When business goals clash with user needs
In Agile software development, features and functionality planning is usually documented in the form of user stories. Ideally, a user story represents a user goal and an outcome, and is told from user’s point of view. This helps Agile teams to keep users at the center of the development process.
The typical format of a user story is a single sentence:
“As a [type of user], I want to [goal], so that [benefit].”
For example,
“As a Medium user, I want to sort my bookmarks based on date, so that I can start reading from my oldest bookmarks.”
User stories: a case for Instagram
Let’s have…
A case study of worldbuilding using design fiction films
In my master’s thesis I submitted back in 2014, I explored the emerging creative practice called design fiction for the first time and questioned how design fiction artifacts can be used to spark and facilitate discussions about the future. With that purpose, I set up a roundtable and invited four fellow students from our programme to co-analyze a speculative short film. In this article, I summarize my findings.
Design fiction is a creative practice that envisions possible futures through prototyping and storytelling. It doesn’t try to predict the future; it illustrates potential outcomes and wraps them in “what if” scenarios…
How user stories can help
When committed to creating detailed prototypes in Figma, things can easily get messy, especially if you have all your frames within the same file. While I was designing a complex web app for managing annual salary reviews, I avoided this problem thanks to user stories.
Is platform exclusives the next big thing?
As the smartphone platforms have gotten closer in terms of customer experience and hardware capability over the last few years, we have arrived at where gaming consoles had arrived many years ago: platform exclusives.
A brand new Instagram app
It seems Apple has a new trick up its sleeve. Joining forces with Facebook, the tech giant is planning to release an iOS-only Instagram.
While providing the same functionality as the current app, the iOS exclusive is expected have a brand new user interface design that fully capitalizes on the upcoming Apple hardware, thus offering a significantly better performance and user experience that may not be…
Do you remember?
You launched your product and people seemed to have adopted it. The positive feedback have started to pour in, along with new feature requests here and there. Then the number of requests started to increase, because your users simply want to do more with your product and they can’t be blamed for that. With the pressure of growth gaining heavy on your shoulders, you start adding features to get approval, pretty much like sharing on social media to get some likes. But with great number of features, comes great responsibility, the responsibility towards your product’s default, core experience. …
Because there’s no such thing as UX design.
It did not occur to me until I read James Mingardi-Elliott’s article “There is no such thing as UX Design”. He brilliantly explained his reasoning behind why the term “UX design” doesn’t make sense and it resonated with me.
UX Design as the name for Product Design made total sense as the industry started to accept the importance of considering a user’s whole experience. UX Design put UX into every conversation about our products. But we’ve matured beyond that and UX is bigger than just Product Design, it’s something the entire organization does. A user’s experience is too big to…
How I designed a maglev train/Hyperloop hybrid when I was 12 years old
When I was a little kid, I used to be quite a scientist. I worked on ideas ranging from firefighting drones, smart car user interfaces to sci-fi dreams of teleportation and hoverboard. Without access to the internet, my research relied on the encyclopedias we had at home and the scientific publications I read.
Back in 1998, at the time I was 12 years old, I had an idea that excited me. This falls around the time I first learned about magnets and the basic principle of attraction and repulsion forces, most likely from one of those publications. …
The global pandemic might change how we interact with daily objects.
As every person is a potential virus carrier and each publicly used object is potentially contaminated, how we perceive and interact with these objects have been dramatically changed. Thus, the core concepts of product design might be subject to change as well.
One of these concepts is affordance, which was popularized by Don Norman, a researcher, professor, and author. In his book The Design of Everyday Things, he defines affordance as “a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used”. …
Döngüsel ekonomiye geçişte tasarım nasıl bir rol üstleniyor?
İnsanlar doğrusal sistemler kurarken, doğa döngüsel sistemler kurar. İşte bu sebeple, doğada ‘atık’ diye bir şey yoktur. Döngüsel ekonominin radikal vaadi işte bu: Geleneksel ‘al-üret-at’ ekonomisinden kapalı bir döngüye sahip, malzeme ve verinin sürekli olarak yeniden görevlendirildiği bir ekonomiye doğru geçiş.
Kurumsal gelecek vizyonları gerçekten geleceği tahmin etmek için mi üretiliyor?
1987 yılında EDUCOM fuarında, dönemin Apple CEO’su John Sculley, teknoloji eğitimi toplumuna yönelik yaptığı konuşmasında Knowledge Navigator adlı bir video sundu. Konsepti Hugh Dubberly ve Apple Creative Services’den Doris Mitsch tarafından geliştirilen video, 60.000 dolar bütçeyle çekildi.
TIME dergisi için yapılan bir röportajda, o dönem Apple’da bilgisayar uzmanı olarak görev yapan Alan Kay, Sculley’nin kendisinden Dynabook’un modern bir versiyonunu geliştirmesini istediğini belirtiyor. Dynabook, Kay’in 1972 yılında yayınladığı A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages adlı akademik çalışmasında tanımladığı, grafiksel kullanıcı arabirimi ve klavye kullanan bir konsept taşınabilir bilgisayar. Adından da anlaşılabileceği üzere Dynabook, esas olarak çocuklara yönelik tasarlanmış bir…
