New Media Buzz

Been meaning to post a follow-up with insights on Steve Krug’s incredible presentation on usability last week. But really, the way to describe just how eye-opening and validating it was comes straight from Emerge’s own Creative Director Adam Stipanuk — who wasn’t there at all.

He picked out the following two passages as completely gratifying that our design team is aimed in the right direction, not having ever read Krug before (shame!):

“Showing 3-4 people a sketch on a napkin will reveal very important things about your design when you can easily fix them. When you get these great discoveries late in the process, often you’ve spent too much time and/or money to actually make any of the important changes.” Man, this quote from your blog really reaffirms our process for wireframing. A good argument for the next time someone bawks at our wireframing line item.

“Common sense is always obvious in retrospect. Much of his job is reminding people of what they already know.”
It’s funny how easily the obvious can be so elusive in design.

And this is the killer… he then showed me his mantra, passed on to all our fine interface designers to, "keep our whole team on the same page:"

Emerge Digital’s Design Approach:

We will…
Keep it simple – don’t make the users think (about what to do next)
Create a Visual Hierarchy – through color and size to create a visual path
Cluster like items into 3 clusters – If you need more clusters, then we’re probably not keeping it simple
Tame powerful colors – with large amounts of neutral colors
Add something unexpected – insert your personality here.
Use whitespace – to balance heavy content areas.
Justify all our design choices – we all like blue, but is it appropriate?

It’s a great combination of insight, direction, and what makes every Emerge design effort uniquely effective.

Have another mantra of your own that you’d put in this list? Leave a comment below — knowing that Stipanuk is a hard act to follow…