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The Facebook Timeline: Not your typical UI development project.

posted in: UI | 0

Title: Designers Behind Facebook Timeline: 5 Keys To Creating A UI With Soul
Context: How do you design a UI around an ephemeral idea such as people’s memories?
Synopsis: It’s not everyday a user experience team is asked to design a solution for recording and communicating people’s most precious memories. But that’s what the Facebook team responsible for the new timeline profile page was tasked with. The interesting thing is not the solution itself (in my opinion anyway) but rather how they arrived at the solution. The questions they asked and the challenges of exposing an individual’s history with sensitivity and usability at the core of the process. This project required a different level of user “research” as personas and assumptions are hard to match against a user experience that is so tightly individualistic in every incarnation. Here is the key insight as I see it: design for actual people not demographics. This is how a UI evolves from static interface to adaptable utility. Now if only they’d give me a damn “Dislike” button.
Best Bit: “Felton says the main lesson he learned from the experience of designing and iterating Timeline is that ‘Photoshop lies. You can come into a meeting with a very beautiful comp and it’s like, ‘Oh yes, we should do it that way,” he says. ‘But you’re never going to know if you can do it that way until you pump in the real data and live with it for days or weeks.'”

via fastcodesign.com

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