An Event Apart: Designing Using Data

In Sarah Parmenter's talk at An Event Apart in Boston MA 2014, she emphasized the importance of using data as research evidence to design.

Instincts are experiments. Data is proof.

  • “Many designers who are skilled technicians, craftsmen, or researchers have struggled to survive in the messy environment required to solve today’s complex problems. They may play a valuable role, but they are destined to live in the downstream world of design execution.” 
  • It makes stakeholders believe when we present our design with data or research
  • Back up decision. Instead of just doing what you do and not asking enough of why, understand as much as you can. I don’t know any of the terminology, but I would dig a little deeper than others.
  • Example: Airbnb did a research on images and result shows that professional images have 2-3 times more click than non-professional image. We need to stop decorating, stop designing, start strategy.
  • If a strategy can’t predict outcomes, our strategy is broken
  • When establish persona, we use Facebook, it is the cheapest why that we can run ads and see who is engaging 
  • Watch out for small hints, small things really allow us to stand out
  • Look for patterns (holiday, monday, birthday), it impacts users behavior
  •  Order of the importance of the content matters.  When you resize, it stays in order
  • Communicate your findings that your users can relate.

An Event Apart: The Long Web

In Jeremy Keith's talk at An Event Apart in Boston MA 2014, he talked about the to preserve web page and prepare for the future when designing.

You can’t predict the future, but you can participate

  • when you look at web, in particular looking at html, you’ll realize it’s all text format. We as creator should think about storing collective knowledge in a readable format so later on the knowledge can be passed on
  • now we don’t know where users will be accessing your website, it could be all kind of devices, so we need to think about content first: task and behavior, what do people want to do fist, whats their first tasks
  • URL first. URL design is something we don’t think about much, URL is universal, (iphone, chrome, IE) and even written down in sticky note. URL is for human, it should be readable, hackable.
  • content first, navigation second
  • try to use css to create logo instead of using image
  • it’s okay to use something in html syntax that not being supported yet. it won’t throw error. but it’s how we improve. 
  • content first, then structure, then styling as progressive enhancement 
  • use javascript, but don’t rely on it. until javascript is loaded, every user is a non-javascript user. You can trust nobody, rely on no third party API
  • What’s the most important things to load first, to device what’s important and what can be loaded later
  • whenever you got third party widget, you should not rely on it to load. you tie your performance to third party’s performance. 
  • think about how long you want your site to exist. Don’t just think about now. Think about future. 
  • We should measure our work in decades, not month or years http://futurefriendlyweb.com/
  • how to be future friendly? How to prepare for future. Backward compability. 
  • every time we move on to another format, we lost some of it
  • HTML format can survive 2 decades is not by accident, it’s constantly being improved.