STUDIO NOTES

Musings on design matters, technology and culture

 

Why Not Just Try Designing? – Trusting the Ability and Conviction of Experienced Designers

We need to recognize that good design is often lead by individuals who have mastered their craft and because of this, are able to present their design with confidence and conviction.

View full post »
 

Design Thinking 101

Design thinking is an innovation process that uses the designer’s sensibility to find unmet needs and opportunities in order to create new solutions that matter to people.

View full post »
 

Help! My Designer Wants a “Discovery Phase”

The “discovery phase” is one of the most misconstrued areas of product development and of the designer-client relationship.

View full post »
 

When The Client Wants a Re-Skin

A request from a client for a re-skin of their web site or application should send up a red flag telling the designer to dig deeper and examine other hidden issues.

View full post »
 

Why Some Startups Fail

I recently finished reading a book by Marty Cagan titled Inspired – How to Create Products Customer’s Love. For all of you who don’t like to read, this is only 225 pages with pithy chapters of only 3-4 pages in length. In short, the book is a gem and has loads of advice from an [...]

View full post »
 

Waiting for App Store 2.0

For those of us who make a living partly by selling mobile applications in Apple’s App Store, there’s been a lot of concern expressed on blogs and amongst developers about whether or not the App Store is a dependable resource. With over 65,000 apps and more than 100,000 developers, the general consensus is that Apple [...]

View full post »
 

Party Like It’s 1999 – Why Mobile is the New Internet

In 1999 the human population surpassed six billion, Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France, The Matrix came out and the dot-com bubble was approaching its climax.
The Internet began to take off several years earlier with the introduction of Mosaic, the first Web browser with mass appeal. In 1994, the same founders formed a [...]

View full post »
 

The Human-Tech Experiment ;)

What do you get when you give lab rats a strong dose of technology? Do they become anxious? Addicted? Neurotic? Actually, it’s an impossible experiment that we’ll have to just work out on ourselves this time (and are doing so at increasing speed). Will technology end up making us sick?
In the latest controversy over the [...]

View full post »
 

31 Flavors – Designing for iPhone, Android and Blackberry Platforms

A client of mine who wants to make aggressive headway into the mobile space has asked me to make three versions of their current iPhone 2.0 app that includes an upgrade to iPhone 3.0, a never-launched version for Google Android and another one for Blackberry devices (Palm Pre version to come later). It’s my job [...]

View full post »
 

Everybody’s an Interaction Designer

A provocative blog post by Cooper’s Tim McCoy titled, “Is Interaction Design a dead-end job?” got me thinking—is everybody now an interaction designer? Just read a few reviews for any iPhone app in the iTunes app store and you’ll begin to think so. One reviewer of the Facebook app for the iPhone wrote:
“In the next [...]

View full post »