Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

SEEK INSPIRATION EVERYWHERE
Just as you should seek inspiration and insight from your team members, you should
always be looking for ideas outside the office, out from behind the computer screen and in
the world. You never know where good ideas are going to come from. There is so much
emphasis in the writing about UX on getting to know users and their needs, and I just want
to highlight that tapping into users’ lives and experiences with your products should by no
means define the limits of your idea horizons. You want to be drawing on all sorts of other
sources of inspiration. As I said, UX design is not the sum of its methodologies; it’s also a
way of thinking and seeing. Once you start doing it, you’ll find yourself almost constantly
making note of useful and creative features you might work into your designs, from all
over, including from totally outside the world of tech. Maybe that’s an art exhibition you
go to that uses videos in some way you might draw on, or a restaurant that has introduced
some special element in its service that you can create a version of, say a friendly greeting
to patrons printed on its menus or engaging explanations about the dishes offered.
One of my favorite ideas for a feature came from way outside of tech and had
nothing to do with user interviews or personas. The app No Man’s Land, created by my
company, Tumbleweed, is an entertainment experience—some call it a game, but it started
as an idea for a movie. I and my compadres in developing it never had any intention of
turning it into an app. A few dozen of my friends and I thought it would be fun to
collaborate on making a film, and each of us pitched in our personal time and money. I
rented a small room in my apartment to be used as an editing room, and whoever had time
could come work on the project. Different members of the team contributed to the editing,
color correction, or whatever they could. As one of my future cofounders and I were
talking one day, the idea popped into our heads to release the movie not as a standalone
thing to visit and watch on the Internet but as something we could make way more
interesting, more of an experience. We were on our way to lunch when the idea hit. What
if it was a location-based movie? What if you had to be somewhere specific to watch each
scene? Over the next several months we planned and researched and designed until we
had what is now our very own location-based movie app.
Steve Jobs famously took inspiration from the calligraphy course he enrolled in at
Reed College. As he told Stanford graduates in his famous commencement speech:
I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space
between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t
capture…. When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came
back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with
beautiful typography. 2
I love what he says about the poetry of type, but I disagree with him that science isn’t
capable of capturing such beauty and lyricism. When I think of naturally occurring
geometric patterns or forces of nature that create perfect circles, such as the rings of
Saturn, I can’t help but think of the detailed observations needed to see forces behind these
phenomena. I don’t know if it’s the kid in me or the scientist, but the artistry all around us