Posts tagged “design”

I'm offering free design reviews for YC founders! Whether you're working on your product, pitch deck, or website, I'd love to help you improve your design.

If you want to learn design, begin by learning to take better photos. If your eye cannot compose a nice photo, you likely need to develop the fundamental spatial sensibility required to make a nice design, and learning photography is a simple way to do this.

A perennial problem in philosophy of art is that explanations of beauty too easily devolve into poetry. An ambitious thinker sets out to explain beauty, and ends up writing words that are beautiful but do not explain beauty. The reader is complicit, accepting the feeling of beauty instead of its explanation.

Design shares this dilemma with beauty—it’s relatively easy to write ‘designey’ words about design, but it’s difficult to explain how design works. To give a modern example, "chamfered edge" is an exquisite phrase, but it doesn’t explain why some edges have better design than others. As a designer who intends to explain design, please don’t let me pull the chamfered wool over your eyes!

For a time, my job involved improving the user experience of a Windows desktop application that had been in development without qualified design input for two years. Given that a beta release was imminent, I decided to give the application the papercut treatment, cleaning up visual assets, hiring visual designers to freshen the identity, reverting disgustingly-skinned controls to their default appearance, correcting typos, removing technical jargon, etc.

Issue 134 (August, 2010) of Linux Format magazine contains an interview by Jono Bacon in which I discuss Unity and other related topics. Below are the questions Jono asked me and my responses.

After working on paper cuts for a year, I realized how disorganized many open source projects affecting Ubuntu are when it comes to improving user experience. I would often go to upstream projects with a list of paper cuts to discuss and have a very difficult time finding someone to discuss them with. Either the maintainer was too busy, or nobody was interested in small user experience issues, or "the mailing list made that [design decision]," or there was no record justifying the existing user experience so project stakeholders assumed they were deliberate decisions made by the original authors, etc.

This is an early version of Unity, what will hopefully become the new interface for Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10:

It's been a couple months since I left Los Angeles and Idealab to move to London and join Canonical's new Design and User Experience team, which Mark blogged about in September:

I thought I'd share a fun paper cut from this week's milestone that has seen some interesting developments. The proposed changes (and discussion) have grown larger than paper cut size, but some progress was made (resulting in a PPA for you to try) and you may find the work fascinating like I do. The paper cut in question is "Nautilus file browser toolbar is complicated, needs a face-lift". Check the bug report for the description, which I will summarise here.

Here is a tentative list of 100 paper cuts for Karmic, divided into 10 weekly milestones of 10 paper cuts each (some milestones contain an additional Kubuntu paper cut):

One Hundred Paper Cuts is off to a great start. After my last post, many people began adding existing bugs to the project, and filing new bugs as paper cuts. Now we have hundreds of bugs filed, and we will probably have hundreds more by the end of the week, but many of the bugs are not paper cuts. Some people are confused because, although every paper cut is a usability bug, not all usability bugs are paper cuts; also, although we have committed to fixing one hundred paper cuts, when your bug does not qualify as a paper cut, that does not mean we do not think it's a great bug that should be fixed.

In a recent post, I introduced the concept of a paper cut as "a bug that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix." Canonical's nascent User Experience and Design team is determined to identify one hundred paper cuts to be fixed before Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" is released in October. We have dubbed this exciting endeavor "One Hundred Papercuts." From the project page on Launchpad:

For Ubuntu 9.10, the Ayatana Project together with the Canonical Design Team will focus on fixing some of the "paper cuts" affecting user experience within Ubuntu. Here I offer an example of a paper cut and a preliminary definition of the term.