Title: Designing Great Experiences: The Gap Between Activities
Context: One of my favorite design quotes from the Tao Teh Ching is: “Clay is molded into a vessel, but the usefulness of the vessel depends on the space where nothing exists.”
Synopsis: Let me get all Zen on you guys for a moment: user experience is not about the things we design but rather about the spaces between the things we design. Did I just blow your mind? Awesome. But it’s kind of true. We spend so much time perfecting the specific features in our projects that we may lose sight of the rest of the end user’s workflow. What other tools might they currently be using? How much screen real estate should we leave free? Of course the ability to judge the gaps correctly takes investments of time and money because we have to be able to step back and spend time looking at the bigger picture as well as the micro view of our personal design task at hand. Plus we should all learn towel origami. That sounds like fun.
Best Bit: “[W]hen we’re designing for experiences, we research and design for the time that happens between the discrete activities. We look for opportunities to expand the design space, connecting the activities into a continuous stream.”
via uie.com
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