Models of the process of design are relatively common. Each describes a sequence of steps required to design something—or at least the steps that designers report or recommend taking. Models of the process of design are common because designers often need to explain what they do (or want to do) so that clients, colleagues, and students can understand.
Less common are models of the domain of design—models describing the scope or nature of practice, research, or teaching. Such models may be useful for locating individual processes, projects, or approaches and comparing them to others. Such models also help clients, colleagues, and students understand alternatives and agree on where they are (or want to be) within a space of possibilities.
Typically models of a domain are of three types:
- Timelines
- Lists of events from the domain’s history
- Links between events suggesting influences
- Taxonomies
- Lists of sub-domains
- Trees branching into categories and sub-categories and so on
- Spaces
- Venn diagrams indicating overlapping categories
- Matrices defining the dimensions of a space of possibilities or area of potential
The Space of Design
IDEO Labs is a place where we IDEO show bits of what they are working on, talk about prototyping, and share their excitement over the tools that help them create.
IDEO Labs
So you think you are an interaction designer? Not if you cannot answer all the following questions quickly and with authority.
If you’re not an interaction designer, but you know one—or you are thinking of hiring one—slip them just the questions, and see how well they do. Bruce Tognazzini used variations of this quiz for years during the interview process to good effect.
These questions and answers assume that you have total control over all screen real estate, the OS, etc. Just pretend you are chief designer for Microsoft or Apple…
A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts
If you are a graphic designer or an interaction designer and have ever been tasked with creating a style guide or UI guidelines document (both are different and I’ve had the pleasure to work on both of them creating templates and the actual documents for brands and products), this list should help you out as a consolidated list of references. This list is going to be constantly updated (and will ultimately be a monster list, it’s quite modest for now) of publicly accessible style guides and UI guideline documents on the web. If you find any links not working or would like to suggest one that is not on the list, feel free to comment and let me know.
- 3M
- ABB Brand Identity
- ACDSee Brand Style Guide
- Air Products Identity Standards
- Ameritech Graphical User Interface Standards and Design Guidelines (This one is from the Internet Archive)
- AMAIA Residence Brand Manual (PDF, 816 kb)
- Android User Interface Guidelines
- Apple Human Interface Guidelines
- Apple iOS Human Interface Guidelines
- Barbican Brand Guidelines for Print / Web / and Plasmas
- BBC Future Media Standards & Guidelines
- BBC Global Experience Language (GEL)
- Belfast Zoo Brand guidelines
- Blackberry and RIM wireless handheld UI Developers Guide (PDF, 1.3 mb)
- BlackBerry Branding Guidelines (PDF, 300 kb)
- Brick brand guidelines
- Cargill Identity Style Guide
- Cambridge University Brand Manual
- Cunard Brand Guidelines
- ELMER 2– User Interface Guidelines for Government Web Forms (PDF, 1.2 mb)
- Easy Group Brand Manual (PDF, 2 mb)
- Eclipse User Interface Guidelines
- Federal Identity Program (Canada)
- GOOD Technology Brand Identity Guide
- Gnome Human Interface Guidelines
- Heineken Brand Manual
- iPhone Human Interface Guidelines
- Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines
- KDE User Interface Guidelines
- Kew’s Brand Guidelines (PDF, 5 mb)
- Microsoft Inductive User Interface Guidelines
- Microsoft Surface User Experience Guidelines
- MITRE- Guidelines for designing user interface software
- NASA’s webstyle guide
- Novozymes’ brand guide
- The New School Visual Identity Manual (PDF, 6.5 mb)
- The New School Web Style Guide
- Nokia Design and User Experience Library
- Oracle Technology Network Guidelines
- Palm User Interface & Human Interface Guidelines
- RSA brand standards
- SAP Interaction Design Guide for Internet Application Components
- SAP Design Guild
- SAP User Interface guidelines
- Silicon Graphics Indigo Magic User Interface Guidelines
- Skype Brand Identity Guidelines
- Spelman College Visual Identity Guidelines (PDF, 1.3 mb)
- Reuters Brand Center
- Taligent Human Interface Guidelines
- WebEx brand style guide
- Web Style Guide 2nd edition
- Windows User Experience
- Windows User Experience Guidelines
- Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines
- Windows XP Visual Guidelines (There’s a download section to the right to download WindowsXP DesignGuidelines)
- Yale Web Style Guide
- Yale’s Visual Identity
Published in 1954, Fitts’s Law is an effective method of modeling the relationship of a very specific, yet common situation in interface design. That situation involves a human-powered appendage at rest (whether it’s physical like your finger or virtual like a mouse cursor) and a target area that’s located somewhere else.
Visualizing Fitts’s Law
For people who need tables in everyday work they are hated element that makes them scream. And it shouldn’t be this way. Here are some of the patterns that can help in creating less evil tables.
Ultimate guide to table UI patterns
Three more table UI patterns
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Google Drawings is the latest addition to Google Docs. You can use it for wireframing with this stencil kit.
A Wireframe kit for Google Drawings
Human-centered approaches to industrial and interaction design have long focused on studying human behavior to create informed and appropriate designs. A social interaction designer must consider not only people, environment, and existing tools, but also the unseen elements of the system such as social relationships, power dynamics, and cultural rules.
Social Software: The Other ‘Design for Social Impact’
If you’re running a project where you mock up designs, get them approved, code them up, build a CMS, hook it all together, and then everyone looks around and says “Who’s got the content? Wait, this content doesn’t match the designs and it won’t fit in the CMS!” then you have a problem. A big problem.
Lorem Ipsum is not the cause of your problem. It’s a symptom. The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.
In Defense of Lorem Ipsum
This post provides a list of more than 20 resources that can be used in sketching phase of application development categorized as follows:
- Printable sketch templates for websites
- Printable sketch templates for mobile applications
- Sketch Books
- Make you own sketch templates
A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing