WELCOME
Being Designerly is about designer-like behaviors and habits. Thinking like a designer involves design awareness, and this issue has curated reads about good design, bad design, UX and visual design.
Will you have performance anxiety if you have a large chatbot avatar staring at you? Can a thousand spoken words replace a picture in a furniture catalog? What was Bezos' design legacy? Can you trust Alexa? Does the South Carolina flag redesign look less like a toilet brush? Is the fox still in Firefox? Can you sell a digital collage for $69M, given than 69M people can still download it for free?
Curious? That's Being Designerly - enjoy this issue!
FEATURE
Why Does a Design Look Good?
Design is subjective, especially when it comes to the visual part. Raise your hand if you haven't heard (or thought) "I like that color", "I don't like that font". No one? I thought so!
Nielsen Norman Group's Sarah Gibbons deconstructs visually aesthetic designs showing the impact of consistent typography, a clear hierarchy, a refined color palette, and alignment to a grid.
nngroup.com
This Is Not Good Design
Christopher Butler writes about seven kinds of bad design, while acknowledging that there are many more. This is less about the opposite of "good design" above, which we all can live with, but more on the lines of design that is bad. Evil-bad.
chrbutler.com
Inside Jeff Bezos’s failed attempt to make Amazon “cool” like Apple and Nike
There's good design, bad design, and Amazon's design. Just kidding!
This article examines products designed during Bezos reign and how his approach made products that were functional, and even future-forward. But they were rarely covetable, and they were sometimes downright silly.
fastcompany.com
Vote With Your Wallet On New Alexa Products
Speaking of Amazon products, you have a few hours left to pre-order the following Alexa products and get early access if they make the cut: Smart Cuckoo Clock, Smart Nutrition Scale, and a Smart Sticky Note Printer. These are Amazon Day 1 Editions product concepts - learn more about them at the link below.
Will you, won't you?
amazon.com
Why would you ever trust Amazon's Alexa after this?
TLDR: Privacy. Or the lack of it.
That's mainly why I personally didn't pre-order the Day 1 products above.
This article is about research that will make you have second thoughts about your actual privacy with Alexa skills and how easy it is to spoof a company and publish skills...
zdnet.com
UX
To fix the cybersecurity talent shortage, we need smarter product design
Most cybersecurity products rely heavily on people to make them work and iron out any misfires or false positives. How can product design solve that issue?
This article lists 3 design principles to inspire product builders and buyers to become obsessed with minimizing overhead as an explicit design objective, not an afterthought.
fortune.com
Inside Google's $240 Plan to Disrupt the College Degree (Exclusive)
Read more about Google's new Career Certificates on Coursera in project management, data analytics, and user experience (UX) design.
Scholarships - why, yes!
inc.com
VISUAL
After scrapping hated flag design, SC lawmakers settle on these two possibilities
The first Being Designerly issue of 2021 first discussed the Palmetto state flag controversy. Here's an update that looks less like a toilet brush...
Or does it?
thestate.com
Remain Calm: the fox is still in the Firefox logo
After the "They killed the fox" meme made its rounds on social media, Mozilla cleared up the confusion: "We didn’t get rid of the fox then and have no plans to do so now, or ever."
Read all about it!
mozilla.org
INSPIRATION
Nestle Toll House Rolls Out Digital Avatar to Enhance the User Experience
How do you stand out when everyone and their mother has a chatbot? Say hello to Ruth, your Nestlé Toll House Cookie Coach! She can help rescue burnt cookies, but that's not a problem in my house, where they disappear before they can get burnt!
I found it extremely distracting to have her staring at me (full screen) while trying to formulate my question, so I just gave up.
I'd take a text only interface anytime, I can't see the benefit of having such a large avatar staring me down. What about you?
uschamber.com
The 2021 IKEA Catalogue - As An Audiobook
IKEA just released their catalog in audio format. Wait, WHAT?
It’s the same IKEA catalog you know and love, now as a handy, and hands-free, audio book. IKEA touts it as a way to save on paper, be contactless, convenient, and filled with style inspiration and vivid product descriptions for your listening pleasure.
While I love IKEA, I couldn't really picture OUMBÄRLIG, KNARREVIK, BERGPALM, and KUNGSFORS.
What's that saying again? "A picture is worth a thousand words..." Paper or digital catalog FTW!
ikea.com
An Initiative to Improve Street Safety through Public Art
How might we improve street safety at dangerous intersections?
"Stop Signs, Speed Bumps..." may be an easy go-to. What if you also designed those intersections?
Read about how a city turned over 400 sq ft. each to 4 local artists to use as a canvas.
Design constraint: they were restricted to using traffic striping paint, which is available only in six colors. The transformation went beyond aesthetics, and along with stop signs, reduced overall vehicle speeds by 45%, shortened pedestrian crossing distances by half and reduced noise levels by 10 to 12 decibels, according to survey data from the city.
nextcity.org
NEWS
2021 Google Algorithm Update: Double Down On Website User Experience
Good UX is good for everyone, including SEO results in Google. Read on for some upcoming changes and what you need to watch out for and fix...
forbes.com
The $69 Million JPEG
There's a lot of things we never imagined would happen; for me, one of them was someone selling a digital collage as a nonfungible token (NFT).
Non-what what? Time to see how millions of dollars are spent at the intersection of non-tangible and blockchain...
I'm off to search how to make Being Designerly a NFT!
npr.org
