Issue 17

WELCOME

This issue of Being Designerly features some food for thought from a UX Design pioneer, and curated reads about inclusive design, Google's future search vision, and prioritizing people's pain points.

You may rethink your dislike for Comic Sans while you take in some data visualization eye-candy.

Enjoy!

FEATURE

I helped pioneer UX design. What I see today disturbs me

This article by JJG has a lot of food for thought, for designers and non-designers alike. I am a strong advocate for design awareness for everyone, and people learning designer habits (hello: Being Designerly), but still believe that designers with training and experience should be responsible for design.

UX

Google Hopes AI Can Turn Search Into a Conversation

Google's vision for search that goes beyond a list of links and could change how billions of people search the web. It may infer meaning from human language, answer multipart questions—and look more like Google Assistant sounds. It may both summarize and generate text; it will know to compare Mount Adams to Mount Fuji and that trip prep may require search results for fitness training, hiking gear recommendations, and weather forecasts.

Changes that emphasize search with natural language or images could shift users away from a focus on keywords and also disrupt the booming business of search engine optimization (SEO).

Three Levels of Pain Points in Customer Experience

Pain points are problems that occur at the different levels of the customer experience: interaction level, customer-journey level, or relationship level. Identifying and fixing pain points, and better yet, preventing them, is core to what we do as UX professionals.

This NNG article talks about identifying each type of pain point using various UX research methods, then prioritizing them based on contextually appropriate criteria.

INCLUSIVE

After reading this, I stopped making fun of Comic-Sans

It is dyslexia friendly, as are Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic and Trebuchet.

Also take a look at the Dyslexie font designed especially for dyslexic people to read, and the Beeline Reader for easier computer reading - dyslexic or not.

Inclusive design is good for everyone!

More people with disabilities are developing technology—and it's good for everyone

A well-designed website or app user interface makes the information on the website or app accessible to the screen reader, which makes it accessible to blind users. An app or website that causes problems for a screen reader is likely to be more difficult than an accessible app or website for anyone to use because it will take more time or effort.

Observing people is good; their participation is better!

VISUAL

Visualization: The Biggest Companies in the World in 2021

A little data eye-candy showing the world's 100 biggest companies, visualized based on size, grouped by country and color coded based on sector...

UNTIL NEXT TIME

Until Next Time

I hope you enjoyed this issue, and the articles about problems with UX, pain points, inclusive design, future of search, and data visualizations.

If you think someone would benefit from Being Designerly, please forward it to them.

I'm looking for feedback, of the brutally honest kind, so this can improve over time. You can reach me at lycerejo (at) gmail.com - thank you!