Read These Product Design Links
Here’s what’s inspiring us this week:
Thomas: I enjoyed reading @kristoforts’ post about user testing. Most of our testing at Axial is done remotely with our customers.
https://uxdesign.cc/i-sat-through-hours-of-user-testing-sessions-heres-what-i-learned-ead5166a4528#.he0yqrqup
Thomas: @tessrothstein’s post about interactive UX research was also pretty great, and is similar to how we’ve started bi-weekly qualitative research sessions here at Axial. Instead of presenting UX findings in a boring presentation or bulleted list of improvement ideas, getting interactive with the team by regularly viewing select usage or session replays, playing guessing games around the questions or pain points then seeing where you were right, or generally workshopping problems makes UX research much more actionable and engaging.
https://medium.design/make-your-findings-interactive-d83a2204b11e#.pycsk4hl4
Sarah: Here’s a tool being developed by Adobe Research and the computer science department at the University of Toronto. It’s a system generating design layouts. Although the elements and layout are both fairly rough, you can easily see how a tool like this could be helpful and incorporated into a design process. http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~donovan/design/index.html and Khoi Vinh has a more thorough write-up here: https://www.subtraction.com
Sarah: Here’s a good article describing the use of illustrations in product design. The idea that metaphor is a strong driver in determining what kind of illustration should be used may seem like an obvious choice, but I think is often overlooked in favor of style.
https://medium.com/shopify-ux/effectively-using-metaphor-in-product-illustration-62bdccbe14e4#.dum9gsa97
Thomas: File this one under ‘when algorithms and good intentions go horribly wrong, because robots are dumb’
http://qz.com/857122/an-algorithm-rejected-an-asian-mans-passport-photo-for-having-closed-eyes/
