paper & pencil

Manifestos on Creativity and Growth

Hugh MacLeod lists a number of ideas on how to be creative, supplemented by very interesting cartoons sketched by the author. Some of my favorite tips include:

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

25. You have to find your own schtick.

30. The hardest part of being creative is getting used to it.

In a similar vein, Bruce Mau listed out about 43 statements that form "An Incomplete Manifesto For Growth." Some favorites from this list...

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

Measuring users emotions

The October 2005 UI Design Newsletter discusses beauty as a usability attribute. In an attempt to better measure the aesthetics of an experience, one company has developed a series of cartoon-like expressions for users to choose from.

In a 2004 research study to separate"beauty" from "goodness", the researchers found that products considered beautiful also generated high goodness ratings on first impression. However, after using the product for a specified period of time the goodness ratings went down if there were usability problems.

Joel's Introduction to Great Design

Joel Spolsky published his first draft of Introduction to Great Design, where he begins his quest to write a series on "great design".

While most products were became increasingly incomprehensible, like the typical home entertainment remote control, with dozens of mushy little buttons marked "MTS" or "SURR" or "PTY" that nobody has any hope of understanding, something else was happening: a very few, very good designers were, somehow, coming up with truly great designs that were beautiful, easy to understand, fun, and which made people happy. You know who they are because those products became bestsellers. The Apple iPod. TiVo. Google. Even the Motorola RAZR, which is so hard to turn on, is, in most ways, a great design.

The first article in the series aims to define design. His definition simply boils down to making tradeoffs between constraints, many of which are conflicting.

Every new feature is a tradeoff, between the people who could really use such a feature and the people who are just going to get overwhelmed by all the options.

Joel ends this first installment on the importance of design and set things up for the next article, where he will define "great design."

Design is something you only have to pay for once for your product. It's a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That's what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that "Good design adds value faster than it adds cost."

(Footnote: AUTOS ON FRIDAY/Design; He Put a New Face on Chrysler, The New York Times, Published: February 9, 2001, by By JIM MCCRAW , Late Edition - Final, Section F, Page 1, Column 1)

Google UI - Both Science & Art

DM News reports on Google's plans to keep their home page clutter-free. Part of this is due to co-founder Sergey Brin's directive "don't put things in people's way." And partly due to the extensive and detailed user research and testing they conduct.

The company combines internal testing, user studies, log analysis and customer feedback to constantly track its user experience. And there is room for mistakes and adjustment.

"As we launch products, we expect not to get things right on the first try," Fitzpatrick said.

Experimentation, analysis and iteration by closely seated Google engineering teams of three to five executives help maintain a friendly user interface.

Gonna Tag You Up In My Love

Madonna jumped on the tagging bandwagon with her Madonna Tagging site. The tagging project's goal is to create the largest Madonna photo archive.

(via Wired Blogs)

Target Redesigns the Pill Bottle

In early 2005, Target unveiled a newly designed pill bottle with clearer labels and colored rings to help families keep track of their own presecriptions.