Adding a workflow step (or two) to your app helps people automate their work, by connecting their Slack workflows to your service — now available in developer open beta.

The future of workflows

Workflow Builder for Slack allows anyone to automate routine process and communication — all in a matter of minutes. Once triggered, a workflow runs a series of steps, like collecting form responses and sending Slack messages.

Now, Workflow Builder is more extensible than ever, because steps from apps can provide new functionality. They can add new features and allow builders to integrate with their everyday tools outside of Slack, all without writing a single line of code.

Let’s walk through how you (as a Slack app developer) can design your steps, so builders can create powerful workflows that make Slack users’ lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.

This guide is paired best with our steps from apps demo and tutorial, which walks through the technical details of workflow development.

How to think about designing your step

First, decide whether a builder needs to authenticate an account for your step to work. If it does, design that step configuration view first, since it will be the first part of step setup. Remove anything in that view that isn’t about connecting the necessary account, so that it’s clear how to proceed.

Then design the main step configuration experience, which should always show which account, if any, is connected and a way to disconnect it. This way, builders are clear on which account is being affected, or which account the step is acting on behalf of.

You’ll want to design your step to be as flexible as possible, so builders can leverage all of Workflow Builder’s features. For example:

• Unbundle individual actions that are part of your core user flows. Instead of a workflow step that shows a form to a user and later creates a record based on that form, configure the step to simply generate a record. This allows builders to create more custom workflow forms. Creating, fetching, updating, and deleting your app’s primary record (i.e. tasks, tickets, leads, etc.) are all great candidates for individual steps.
• Enable variable data from previous steps into the configuration of your step.
• Design your step to output variables for later use in a workflow, especially when creating a new record (i.e. a link to a record and its name).
• Ask builders where to send messages instead of assuming. Don’t share to a channel automatically. Instead, let them choose where to send your precomposed message — or allow them to disable sending that message at all. This way, they can send their own message with variables from your step later in the workflow.

Remember to think of a specific step’s usefulness in the context of a complete workflow. That is, think of your step as a single action on the road to what someone wants to accomplish in Slack. Never assume a builder has prior knowledge of your step (or what it’s doing behind the scenes). You should not only think about your app’s steps in isolation, but also how different steps can build upon one another.

If it’s difficult to name your step in a clear and concise way, that’s a sign that you should consider splitting it into multiple steps with simpler names and a more specific purpose. As an added benefit, your configuration UI will get simpler. For example, instead of a step that creates a document and adds content, consider two separate steps that accomplish each action, respectively.

A real-world process to automate

Here’s a simple example.

Let’s imagine I’m a designer at a tech company (easy!), where all text must be reviewed by the writing team before I can release my latest designs to the world.

My company uses an internal app for project management called Task Manager, so I typically navigate to a website and create a task (including supplemental links and context) for the writing team to review my design.

I want to automate this process for my entire design team, so it’s a perfect Workflow Builder use case. Luckily, the development team that built Task Manager took advantage of the open beta and coded a workflow step for this Slack integration, which makes this easy! 🎉

Building a workflow

My workflow for requesting a review could look like this:

This workflow adds “Request a review” to the ⚡️shortcuts menu in the #design-team channel. When selected, the workflow will prompt users to submit project information, then automatically create a task in Task Manager for review. It then sends a message with the variable data from the Task Manager workflow step.

Configuring a workflow step

Let’s take a look at how the Task Manager developers structured their step to make this workflow possible.

You’ll notice that in each text field, I can use variables from previous workflow steps through “Insert a variable.” This is how I can send data from the form step to the Task Manager step. 👇🏾

As configured above, when someone runs the workflow and completes the form, Workflow Builder will send the final values of the selected variables to the Task Manager app. Voilà! Using a step from a Slack app, I’ve automated the process of requesting reviews for design projects.

Getting started

To spin up your own prototype of this example, you can follow our steps from apps tutorial. Cheers and happy building!

We want your questions and feedback! Email us at feedback@slack.com.

A new design approach was originally published in Slack Platform Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Your beef with Becky is bullshit

More than half of the problems I’ve ever had at work have been due to the illusion of communication having occurred when in fact it hasn’t. There is a single consistent thread: I or another person thinks they’ve understood what someone has said (and why), but the correct information wasn’t actually exchanged. Most often—under the guise of many different issues and interpersonal conflicts that look like the real problem — it is a case where one person assumes or believes they have accurately guessed another’s intent but has not.

