Readmill Blog

For me, this is partly about managing your time well, but mostly about confidence and experience. The more comfortable you get with allowing interviewees to elaborate, while remembering you’ll need to bring them back, the more you open up opportunities for the interviewee to take you to places you perhaps hadn’t considered and uncover insights a more rigid format wouldn’t have allowed.

Whether you’re new to research or not, I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be to keep your distance but maintain empathy. But just as we reassure participants in usability testing that no-one’s feelings will be hurt by their feedback, so we must let interviewees tell their story, their way. We’re there to observe, not judge.

Good listening as an interviewer isn’t just about hearing what the interviewee is saying. It’s about understanding why, observing how they are saying it. It’s about thinking about what might need further clarification, anticipating what follows on from their response (rather than your previous question).

Often, the problems that I’ve seen with research delivered by third parties can be found right here. Tired, set formats, over-engineered slide decks and bound reports aimed at those who commissioned the research rather than those required to act on it. When setting up your research, determining who it’s ultimately there to inform is critical (and not always easy).

There’s a tension here between the undoubted power of the soundbite and the need to tell the fuller story, and an onus on us to tell that story in a compelling way. But there’s a note to be made here about honesty, too. About the importance of reflecting what we were heard, not just what we wanted to hear. Interviews can challenge our preconceptions as much as those of our clients. We need confidence to share that with our clients.

Whenever you learn something new, mnemonics are very helpful. My science teacher taught me this mnemonic when I was a child. Although he taught it in a completely different context, I still remember it after all these years.

Devices like the Arduino might seem to be limited if you compare them to “real” PCs. But the gap between embedded systems and desktop systems isn’t as wide as it was a few years ago. It’s no longer necessary to permanently optimize your code, and for many applications you can completely ignore the fact that you’re working on an embedded system. These days, many Arduino libraries have a nice object-oriented interface, and they don’t waste a lot of resources.

I think it’s amazing how a little add-on like a distance sensor opens a whole new world of applications. In principle, an Arduino is nothing but a regular computer, but you’d never think of such applications when programming your PC. It still amazes me how a small sensor can lead to an explosion of creativity.

Working with sensors makes many programmers a bit nervous. Software developers are used to deterministic behavior. Running the same program twice with the same input will always lead to predictable results. Programming embedded systems is often different and can teach you many helpful lessons that will make you a better programmer in more regular environments, too.

Devices like the Arduino have the potential to bring important knowledge back to the masses. There was a time when it was really difficult to explain the inner workings of a simple device, like a remote control, to your child. Now with the Arduino and the Internet you can build and program one in less than two hours. You can even build a replacement for an existing one that you don’t like or that lacks some features. Of course, this holds true for many more devices too.

I know I wrote it, but I do love this quote. It’s more true now than ever before as well with more immersive experiences taking place on the web.

This is a great quote from Mike and is true beyond colour.

This is about using conventions to your advantage to communicate effectively and efficiently. Sometimes though, other elements might influence the design decisions you make such as brand guidelines.

In UK store Argos, for example, the enter button on their in-store product ordering system is red because red and blue are their brand colours. Google also use red for their call to actions but they seem to make it work!

Semiotics is a fascinating topic that anyone who works in web design should take the time to read up on. Work carried out in this field still heavily influences the way we construct and deconstruct texts today.

If you’re short in time then Semiotics for Beginners by Paul Cobley and Litza Jansz is a good start.

Another essential read is This Means This, This Means That by Sean Hall.

This is more true now than ever before and is really what inspired the writing of this book. As a media studies student I was made aware of the influence the media has on us, often subconsciously, in our everyday lives.

If you stop and consider all the times during an average day you are exposed to some sort of media, it’s incredible.

Billboards, films, websites, radio stations, adverts, branding, social media, word of mouth, shops, direct mail … The list is endless and each one of these media types have been carefully constructed to convey more than what meets the eye.

Reading Michael Fox and Miles Kemp’s _Interactive Architecture_ (http://interactive-architecture.com/) was a revelation. Actually, that’s not quite right—it was a proper kick to the head. Kemp and Fox not only showed me a more interactive side of architecture I’d never seen before, but painted a clear picture of the challenges that caused it: crises of economy, of climate, and of sustainability that, taken together, demonstrated the need for a more flexible, more _responsive_ form of architecture.

These are, I think, crises we were dealing with in our own medium, as we started to design beyond the desktop. And we’re still working through them, I suppose.

Dave Rupert said recently that responsive design is allergic to complexity, and I think there’s something to that. Every responsive project I’ve worked on has benefited from borrowing a page from Luke Wroblewski’s “mobile first” mantra, from rethinking design elements if they’re not right for small-screen, handheld devices. Responsive design isn’t just about making elements _fit_, but making sure they’re appropriate for _all_ of your users—regardless of the size of their screen. And if you can use a responsive redesign as an opportunity to simplify your work, the result will be much, much better for it.

The original article on responsive design just turned three years old, which means this little book of mine’s about to turn two. And even after a bit of time, a number of questions pop up from folks who see responsive design as a sort of “all-or-nothing” approach: that they have to ditch their existing mobile experience, or replace their existing desktop site, or toss out various babies with sundry bathwaters.

The thing is, responsive design doesn’t mean you have to tear everything down at the outset. There’s room for more nuanced approaches, where you might test the responsive waters a bit. For every wholesale responsive redesign like The Boston Globe (http://bostonglobe.com/) or Disney (http://disney.com/), companies like The BBC (http://m.bbc.co.uk/news), The Guardian (http://m.guardian.co.uk/), People Magazine (http://m.people.com/) take more conservative approaches, experimenting with responsive design on their “mobile” sites before opening it up to wider parts of their audience.

I don’t have much to add to the sentiment here, but in rereading it I realized terms like “mobile,” “tablet,” or “desktop” _rarely_ pop up in my work these days. The teams I’m working with usually talk more broadly about specific challenges around resolution (small-screen, mid-screen, or widescreen), input type (touch, mouse, keyboard, hybrid), network type (low-end, broadband), and so on, instead of falling back on stock device classes.

Like I said, not much to add here. But it did strike me that the language I’ve been using has gotten a bit more nimble, as the lines between device classes have gotten much, much blurrier.

The highlighting stripped out the emphasis, but “_media queries alone do not a responsive design make_” is, I think, one of the key lines of the book. The best responsive sites I’ve seen all let their foundation—the fluid grid—do the heavy lifting, treating media queries as the final layer in the cake.