It has become a shibboleth of the UX and Agile communities that “collaborative design” is the best way of designing things. Or if not the best way, it is at least better than leaving people to come up with solutions on their own. Regular readers of Webtorque will know that if there’s one thing I like to do, it’s to question things that appear to be received wisdom. The usually unchallenged assertion that collaboration in design is always good is …
Tag: linkedin
I’ve been wondering whether using Chernoff faces might be a good variation of the “advanced search” pattern in the context of finding a hotel to stay in. Choosing the right hotel requires a number of quite complicated things to be considered. But which things you place the most emphasis on depends very much on the context of why you are booking a hotel in a given location or time. If price is the only consideration you have, then you’re lucky. Th…
I’ve had a bit of a realisation about the way I come up with design ideas that I’d not considered before (see below), but first, an important aside. Many people in my field mistake the activity of discovering and refining their own design processes as being a signal that they should recommend these processes noisily to everyone else. However, just because I think that a certain technique or principle works for me, it doesn’t mean that it will wor…
Several months ago, we made some changes to the search results of hotels.com, and among these was the creation of a “pinned header”. As you scroll down through the list of results, a portion of the page header stays with you. Here’s the UI before scrolling. And here it is with the header pinning (linking to screenshots for archival purposes). The rationale for this change was that the business wanted us to shout as loudly as possible about our lo…
Ah, synchronicity. No, not the 80’s album by The Police, but the fact that I was recently thinking about “back” buttons and software states in the design of our forthcoming Android and iPhone app. And so was Aza Raskin. Raskin suggests an improvement to the much-improvable experience of using the Apple iPhone’s ultra-simple, yet rather confusing “home” button. To cure what he says is a big problem on the phone (albeit not one I have myself notice…
Last year, our fearless team of interaction designers, creative designers and interface engineers (about 20 of us at the time) took the decision to embrace Scrum, the “agile” methodology for project management. We were all given training courses to attend, and I myself volunteered (along with several others) to become a certified Scrum Master. As we began on sprints, attended sprint planning and reviews, and got together for sprint retrospectives…