Once I started learning about more about cross-cultural communication and how differing conversational styles lead to misinterpretations, I started to spot the it happening everywhere. I now believe that communicating across conversational styles is the main challenge for any member of an underrepresented minority at work.

Conversational Styles

Anything that is said or done must be said or done in some way, and that way constitutes style. If you sit in a chair, motionless, you are nonetheless sitting in a certain position, dressed in certain clothes, with a certain expression on your face. Thus you sit in the chair in your own style. You can no more talk without style than you can walk or sit or dress without style.
— Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., Linguist

Conversational style is made up of a couple of different qualities. Some are purely the mechanical aspects of how you speak:

• Your rate of speech
• Your pitch and volume, and how you modulate each as you speak
• The length of your pauses between words or phrases
• Your emphasis and pronunciation
• When you start talking relative to when other people stop

Other aspects of conversational style are more about the content of what you are saying, like how much you tend to exaggerate, how you incorporate metaphors and idioms, and how direct¹ you tend to be. When you are hungry and would like to eat lunch with someone, do you tell them, “gosh it’s almost lunch time,” or “are you hungry?”. Or do you say, “I‘m hungry, do you want to join me?”.

Your level of emotional expression is one of the most important aspects of your conversational style, and is expressed through the mechanics of how you speak, the content of what you say, and your body language when you say it. The way you express emotion in your conversational style is a primary driver of what others assume your intent is, and it effects what people feel in response to what you say.

Conversational Style as an Expression of Cultural Values

Conversational styles are like religions (or love languages). You probably have a preference, and whichever one you like is also probably the one you grew up with. That said, much of a person’s conversational style is due their individual prioritization of values, which come from their cultural group.

For example, men tend to prioritize independence over social involvement, compared to women who tend to care more about social involvement. That means men are more likely to say “please have that on my desk on Monday”, versus “it would be great if that’s done by Monday”. This difference in cultural value hierarchies occurs across all types of cultural groups, not just ethnic ones. Lawyers tend to have differing value priorities when compared to people working human resources, as do east-coast Americans compared to west coast Americans, or African-American versus east-Asian people. To quote an example from Dr. Tannen, on the subject of the American way of doing business:

Most Americans think it’s best to “get down to brass tacks” as soon as possible and not “waste time” in small talk (social talk)…this doesn’t work very well in business dealings with Greek, Japanese, or Arab counterparts for whom “small talk” is necessary to establish the social relationship that must provide the foundation for conducting business.²

Conversational Styles in the Workplace and Minorities

Conversational styles are not good or bad, they just are. A different style isn’t better or worse, it is just different. Unfortunately, when the majority shares a conversational style, that style becomes “good” and “right”, and any other conversational style is “bad” and “wrong”. The further your style from that of the majority, the more communication-rooted problems you’re likely to have and the less you’ll naturally fit in.

This is because your conversational style affects how you communicate, and it is the lens through which you interpret other people. For example, you may believe it is unarguable that you or someone else has been interrupted when in fact that couldn’t be further from the truth:

Diógenes Brito on Twitter

'overlap' is mechanical: Anyone could listen to a conversation...and determine whether or not two voices were going at once. But interruption is inescapably a matter of interpretation regarding individuals' rights and obligations." -@tannen_deborah, "You Just Don't Understand

Perhaps you may — as I have— run into cases where you miss that someone else is angry (you expect a raised voice and instead saw a slight sigh and narrowing of the eyes), or have other people misinterpret you as more upset than you actually are. Or you might interpret “it would be great if someone did this” as “in a perfect world this would happen, but in the real world it won’t” as opposed to what they meant, which is “I want you to do this”.

YouGov on Twitter

Half of Americans wouldn't be able to tell that a Briton is calling them an idiot, finds our new study on British subtext What does "with the greatest respect" mean?

How can we avoid these miscommunication issues?

It’s an uphill battle (and perhaps wasted effort) to try and change your conversational style completely or that of others. Aside from code-switching, what you can do instead is always be aware of the possible vectors for misinterpretation and translate for people, or explicitly note the multiple possible interpretations of a communication. You can put in place processes and habits that catch any miscommunications when they occur. That means things like ending every meeting by summarizing for everyone and stating explicitly who agreed to do what by when, as well as “active listening” and “non-violent communication” techniques to restate back the facts you’ve heard and — usually more importantly — the feelings you have picked up on. Readers of “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership” or Brene Brown books might recognize these as “fact vs. story” exercises that make interpretations explicit.

