Kirsten Jahn on Design & Life

Where Worlds Collide by Jared Spool

• Its not about the application, its about the experience
• Good design disappears into the background
• The Twitter experience is about ambient intimacy
• What are web-based applications?
  • Where user needs, business, & technology collide
• Corporate underpants: when the organization of your company shows through on your homepage; “Like wearing your underpants on the outside of your clothes.”
• How do we create great experiences?
  • Not measurable & no patterns known
• Three elements of knowing whether a team will produce successful web apps
  1. Vision
  2. Feedback: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor’s design?
     • What matters is the amount of exposure your team has to this feedback
  3. Culture: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for a major design failure?
     • You must be able to take risks in your designs in order to make things better
     • When we fail we learn incredible things
     • Every failure is an opportunity to learn
• Less and less people are comprising teams but the roles are expanding
  • Need to think in terms of skills, not roles
  • The future of design is based on skills that people have, not roles that they fill
• Editing & Curating: deleting and picking out the right stuff for the design is important
• Paradox of choice: the more choice you give people, the less satisfied they will be
• Kitchen cabinent problem: you know where everything is in your cabinets so you resist change
  • Can make things more transparent but makes things look more cluttered
  • Think about the process of change over time
• Make sure that someone is editing and curating

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