If you design something for the average person, it’ll work for most people, right?
In the 1950s, a US Air Force researcher called Gilbert Daniels took a group of 4,000 pilots and measured them in 10 dimensions of size, including height, waist, chest, and reach. The assumption of engineers at the time was that the vast majority of pilots would fall within the average range in most of those dimensions, if not all. In fact, none of the pilots fit the average in all ten dimensions. If you looked at just three dimensions, less than 3.5% …
Several years ago — and probably still in some teams — it would be common for a designer to draw a website in Photoshop and then throw it over the wall to a front end developer who would convert it — or ‘slice’ it — into HTML and CSS. It’s the typical workflow in teams that follow a waterfall process. These days, the line between design and development in agile teams like ours has blurred, with more designers embracing code and designing in the browser.
While the Photoshop slicing workflow might be a thing of the past, that doesn’t mean…
Before joining Holiday Extras as a Software Tester three years ago, I had spent the previous nine years in a split UX/QA role at a digital agency — both designing websites and apps, and then testing them once they’d been built. In the last few months, I’ve started to dedicate part of my time to design once again.
In my agency role, I was used to switching from one project to the next, and from designing to testing. Because of client deadlines, I would often work on one project for a couple of hours, then switch to another project for…
UX/UI designer and front-end developer specialising in accessibility and usability.