User experience tips from a software engineer

By Michael Fraase

Thursday, 13 March 2008 08:27PM CST

Section: Internet

User experience design processAccording to the blurb for Michael Lopp’s talk at SXSW, Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts, great design always meets with great resistance. Lopp is a senior engineering manager at Apple and apparently let a little of Apple’s design process out of the bag.

What I have to assume are Lopp’s high points are documented by Helen Walters on the BusinessWeek technology weblog. Apple has always focused on “pixel-perfect” mockups, sometimes spending months on something that has a better than even chance of being tossed. Lopp acknowledged that this approach causes a tremendous amount of work and time but “removes all ambiguity” thereby saving time on the back-end.

What I found most interesting is the 10-3-1 mock up process:

“Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, ‘seven in order to make three look good,’ which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.”

Imagine—just imagine—if user experience professionals took the time to implement a similar process; planning on throwing work away. How many orders of magnitude better would the average web experience be?

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