To put a fine point on it: you will misunderstand people and you will be misunderstood, so the skill to develop is how to spot and recover from these misunderstandings. Building up psychological safety within your team will allow your colleagues to be comfortable expressing their negative (possibly mis)interpretations of anything said, and building up good will in other ways gives people the emotional space to be curious about conflict instead of obstinate. Good relationship groundwork allows others to seek to understand you, and you them, rather than everyone only defending their own position.

P.S. For more information about how cultural differences affect communication at work (and practical tips), see Erin Meyer’s Culture Map.
P.P.S. Follow me @uxdiogenes.

[1]: I think of a spectrum from 100% direct and explicit, to 100% circumlocution, only ever implying the meaning you mean to convey.

[2]: Tannen, Deborah. Thats Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships. Harper, 2011.

[3]: Tannen, Deborah. You Just Dont Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. William Morrow, 2013.

The hand in question was part of a graphic announcing our latest initiative, the “Add to Slack” button. I decided to make the hand in a promotional graphic look like my hand: brown.

I wrote about my brief internal struggle with the decision to use a brown hand in a post on Medium, and in less than a week, the post had seen almost 25,000 views and thousands of shares on social media. Over a dozen people of color reached out to me directly online and in person about how the article resonated with them and their experience. It currently sits at over 49k views.

I should not have been surprised. People of color are underrepresented in the tech industry and all STEM fields, as well as government and other positions of power. Most insidiously, we are underrepresented in American media, and I don’t (just) mean among journalists and children’s books. Everywhere we look, the visual media that propagates and shapes our culture reinforces whiteness as normative. White is the default, and everyone else is other. A brown hand in a widely circulated image not about crime, violence, poverty, or hip-hop? Sadly, that is a rare sight.

While outright discrimination is largely verboten today, areas like iconography still overwhelmingly exclude people of colour and women. It’s a signal that reinforces their outsider status, a reminder that the power to make decisions still rests in the hands of white men.

— Murad Hemmadi in Canadian Business

My point is not to grimly recount the state of American society. I hope to convince designers like myself who are considering making a similar choice to seize the opportunity, whether their skin is milky white or toasty brown. I also want to say that our small choices as creators matter in powerful but sometimes subtle ways.

What’s Stopping Us?

Melanin-positive designers can experience trepidation about showing people of color in the imagery they create. Like me, they might worry that they are expending some of their precious social capital at their jobs not to accomplish great work or help their career, but to make a “statement” on behalf of all people of color. And if we are forced to defend our choice and allow emotion to seep into our tone of voice, we might end up reduced from a multi-faceted human being to, say, an angry black person.

The sword cuts both ways. White people may also feel afraid that their efforts to include more diverse representation will be perceived as tokenism. After reading my article, an early Slack employee told me about a long conversation the team had about using stock photos that prominently featured a black model. They had chosen the photo based on its tone, the expression on the model’s face, and the context of its use, but they worried about how their decision would be interpreted. That colleague, Johnny Rodgers wrote to me:

Will people think we (10 white people at the time) just picked it because it has a black guy front and center? Is that like reverse racism? Why is this even a conversation? As you know, we used it, and heard nary a peep. Of course.

Don’t overthink it, just go for it. We all have to work towards making inclusion an ordinary occurrence. Rather than wonder about how to adequately represent exactly 17% colored people in an image that only has three people in it, chill out and drop some extra color in there. You are neither atoning for hundreds of years of continued injustice, nor creating institutionalized racism against white people. You’re just making the world a little friendlier for the many, many people alienated by their media.

Don’t overthink it, just go for it.

Join the Cool Kids

The tech industry is making progress in increasing the inclusivity of its iconography, so you’ll be in good company when you decide to buck the status quo. The Unicode Consortium, the non-profit group that governs the emoji standard, proposed a more diverse update in 2014. Apple was the first operating system maker to implement the new, more inclusive set of emoji.

At Facebook, design manager Caitlin Winner visually promoted the female silhouette in the new friends icon, making it more prominent. Also at Facebook, Julius Tarng got the ball rolling on photographing diverse-looking hands holding phones for the company’s design resource site. Meanwhile, the grassroots initiative “#WOCInTechChat” recently published stock photos of …women of color in tech, of all things.

Even big-name game developers like 343 Industries are doing their part, featuring a black main character in the latest installment of their blockbuster Halo franchise.

Another (half) shout-out to Apple for finally including darker hands in their new product shots after the most recent release event.

