Things to make guidelines for
- Aesthetics
- Overall use of color – tonal? Tonal with pops? Poppy?
- Flat or modeled?
- Translucency, light, materials
- Interactions
- What to do with various wait times
- How to handle errors and messages
- Information density
- Basic interaction geography
- Transitions
- Audio
- Discovery
- Naming
- Icon
- Which screenshots to use to show in the app store?
- Performance
- Startup time
- Device discovery time
- Search results time
- Time through a key day-to-day workflow
- Time through setup workflow
- Goal: get quickly from launch to the main event
- Goal: feel responsive and crisp
- For THIS app, what will make it sticky?
- For THIS app, what will make it special?
- For THIS app, what will demonstrate thoughtfulness?
Every experience needs a theme — an organizing principle that helps us choose what to do with every part of the experience.
Engagement is essential to a successful experience. Engage as many senses as possible — and what you can’t engage, evoke.
Look at your product for the first time. This doesn’t mean merely considering the novice user, but making the product immediately intelligible for the occasional user, who becomes partially novice between bouts of using the product, and smoothing out recognition for intermediate users so that they may one day become advanced. In essence, lowering the barrier to proficiency by requiring less recall and less rote learning of controls and processes.
One interface to rule them all. Be strict about hierarchy; the primary read must be chosen and adhered to, and there should be no more than four reads or layers on a given screen, in general. A “main event” screen has mostly one thing to do, maximum three. It is the most branded part of the experience, usually.
- Main event — most user time is spent here — 1–3 reads, most branded
- Secondary screen — 4+ reads
- Deep screen — ~12 reads, more standard
Define and articulate the desired experience early so that the design and implementation are focused and not bloated.
How do you want your customer to feel?
- Typical emotions here, at this point in the process, would be…
- Desired emotions would be…
No loose parts! If there must be a loose part, give me somewhere to keep it — otherwise you are asking me to make a decision about maybe throwing away something I just bought.
Packaging / out-of-box setup
- Make it easy to open
- Make it self-orienting
- Present the product nicely, cleanly
- Show care for the product and user through design of protection, material selection
- Make the right parts fall to hand at the right time
- Plan the process
- Accommodate people going off-book
- Reduce physical operations the person must perform
- Don’t ask questions the person can’t answer
- Figure out the right or most likely behavior and take care of it
- Packaging quality supports purchase price
- Packaging quality supports a person’s confidence in the product
- Packaging is an opportunity to display our thoughtfulness to the user
- Make it a single experience; product, packaging, in-box materials, software, and behavior all the product of a single mind
- Ship the product ready to use, or nearly so
I think, I see, I hear, I taste, I touch → I feel, I say, I do.
Networking: connector and client LED behavior standards
Talk about port order:
- High to low
- Horizontally
- Grouping of like functions
- Considerations of cable weight, stability, user operation, frequency of use of various connectors
Activity blinking is suitable for technical environments or continuous monitoring where there is no better evidence of activity. It is not pleasant in the home or car and can be distracting. We avoid it.
Lots of LEDs can create anxiety in the user if the meaning of the indicators is not immediately obvious and if it is not completely clear how to respond to a change. We tend to reduce indicators where possible.