Making knowledge equally available to creatives on all levels of their development regardless of their educational, financial, and cultural backgrounds.
Dear design community,
I’ve been working for a while on an initiative derived from my very deep need for bringing high-quality content to design industry publications. Most articles and podcasts focus on vague, often pointless conversations rather than on encouraging creatives to share the intellectual and manual challenges they had to struggle with during projects they’ve worked on. Every creative is a luminary whose voice should not be silenced particularly, as she or he has the power to illuminate the rest of the community and therefore, has the power of impacting further progress of everyday objects and services. …
Everyone of us is disabled in a way on daily basis as disabilities occur not only permanently. Here’s the journey we’ve gone through in order to design for everyone.
For everyone
I’d like to tell you a bit about the things that we include into our product that are not visible at a glance but make a huge difference to how useful it is to our users. While developing the product we always try to make it beautiful, relevant and as user-friendly as possible. We continuously try to make it better for all our users. The Unmind’s motto says:
“Everyone has the right to a healthy mind”
We believe that it shouldn’t be only a slogan. It should be solidified in the way we design and engineer here at Unmind. It…
As a Design Team, we meet lots of challenges impacting our cross-departmental collaboration everyday. Some of them are related to tools, some of them to efficient communication, yet others to frameworks which could ease our work. Here’s what we’ve done and will continue to do to mitigate some of these challenges.
Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.
Over the past few months, Unmind has scaled rapidly. Such circumstances may simultaneously create nightmares as well as opportunities. Between 2018–2019 we’ve worked on a completely revamped version of our product. Because we were on a very strict deadline for the launch of this revamp — Mental Health Awareness Week 2019 — we needed to be scrupulous in regard to our pace of implementation. Doing so requires close collaboration between Engineering, Product, and Design leaving no room for ambiguity during design handoff. In that regard, we appointed the “Refactoring” project. Its primary aim was to ensure that every, even the…
“God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good”. Take a glance around. The Sun, a butterfly, or a rose — would it be possible to redesign them? How are icons being created? There’s a reason why some objects are immortal. This reason bears a glamorous name — archetype.
Archetype
In the above picture, you’re seeing a shape reminiscing a rose. Its form is so distinctive that your brain receiving this stimulus immediately creates a percept of a rose. You’re subconsciously experiencing archetype.
ἀρχέτυπον — Greek “archétypon” — original pattern from which copies are made. Philosophers also translate this notion as ‘essence’.
That ‘essence’ is what we are far more able to discern than to articulate. A part of a product deciding not only on its commercial success but firstly on its relevance. Panton Chair, iPod, Glass Coca-Cola Bottle, 302 Telephone, Porsche 911, Braun Sextant Razor. They resonate with sincere…
Everyone has the right to a healthy mind. This is Unmind’s purpose and for this reason, we try to be as aware of our users’ needs as possible. This, by no means, is a mundane challenge. In order to be most effective when solving for these challenges, we need to first know how to best collaborate cross-departmentally. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy to identify our responsibilities, industry best practices, and methodologies that fit us well and can help us make Unmind a better product for our users. Today, we’d like to share our Product Design Process Principles as a tool that will help us collaborate and communicate more effectively.
The principles below outline Unmind’s approach to our Product Design process. It involves multi-stakeholder research, collective ideation, iterative workflows, consistent feedback, and transparent execution. By following these principles we can ensure that any finalised design has been rigorously tested from multiple perspectives prior to any formal deployment — saving our colleagues (and ultimately our users) time, energy, and ambiguity in the long-run.
Discovery
Context
Every Unmind client has their own unique workplace environment. Context defines such foundations as device spectrum, lightning conditions, interface elements scale, or even colour hues.
Make sure you understand the context of when and where the product is…
You know, I love the joy on someone’s face when a result of my work is shipped. It’s a priceless remuneration, the most resonant way of saying “thank you”. I think as designers, we’ve got a responsibility to provide a service to individualities, societies, to each other, to humanity.
However, the path very often turns to be rough. There’s a lot of obstacles to deal with to make something just good. In between 18th and 19th centuries when the Industrial Revolution took place, and technological progress allowed to manufacture faster and in a high volume, the Three Pillars of Design were defined:
- Voice of Business. How do you as a designer respond to a company’s business model to make a product relevant?
- Voice of Technology. How do you design to create something within a budget and yet well made?
- Voice of Customer. How do you answer people’s needs? How…
Radek
radekszczygiel.com | London UK | Twitter: radekszczygiel | Instagram: radekszczygiel
