Designing with Lenses: Lessons from Other Design Crafts
In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into “design lenses”. A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design.
In this talk, Bill will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lenses inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.
About Bill Scott
For a long time Bill Scott couldn’t decide if he was a designer or an engineer, but finally gave up trying to classify himself and just decided to live in both worlds as much as possible. He has enjoyed working with technology for 25 years, and enjoyed interacting with people for even longer. It seemed only natural to blend these two loves together. These dual passions drove him to create one of the first successful Macintosh games (GATO, 1985), build war-gaming interfaces for NATO, found and lead the UX design team at Sabre, write OpenRico’s AJAX framework, manage the user interface engineering organization at Netflix, publish the Yahoo! design pattern library, and even write a book about it all (Designing Web Interfaces, O’Reilly).
Photos from the event taken by Ann Marcus.
See more photos from the meeting on Flickr.
Comments
Gary Smith
Member
April 12, 2010
11:13 am
April 7th’s Meeting
5 PM rolled around and as I entered the nearly empty McFadden’s it was clear that I was on my own. I noted that there was a Guiness happy hour special so I watched in anticipation as that creamy head appeared above the dark brown goodness as the bartender filled my glass. Fellene soon showed up and we quickly corralled Leo and Bill who wandered in shortly thereafter.
While it seemed that it took a while for the service to come up to speed at McFadden’s all in all, I enjoyed the change from Deschuttes. On across the street to UO…
With maybe 18 or 20 at the CHIFOOd event, I’m guessing there were at least 50 in the room at UO. I must have liked the chairs more at UO because for whatever reason, I felt more comfortable there.
Bill gave a great presentation - touching on a lot of design ideas and observations. His career includes stints with both Yahoo! and NetFlix (which he just recently left to start a new adventure with Meebo http://www.meebo.com/ ).
I noted a particularly poignant exchange between Bill and Ann Marcus about extending the metaphor of the lens concept by further applying the notion of f-stops and their affect on depth of field. It just goes to show that in a room full of professionals, even the speaker is likely going to be enriched!
It was also a great night for door prizes! I’d guess that close to $200 worth of technical books were given away to lucky ticket holders (unfortunately none to me) including several copies of Bill’s “Designing Web Interfaces” (link to Bill’s book on Amazon http://tinyurl.com/yhzamf4 ).
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