A Few Lessons from Google SPAN 2015
A few weeks ago I attended Google SPAN 2015: NYC. Hosted by the Google Design team, SPAN is a mulit-track, single-day conference about facilitating “conversations about design and technology.” As I think about this great event a few weeks later, here are a couple thoughts that have stuck with me.
Lesson No. 1:
Animation can be an amazing tool within user interfaces and experience workflows. Unfortunately the tools out there today aren’t that great yet.
Erica Gorochow, PepRally, gave a great talk, walking us through her experience creating the iOS game, Specimen. She talked about how adding animation allowed users to intuitively learn the game faster without needing to read a lot copy.
Erica also gave a short synopsis on where animation tools are at right now. In her opinion there’s still no tool which allows developers and designers to work side-by-side while sweating the details. Things are progressing, but we’re not there yet.
Lesson No. 2:
Design collaboration is a struggle… still.
Led by three members of the Google Design team (Adam Debreczeni, Owen Otto, and Matthew Levine), the Design Collaboration workshop had us work through the design process for our last project. We then shared our process with others around us, making note of pain points or interesting solutions within each of our processes.
After this exercise, Owen shared some of his team’s findings when they conducted this same workshop with nine other Bay Area startups this past spring. What I found interesting in these findings (and the results of our workshop that day) is how much teams still struggle with communication, organization, and documentation.
Why is that? While we didn’t really explore the “why” in the workshop, it got me thinking about my own process. Believe me. Things aren’t perfect at Stack Overflow. We still struggle with communication and organization problems. Yet I found that many of the pain points shared don’t apply to my day-to-day process. I have a couple ideas for why this might be, but I need to think about it a bit more.
Oh, and once again, let’s all say this together: Use the right tools to express the right fidelity at the right time. We’ll get this right…eventually.
Lesson No. 3:
Writing is hard and it takes practice. A lot of practice.
By far my favorite session of the day was a panel-led workshop on Design Writing. The panel was composed of:
- Kate Lee, Medium
- Paul Ford, Postlight
- Amber Bravo, Google
- Aileen Kwun, Dwell
- Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker
This workshop was more of a Q&A time where the panel fielded questions ranging from their individual writing approaches, helpful techniques when getting started, the importance of critiques, and dealing with feedback (even hurtful feedback). A couple key personal takeaways were:
Develop a schedule—and stick to it! Julie Zhuo’s amazing publication, “The Year of the Looking Glass”, was often cited as an example of someone who found a rhythm that worked for her and stuck to it. Writing is about practice and setting a schedule is about proactively scheduling practice.
Don’t just write. Critique! Be sure to critique other work as well. Find out what you like or don’t like about a piece. Try to understand why an author choose to write a particular way. Investigate why you loved a piece (and recommended it) or why it bored you.
Chunk out posts. Organize it. Then fill it in. When Kate mentioned this, it jogged a distant memory of my English professor. It was a great reminder. Don’t sit down and write a piece straight through. Sketch out the points, illustrations, or anecdotes you want to communicate. Then go back through and fill it in.
