Note: These are my notes from this panel, and are not edited very well.
- Kelly Goto, Principal and CEO, gotomedia
- Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer, Yahoo!
- Dirk Knemeyer, Principal, Involution Studios LLC
- Joel Grossman, Managing Principal, Pivotal Click
What does dogma free design mean?
Five things vital to the future of web design:
- Web design should be controlled by designers
- Ajax is the future of the web
- Every big company should have a usability lab
- All web apps require ethnographic researchers
- 99 percent of Flash is bad
What we want to begin with is destroying these principals. None of this is the direction we should be going.
Let??????s talk about design. What is design? Design is the center of a lot of conversation. Critical concept to how business is being done across the board. The reality is, design is largely mediocre. Junk.
Kelly: in addition to her design background, really believes in research. Someone has to be the advocate of the healthy things you should be doing. Goal is to impart this.
Luke: what do these things actually mean? That design will save business.
How did we get here?
Began as engineering driven pursuit. The design of the products were coming from the engineering. That evolves to be business driven. Morphed the engineering process. Now it??????s a bit of a mess (not a bad thing).
Two different approaches that can be successful in app development: Savant: top-down approach. Scientific method: UI is a science not an art. Not a question of which right. Both can work. We need to understand them.
Savant: Design is the fundamental soul of a human made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.
Scientific: Introduce cautious, well-measured changes and introductions of new features and products.
Luke: because engineering process was first, a lot the language of design had to be moved into a language and process that marketing and engineering could understand.
Bucket tested???????A/B testing. Presenting two approaches to the audience.
Luke: on the Savant side, it??????s a risky proposition for businesses.
Design cannot be whether you harken back to the Bauhaus or??????
Luke: You are what you measure. What you get is a bland, numbers driven??????lack of empathy. Missing what it means to the audience. The way we evaluate success needs to change, given what we are now able to accomplish.
Joel: if you’re thinking of yourself as a designer and you care about what you??????re doing, that??????s when it matters most to break away from the dogma. Don??????t be afraid to say there??????s another way to thinking about how we measure success and figure out the right way to do things.
Kelly: People get stuck on certain principles. What do we stick to? What do we decide to break away from? Educate team and clients. Personality and lifestyle-driven, appropriately designed and targeted to user needs. Develop a methodology where your innovators and implementers are in the same room.
Luke: the big fear is the checklist. Made point about people who don??????t understand looking at Jacob Neilson for checklists about what should be on the site. ??????The big picture is much more important??????.
Ideation -> Communication -> Implementation
Design as production part of the assembly line: Implementation.
Design as communication: a strategic value-add.
Stressed iterative development. ??????Design is never done.?????? You climb a mountain, then there??????s a whole other mountain. Whoa. And then the mountain moved.
Kelly: process: there has to be a system of communication with your colleagues so that you??????re all on the same page. Goal: cut out as much documentation, but keep a system of communication.
Joel: there??????s no way you??????re going to get away from the checklist. Ass covering.
Luke: he who can define the problem, can define the solution. It??????s easier to talk about something that you can see. Words can be misinterpreted.
Kelly: create a checklist if you feel it??????s necessary. Some checklists do matter, because you need to keep tabs on things. If we don??????t follow our own process, we lose. Stressed that you need to create a process that works for your team.
extremeprogramming.org: came from engineers saying I don??????t want to do documentation any more.
http://gotomedia.com/goto/lifestyle/process
Goal is to get to lifestyle-driven experience. This thinking needs to be introduced at the highest level.
Joel: Sometimes you have to put yourself on the line. Stand up and believe in what you are doing.
Luke: there isn??????t this set process. Whatever people you??????re working with understand, gravitate toward that, and skip the stuff you don??????t need. Do stuff in your head. The more you can show a potential direction, the better.
Dirk: If you communicate in logical ways that make sense, you can really make a difference.
Audience member: I think a lot of us have legacy bosses. (laughter)