make decisions with the tools or utilities we produce. As with any tool or utility, our designs must focus on serving a need. But who says the service of that need can’t be lively, entertaining, and even emotionally evocative? In this chapter, I’ll discuss the ways in which you can make sure it is.
ISN’T THE STORY SOMEONE ELSE’S JOB? You might think that the story of your product is told primarily by its branded elements, such as the company logo; other branded graphical elements, such as color schemes; and its content—that’s for the marketing team, content strategists, and visual designers to work out. For sure, brand imperatives and the content the company provides are key elements of the storytelling your product does—they set the tone. The branding design elements are the first layer of tone. But your interface design is also vital to any product’s story. When you design a dynamic, moving, smart interface, you play the role of narrator. You will also generally be responsible for the actual narration about how to navigate the site, writing the copy used for labels and input boxes, such as “Enter billing information” and “Click here to move to shopping cart,” to use two pedestrian examples. As I’ll cover later, the skill with which you write these directives and explanations can have a great deal to do with how effective the story you tell is. In terms of the brand story, it’s for sure that you are always going to be designing for a brand, whether it’s a big corporate product group or a not-for-profit, a government organization, or a university. They will all have a brand story that your product must be telling, and this will both constrain and guide you, as I described regarding my work on the Wall Street Journal apps. At the Journal my work always had to be sensitive to the company’s old and well-established brand identity. The phrase “business news and designs” still rings in my ears, but the truth is that having a strong brand story was really helpful. You never want to violate or interfere with brand messaging in any way in your designs—and they’re not likely to be approved if you do. For some products, you need to be very careful that your interfaces don’t overpower the content. With a brand like the Journal, the content is king; anything too flashy that distracts from that is just not going to fly. For other products, like a new app, your interface may be a big part of the content. For example, Sleep Cycle is an alarm clock app that analyzes people’s sleep patterns. The app was designed with some thoughtful UX that tells its story—which is that it wants to help you get good sleep—with nice touches, such as the screen going dark when it comes time for you to go to sleep at night. In the daytime the app is filled with informational and utilitarian interfaces, such as the familiar scrollable clock dial for setting alarms (also used in the stock Clock app from Apple), and a graphic portraying when you were in deep sleep or more restless sleep during the prior night. You always have to make your interfaces consistent with the brand message and personality, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be really creative within those bounds. And sometimes you’ll have a good deal of latitude. With work for startups, which are just building their brand identity, you usually get the opportunity to help substantially mold and shape that identity with your product. You’re still given detailed requirements and marketing material to guide the design, but you have more influence to suggest innovations. You might also be involved in helping to rebrand a company, as I’ve been at Yahoo. The overarching directive for my team at Yahoo is to make each app use images in an interesting way to give the products a more luxurious feel. If you look at Yahoo Weather, which won an Apple <strong>Design</strong> Award for 2013, you’ll find a wonderful selection of photos of your location depicting the appropriate weather conditions, which we’ve crowdsourced from Flickr users, displayed
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Also from General Assembly The Prac
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CONTENTS ALSO FROM GENERAL ASSEMBLY
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INTRODUCTION This is a great time t
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goals. And one of the most pressing
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YOU’RE NOT DESIGNING FOR YOU The
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TESTING THE COMPETITION Another gre
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RELEASE, FIX, RELEASE There is one
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Chapter 5 GOOD UX COMES FROM BEING
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YOU’RE NOT THE OWNER OF THE UX In
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course, this is just not the way th
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(Courtesy Shutterstock) Well, sure,
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pieces of images peeking out from t
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knowledge that data can have about
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Frequency vs. Importance: Give a se
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COLLABORATION GOES BOTH WAYS Always
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MAKING IT LEAN Fitting the parts of
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SEEK INSPIRATION EVERYWHERE Just as
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screen maps that show where gates a
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SHOW, DON’T TELL In the beginning
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POINTS TO REMEMBER Good UX Comes fr
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November 16, 2012, http://managemen
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Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 78 business
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size of user base and, 121-22 user
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Qu, Hong, 158 Rams, Dieter, 117-18
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UX design, 1-4, 62, 19, 33, 148, 16
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