Note to Apple: Don’t think I haven’t noticed y’all turning down the lights on a few of the shots to make it ambiguous.

Our Choices as Creators Matter

The artifacts and systems we design reflect our values. Our creations make statements, and while those can be deliberate or unintentional, they can never be truly neutral. I believe our designs must willfully promote not just what is or was, but what should be.

As Eric Meyer, an expert in CSS and web standards, recently said at the XOXO arts and technology conference in Portland,

We often say the media and the services we build are like roads. Neutral to their uses. That is not true of roads and it should not be accepted of what we create. Because, yes, a ribbon of asphalt is neutral to its uses and to the extent a ribbon of asphalt can be said can be, you know, neutral to anything. But we are not neutral to the uses of that asphalt. We decide where and how a road should be built. Which includes deciding we’ll have access to that road, and who will not … what was valued in the creation of that road is still implicit in its course.

After my experience with the “Add to Slack” button, I know that going forward I won’t hesitate to include people of color in the imagery I produce. And for those readers who are not in the position to make that choice, demand to see inclusivity in the sites and services that you use. Let the makers know how important it is to see a piece of yourself in the product. Little by little, we can help shape the world we want to live in.

Follow me on Medium below, or on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

Slack’s people of color group (#earth-tones) was the first to say something.

But, it wasn’t just Slack employees who noticed:

Bianca L. St.Louis on Twitter

When slack uses a brown hand for their add to slack button. I'm SOOOO here for this.https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/636223893431160832 ...

J.J. McCorvey on Twitter

Peeping @SlackHQ's game, using a brown hand to promote the Add to Slack button. #iseeyou #littlethings http://www.fastcompany.com/3050351/slack-just-made-it-way-easier-to-unify-your-online-work-life ...

Kaya Thomas on Twitter

really appreciate the brown hand in this graphic, I'm so used to seeing 'flesh' colored hands in graphics @SlackHQ

Why was the choice an important one, and why did it matter to the people of color who saw it? The simple answer is that they rarely see something like that. These people saw the image and immediately noticed how unusual it was. They were appreciative of being represented in a world where American media has the bad habit of portraying white people as the default, and everyone else as deviations from the norm.

Kaya Thomas on Twitter

it may seem like a small thing but when you see graphics over and over excluding your skin color, it matters

The result of that American tendency is the telling and retelling of what Chimamanda Adichie would call a single story, one that reinforces people of color as “culturally other.” And boy, do we feel it:

I’m a black person who has been successful in tech by anyone’s standards. I felt fortunate, and I’ve rarely felt any overt obstacles to my progress. But there was a point when I realized that there was a reason behind this. I’ve made sacrifices to be accepted into an industry where people who look like me are woefully underrepresented. I’ve become distant from my culture, my heritage and my own personal history, in order to be more palatable to a white standard. This leaves me feeling stuck between 2 worlds. Obviously not able to pass for white (and not wanting to), but also not “black enough” for those who look like me. I want to try to convey this sacrifice and its consequences in hopes that others in my position feel some solidarity. — Marco Rogers on Conforming to Succeed and What it Means For People of Color

Behind The Scenes: Slack HQ

I was the designer working with the platform team on the Add to Slack project. When launch day began to loom and we didn’t have any marketing images, it fell to me to quickly whip assets together for our blog and social media accounts. The venerable Matt Hodgins previously made a sweet little chunky hand for a banner on our API site, so I decided to use that as a main element. The hand vector file was made of many distinct overlapping pieces, so I asked him to make the change to save time.

A few iterations later — and some discussion about whether my visual metaphor of the button coming from the cloud was too…“and glob said, let there be Slack button” — I sent off what I needed, and we were ready for launch.

Behind the Scenes: My Brain

Having decided to use the hand but needing to ask Matt to change the color, I was first torn about whether it was okay to ask him, then upset at myself for hesitating so much. The internal dialogue went something like this:

Diógenes, Brown Person: This hand should totally be brown. I’m brown.
Diogenes, Person: I’m trying to get good design work done and get this project out, not become an activist and start a movement or something.
Diógenes, Brown Person: It’s not a big deal, you’re the designer, you get to make it brown.
Diogenes, Person: Yea but, I’m going to ask Matt to do it, that’s like, making a thing of it.
Diógenes, Brown Person: So what‽ You should make a thing of it, you never see this sort of thing.
Diogenes, Person: True. Dang. Now I feel bad about thinking so much about whether this is okay. This is okay right? I mean, no one’s gonna say anything. What could they say? Saying something about it would be racist.
Diógenes, Brown Person: Dude, even if he was the designer on this project he should make it brown. It’s like, affirmative design action.
Diogenes, Person: Yea!
Diógenes, Brown Person: Yea!
Diogenes, Person: Good talk, bro.

