Hiring Designers? Some thought on ‘Patterns in Designers’

I can say I have met quite a number of designers both during my college days to my professional life – especially through interviews. I have been involved in hiring process for designer for Yahoo! for quite some time now. My involvement mostly have been to evaluate the ‘design thinking’ of the candidates. Interacting with people I’m starting to see some patterns in designers. These are some patterns that I have seen in designers and design thinking :

Feature Thinkers – For clarity they are not ‘Ideators’ or ‘Thinkers’ or ‘Innovators’ if you think. These are generally designer who generally give good ideas about a new feature, product etc. They can think at a macro level and can give nice ideas on it. But these may not be the best people to implement it. They’ll give nice ideas but are ‘generally’ not able to transform (implement) these ideas into usable/useful designs. These are broad level ‘feature thinkers’. They generally throw wild ideas.

Implementers – Implementers are thinkers but of different sort. These are designers who can solve the problem effectively. These are innovators who can make things ‘work’. They may not be the best of thinkers who can provide broad level “out of box” ideas. But they can solve design issues at more of a grass root level. Their innovation is in making thing work; give them an average idea and they will make it good by their implementation solutions. One attribute which ‘could’ be associated with them is their eye for detail.

Hybrids – And then there are hybrids. A mix of both ‘Feature Thinkers’ and ‘Implementers’. And these are the one who are toughest to find.

Followers – These are sadly the most common to find. These are designer who are Skill Driven. You tell them what to do and they will do it in no time. But they don’t add anything to you knowledge pool or to design. They just follow what’s told to them. These designers thrive on their software skills and they could be useful in some cases.

I guess the best team would be a mix of all these types of designers. Every one has their own qualities. The best would be to get implementers; but identifying them is difficult. One needs to analyze them thoroughly to know if they are good implementers.

Innovation happens at every level – at feature level or at implementation level. Thus I haven’t called Feature Thinkers as innovators. Innovation is considered an innovation if its come out of the ‘factory’, just good idea is not innovation it needs a good implementation. Thus for innovation you need both – ‘Feature Thinkers’ and ‘Implementers’.

These are my thoughts; so don't ask me to support my claims with data ;)

Design Patterns: Are we looking at them from the wrong way?

Was thinking about patterns some days back and was wonder why haven’t created the impact they could have. I’m not talking about big corporation which use them extensively, but small companies or innovation oriented companies.

The reason I feel we are looking at them from the wrong perspective is because the way we structure the patterns are not easily accessible. Let look at the common scenarios of design – what time will you look for a design pattern? Most when you are taking a design decision. Lets look at the current structure of pattern libraries available on the web today. Most of the sites have them classified by their names like breadcrums, drag and drop, tabs, double tab etc. Now if you look at them from the usability perspective; while designing do you think we need breadcrums or I need a drag and drop ? The question that usually comes to mind is “I need to how the user where this current page is located”. At this point of time you want to see what all design options you have to show users the current location of the page. And here the current design pattern structure fails. Unless you know breadcrums are one of the solutions you may never be able to find the right design solution.

The current structure is usable if you know all the “names” of the design patterns that are in use. So what happens most of the time is that you end up using only those patterns that you are aware of.

Another common way that I have seen some people using is by making a self library of design patterns from the web. Designers choose certain design patterns that they like and then start to design their pages trying to some how fit those into their design. This is very negative way to approach design. Design being a problem solving process shouldn’t encourage this kind of usage to patterns.

It’s something like - to create a movie you first start to choose certain scene from other movies that you liked and then try to mix them together to create a story out of it. For better results it should be like you create the story (purpose), then look at the catalog of scene (design pattern) that fit into that story.

This tells us that its not the name of the movie clip that is important but what it shows (purpose) that is important. At the right point of time I should know which scene is to be put together by “purpose” than by it “name”.

It’s a pure information categorization issue. How to present the data to users to make it more sensible to them.

I need to see some solution to a specific information or interaction. And I should be able to find it through my problem rather than by name –

“Double Tab” – it makes sense to people who know it, but I’m sure there are a lot who don’t know the name but may be aware of the design. Thus names could be unintuitive unless we create a Nomenclature which is universal and which may also indicate the purpose of the pattern. The current categorization needs a lot of learning; we have to find ways to cut them and make it more logical.

I’m be writing about this more in future…

G's new Header

Google changed its universal header today. And interestingly it looks very similar to what I once proposed. But the background needs to be a bit different so that it can stand out from the rest of the page. If top header gets segregated from the rest it will bring more focus to the page. Slight grey or light bluish can do. Also the bg could be made a bit transparent to allow it to gel well with iGoogle themes. I hope Google is not listening...

This was my idea.

See my original post

Understanding “WOW” & “Neat”

It’s a very fuzzy topic to write about. The industry has been using these terms to explain the outcome of a user experiences. These are common words – Wow or Neat.

Lets try to see what they mean and what ‘might’ generate them. Lets talk about WOW. When did you said wow for any UI? Of what I have gather through my memory about my WOW moments; I can say – I said them when I got surprised (for sure) or when I liked a liked a very visually impressive UI (hmm say while using Mac).

For sure I can say my WOW moment was when I got surprised – when I didn’t expect some thing but was there. One way to get this wow moment is to think out of the box feature or “may be” a new impressive interaction. The other way to get a wow is by detail – surprise a user by the designing for the minutest details (and getting it right).

“Neat” is I guess slightly different. It’s more to do with getting your structure right. Where every component on the page fits together properly to bring out a clear message (communication). Neat is uncluttered but may not necessarily mean “visually impressive”; thus may not be complete in User Experience. Also Neat doesn’t require a surprise while by my understanding WOW can’t be achieved without it. Neat is essentially doing a standard stuff in an easier/simpler way.

So I can say WOW is the complete Holy Grail of user experience while “neat” is one step short. Looking at examples around us I will say – Apple products fall in WOW while Google fall in the category of “Neat”.