if you don’t realize it, you’ve acted as a designer yourself. You’ll see that when you get to sections covering buttons, text and other web page components. A digital designer deals with those issues every day.
The most obvious audience of my fellow digital designers will already know about many of the things I describe. A designer already has experience with wireframes, prototypes and iterations. However, he or she might not know how their day-to-day work fits into the larger contexts of art, commerce and history. This book will serve as an introduction to those relationships. It will also give designers an overview of digital design in its present-day age of transition. If we step back and view our field as a whole, we can better see its relationships to the broader world. We are in a business providing essential services, not just to individual users, but also to clients whose products are aimed at those users. Digital designers understand formats, menus and analytics, but not all of us have considered how our design practices affect our clients’ goals.
Which brings me to another larger group of readers: the clients who hire us to design their products. UX begins with users, but marketing begins with businesses. A struggling start-up puts thousands of hours of work into an online game. Will consumers buy it? A financial firm wants to increase its customers’ access to its online services. Will those customers be turned on or turned off by the firm’s new web pages? Should they target mobile users? How well will the pages display on tablets? Clients bring these jobs to design firms. This book should serve as a tool for them to better understand how design works. The better they understand what designers do, the more pertinent questions they can ask, and the more likely they are to have a useable context for the answers.
In some ways, digital design grew up in a vacuum, emerging with the mammoth computers of the postwar era. The cost of these unwieldy machines limited their client-base to governments, universities and the world’s biggest corporations. Digital design first entered the consumer marketplace with the handheld calculators of the early ‘70s. Parents bought them for their kids, then for themselves. The leading calculator manufacturer, Texas Instruments, was the first of the newer digital-based companies to penetrate the public’s consciousness. Digital game makers followed, and Atari led this pack. This was the digital landscape when the PC and the early Mac’s first entered the marketplace in the early ‘80s. By that time, digital technology was embedded in the controls of many consumer products, from radios to coffee makers, but few buyers noticed. When they thought of “digital,” they thought of games and squared-off numerical displays.
As I’ll show more fully in Chapter Two, designers were way ahead of the curve. As consumers learned the first iteration of a product, designers might already be thinking about the fifth or sixth. The companies listened to complaints, but their managers were often as far behind as their users. There was barely even a minimum of pertinent communication. Users and clients lacked background, and few of them spoke the language of the digital world. In that context, meaningful exchanges between designers and clients or designers and consumers, seemed almost impossible.
The emergence of UX is due to many factors, but one is the pace of life itself. Digital products and services have shaped our habits, recasting our ideas about speed. Clients and consumers are moving much faster. They’ve learned to accept, and often even embrace, change at rate unheard of just a few years ago. Users accept the fact that this will continue. But they require something in return, something consumers have always wanted: they need to be heard. When we have something new to show them, a product or service with the potential to surprise them, or possibly delight them, they’re willing to look and listen. But they’re asking designers to listen, too. They’re tired of instructions they can’t read, websites they can’t navigate, and functions that go haywire. They want us to pay attention, and we should. After all, ultimately they are the ones footing the bill.
That’s why this book is for users as well. Any worthwhile communication begins with knowledge. I know something you need to know, and vice versa, so we find the words and actions necessary to convey our knowledge to each other. Both sides can do that most effectively when we already know enough to have context. In this case, designers need to understand users’ viewpoints, and users will profit by gaining a basic sense of how design works.
So the main body of readers I’m writing for are all of you who buy and use the products and services we design. Some of you are fellow designers, some are our valued clients, but I will feel as if I’ve truly made my point if most of my readers are the end users of these products—the ones who bear the expense. I’ve written this in basic language so we can understand one another. After all, I’m working to serve you. My writing and your reading are two ends of an exercise in clear, concise communication. As I strip down the techno-speak, I can see my subject more clearly. As I’ve written, I’ve tried to view design through your eyes.
Most of us spend large parts of our days working, playing, and doing business using digital products and services. Everything from clocks to traffic lights depend on digital technology. If you have any interest in how the digital world works, and how you can bend it to your needs more effectively, this book is a good place to start. Here you’ll see how these products are conceptualized, developed and brought into production. You will also learn how designers are finally hearing users’ voices.
Digital design is an art, and digital designers are artists. Now we’re learning that commerce is also an art. This book is a product of that learning experience. It is also a tool for reaching out to clients and users. The better we know each other, the better chance we have of creating products that will bring all of us surprise, delight and meaning.



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