These Little Things Matter

After the announcements, I surprised myself by staying on edge until I saw that folks had responded positively to the image. This thread by @belaurie on Twitter in particular, put me at ease:

It may not mean much to y’all but it signifies..
1. POC work at slack.. making visual decisions that are seen by millions (impact)
2. Visuals matter…. specifically around product users and what a “technologist” looks like. Seeing a brown hand is HUGE — icons matter.
3. slack is serious about elevating POC in my opinion not just through press releases but through business decisions..
This content is going to be on a lot of blogs, posts and shared to a global audience..having imagery that highlights an “anomaly” — — HUGE
In a world that highlights “white is right” and “optimal” brings me great joy to see some melanin on the page. :)
You da best Slack team.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. These small choices matter, so make them whenever you can. People will notice, and they’ll feel good. Things will be better.

I mean this: White Americans can care about more than just themselves. They really can. And the rest of us? We are DYING to see ourselves anywhere. — Mira Jacob

You too, white people. Don’t be afraid to mix it up and use images depicting non-white people. There is certainly enough imagery of white people to go around. If you do so mindfully and with intent to avoid an ignorant caricature of a whole people, then things will work out and you will have made a small but important difference. Our choices as creators matter.

As system designers, we have a responsibility (and opportunity) to design systems with stronger values. They may not change us (we are old), but our children will see the values in these systems as normal. That is both scary and exciting.
—Buster Benson on Eric Meyer’s XOXO 2015 Conference Talk

Now watch some great talks and gain some empathy:

P.S. Follow me on Medium below, or on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

These days, the latest technology goes in and out of style at light speed. It’s enough to make an interface designer wonder how she’ll be prepared for the future and stay competitive and competent in the job market. In fact, “The Future of Work” was the title of the panel I was recently on as part of AIGA’s San Francisco Design Week, along with Heather Phillips, Tyson Kallberg, Mario Delgado, and Dennis Field.

As designers we frequently talk about what “design” really means, and what’s the best tool for a design, but at the panel we all seemed to be hinting at the larger question of what the role of the designer should be. Is there a timeless definition of the prototypical digital designer? What should we aspire to be as new tools, techniques, and computing devices come and go? I would posit that there are 3 fundamental roles of a digital designer.

A digital designer is a…

1. Facilitator, assisting others in refining and transmitting ideas.
2. Steward, supporting and protecting empathy and the creative process.
3. Connoisseur, maintaining a high bar of quality.

Designer as Facilitator

The first essential function of a designer is to facilitate others in refining and transmitting their own ideas. We can accomplish this is by designing compelling presentations and communications, which helps inspire others and rally colleagues towards a unified direction. The main way we do it, however, is by making abstract ideas concrete for others. This is an act of synthesis, it means coalescing knowledge of the medium, human behavior, stakeholder demands, and business goals into specific, actionable details.

We panelists all agreed: while every designer need not be a coder, every designer must be a hacker of sorts, mashing together whatever it takes to bring blurry, partially defined concepts into sharp focus. If you are wondering which tools to learn, simply pick one and get started. The choice of tool is irrelevant as long as the experience with the result conveys the idea and allows collaborators to distill their own thoughts. Put simply,

“Design is the intermediary between information and understanding.”
— Han Hofmann

A designer’s ability to imagine something in their mind’s eye with a high degree of detail and convert that to a realistic likeness removes the mental burden of having to visualize from others. This frees them up to apply their own domain expertise to the problem at hand.

“People understand what they can see. If a programmer cannot see what a program is doing, she can’t understand it.”
— Bret Victor, Learnable Programming

Similarly, we support colleagues in evaluating ideas by making them tangible. Designers can support and encourage powerful ways of thinking by helping others see their ideas, and as our simulacra become more refined we provide a maps of the way forward for others to follow. We help collaborators decide what to do next and provide the confidence to act. Doing that mental heavy lifting for people helps a team hone in on the best possible expression of a given idea much faster than they might have otherwise.

Designer as Steward

The second fundamental role of the designer is to be a steward of a user-centered creative process. We should be ambassadors for empathy and creativity, using and extolling the virtues of what David Kelley calls “design thinking.” Here’s another gem from Bret Victor, again proving the not-so-large gap between user interface designers and software designers:

“Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about “for” loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw.” — Bret Victor

In the same way, being a user interface designer is less about knowing Photoshop or Sketch, and more about sharing and applying a way of thinking.

