Bookmark: Design Quotes
Given Apple's success and Steve Jobs' obvious influence on Apple as a company it is interesting to try and dissect what has made Apple so successful. They are a very large company with few products which relies on design to make their high-end products stand out. Eric Ries comments:
Be disciplined about which vision to pursue; choose products that have large markets. Discover what's in customers' heads, and tackle problems where design is a differentiatorI have been involved in Focus Groups and Usability Labs in the current product/project I am involved in, which is apparently something Apple does not do. The Focus Groups and Usability Labs are intended as empirical data for product development and evolution. I think they are a good idea personally. It must take a great deal of confidence and vision to skip those steps during the investment in a new product.
A house from Los Angeles. I like how the inside and outside blend in together. Suburban houses are designed for mass production, so they tend to have lowest denominator room and bathroom structure, being design for a mass market. For empty nesters such as ourselves it means we have three rooms that are basically dust collectors.
Housing is still very expensive in Phoenix, despite it dropping significantly, however, we are noticing that people are dropping the price to what they owe on the place and then staying there. We have seen properties stick on that price and then go into short sale or foreclosure mode.
We have been looking for about six months now and patience is paying off. We are looking at land that recently dropped 33%, and another that dropped 15%. Despite the 'green shoots' theories, there isn't that much money around at the moment to buy. I agree with this article as well:
One of the the largest mortgage insurers in the US, PMI is forecasting that home prices will be lower in 2011 than they are today, including 30 of the 50 largest metro areas. The decline is likely to spread to "all regions of the nation" from California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the states most affected by the housing slump.I think the Phoenix market is starting to go below what people owe on properties now.
Via brand new, Dick Smith gets his dated bespectacled 1980s logo a new shining and more contemporary look.
Informative article on white space. Especially interesting was how The Economist added micro-whitespace - and hence more air to their page - by adding small amounts of whitespace around the typography.
Business Week has an article on aspects of Apple's design process. The pixel perfect mockups cannot be under-estimated as to how tight a product it makes, especially when QA can combine tests around the pixel perfect placements (the company I am with has product, user experience, engineering, etc departments). The rest of the points made don't particularly catch me as that great.
Engineering is always under resource pressure - and often technical pressure - to give product and user experience exactly what they want. It is products goal to come up with the OMG Ponies feature or product and than negotiate with engineering on technical, resource and skills as to what can be produced within the business timelines.
Product/UE is Engineering's customers and I consider it Engineering's place to say yes to Product/UE rather than no unless it is technically impossible, then it only becomes a resource and marketing issue.
The problem is that attitude can lead to some cowboyish outcomes, but then software is the current tech world's gun-slingers, so I am comfortable with that. I personally like betting on our guys to come through.
One of the other things we do is give the developers working on a feature direct access to UE rather than having to go through the spec explicitly so that the UE designers vision can be maximized within that feature. One of the benefits of that method is that developer can mention other technical possibilities within that feature that the UE designer was not aware of. Good work has come out of that.
