Designing for people
How people use what you build, and how to design for what they came to do.
Reflections on thirty years in tech: as a writer, a designer, a developer and a user.
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Zoom out: here is service design
Service design asks you to look at everything around the screen: the letter before it, the counter beside it, the helpdesk after it. It is a good way of looking and a poor way of building.
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Stay where you are
Stay on the page. Do the task where the task is. Every extra screen, every link to elsewhere, is a moment where someone stops doing what they came to do.
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An FAQ is a list of problems you did not fix
Every question on a page of frequently asked questions is a problem somewhere else on the site. The page explains it. It rarely fixes it.
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Top Tasks: what people came to do
Most visitors come for one of five things to your website. How to find out which five?
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The interruption you cannot turn off
Pop-ups were beaten once. They came back as part of the page
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Inside-out design
Services built from the organisation’s logic instead of the visitor’s