About Symbols and Icons (Follow up)
Another article from UX Collective.
https://uxdesign.cc/do-your-icons-mean-what-you-think-they-mean-fa6f255d56ab?gi=e601de492352
Interesting thesis on the topic of inclusive symbols by Italian designer Aleana Percivalle, through which I’ve learned some more about Augmentative and alternative communication.
https://www.frizzifrizzi.it/2022/07/19/aleana-percivalle-e-la-sua-tesi-sui-libri-in-simboli-per-un-design-inclusivo/
(The article is in Italian, but I’m sure you can find an online tool to translate it)
While Percivalle’s thesis focused on children’s books, the basic approach can be quite interesting in the context of UI design as well. After all, inclusive design means designing for as many people as possible.
We need more knobs
Interesting observations on what designers can learn from guitar pedals. Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks knobs and buttons are much more usable than anything on a screen.
Related to that, for some years now I have kept bumping into articles about how carmakers are going back to knobs.
Here’s a recent one: https://slate.com
If you ask me, putting a touch screen in a car, is just bad design, but apparently I’m not the only one thinking this. To quote the article above:
“I can think of no better way of describing the frustration of the modern consumer than buying a car with a feature that makes you less safe, doesn’t improve your driving experience in any meaningful way, saves the manufacturer money and gets sold to you as some necessary advance in connectivity.”
slate.com
Of course these articles never give you any figures and it’s hard to tell if they are talking about isolated episodes or about a larger trend.
Interestingly this popularmechanics.com article from 2009 already reports very similar issues with car design, but in this case it’s about too many buttons and not enough knobs. 14 years later, the issue just got worse.
Funnily, at one point the article says “I wonder if Apple iPhone will meet with the same success, as its touchscreen offers no tactile feedback“. Looking back, I am still not sure if the smartphone actually ever was a good idea, and if the world would be a worse place without them. One way or the other, we know how things went from there.
The Age of Average
A very interesting article on how everything is increasingly looking like everything else:
I like to compare this with the world of Eurorack, where no module seems to look like the other – infuriating many musicians and admittedly often adding to the challenge of designing a good Eurorack panel. You can like or hate the Make Noise or Snazzy Effect panels, you might think that Doepfer looks too technical and the Indian decorations on the Mutable panels might not be your cup of tea. But if you see all of this in the light of the above article, you’ll have to admit that it’s good that there still exist things that haven’t been swallowed by the averageness syndrome. At least yet.
And somehow related to that …
Sometimes when articulating complex arguments in favour or against a certain thing, we loose sight of the most basic truths of life. An example is this article here:
The icing on the cake: baked goods, AI, and lessons in user adoption
There is one basic truth of life that the article is blatantly ignoring: boxed cake mixes simply aren’t as good as an actual home-baked cake. It’s apples and oranges.
Getting back to the previous article, a world in which we all use boxed cake mixes is a world in which all cake starts to taste more or less the same.
But I’ll stop here, the whole AI topic is much more complex than that, I’ll have to get back to it in a future post.