I am intentional about my choice of the word steward here, and its connotations of both assistance and protection. We assist people in seeing and assuming the perspective of others, to help create interfaces, products, and services that are responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. Designers are also stewards in the other sense of the word, because we protect the creative process. We protect nascent ideas and in doing so, move our company towards innovation. We know about what Ed Catmull, head of Pixar and Amy Wallace call “ugly babies”:

“Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing — in the form of time and patience — in order to grow…Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly…If, while in this vulnerable state, it is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed.”
— Creativity, Inc.

As a part of the small group that is expected to provide creativity on demand and on an ongoing basis, designers are well suited to champion and defend good ideas — whatever their source — until they are fully formed.

Designer as Connoisseur

The 3rd and final fundamental role of a designer is that of a connoisseur, maintaining and promoting a high standard of quality. Quality is somewhat subjective, but it boils down to being mindful during the creative process, making every choice a deliberate and intentional one. The connoisseur role is likely the one that comes most naturally to those who choose design as their profession. A good designer strives to become a discerning judge of great work, honing their taste so that they can become appropriately critical of the right things in the right order.

“As with all creative professions, design included, you want to hire someone with good taste and a discerning eye, who can scrutinize and poke and prod through all the dusty corners of a design and emerge with a comprehensive list of what works and what doesn’t.”
— Julie Zhuo

With a sharpened critical eye, designers can share an appreciation for craftsmanship and conscientious execution with the rest of their team, pushing those around them towards excellence.

That Seat at the Table

By now you have heard about designers gaining a seat at the leadership table, alongside business and engineering executives. In light of these three fundamental roles, it makes perfect sense why that would happen.

“The ability to build empathy, connect the dots on complex problems, and help teams apply design thinking are crucial skills a designer can bring to a leadership team.”
— Phil King

By facilitating the visualization and transmission of ideas, stewarding the creative process, and contributing the discriminating taste of a connoisseur, designers can secure their place at the table now and in the future.

P.S. Follow me on Medium below, or on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

Special thanks to Katie Topper and Heather Phillips, without whom this piece would never have existed…or finished…or published.

The first version of this was originally posted on Designer Fund’s Bridge blog, you can still apply to Bridge 5 by October 20. For more information, check out an overview of Bridge.

The Digital Designer of the Future was originally published in Design Insights from Designer Fund on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Or, what the hell do you actually do?

One of the fun things about conferences is getting to hear how dozens of people like you or with similar jobs introduce and describe themselves. You get to experiment and adjust your own introduction as you meet more and more people. I was able to attend both XOXO and Brooklyn Beta this year, and was reminded (again) of the difficulty in introducing yourself as designer, and describing what you do in a way others understand.

In a classic case of the “the map is not the territory”, job titles have a nasty way of…not being useful. I’m looking at you, creative technologists and digital prophets ಠ_ಠ. Job titles try to be both a concise description of a person’s professional responsibilities and a signifier of distinction. They imply a person’s competence using rank as a proxy for experience (senior x), while attempting to describe their professional responsibilities in just a few words. Add to that the gulf between belief and reality, or meaning and usage, and you might as well skip titles altogether and go right to a sentence describing what it is you do and why anybody should care. Plus, everybody wants to protect their ego, impressing the listener with their impressive role and well-rounded-ness. Don’t pigeon-hole me, brah!

Designers in the (Web) Technology Industry

Design in the internet technology industry is one of the worst offenders, with titles going in and out of style like internet memes. You could simply say you are a designer, if you like wasting time; you will definitely need a follow up description. (“So…what do you design?”). If you are — or maybe just want to be — an artist who works under externally applied constraints (for money, lol), being a Graphic Designer or Visual Designer will work for you until you get tired of people saying you just make things pretty. (“I solve meaningful visual problems!”) Or maybe you realize you are more marketable as a User Interface Designer or UI Designer. That is probably the most accurate title of the bunch, it being a fair description of what most designers in the industry actually do. Presumably the listener can then go on to hear what that entails at a particular company, or assume they know enough from what they’ve heard before.

“A designer is a planner with an aesthetic sense.” -Bruno Munari, Design as Art

For those designers who don’t art so good, Interaction Designer is the flavor of choice. The implication is they focus not on “pixel perfection” but on workflows. They might favor working on sequences over individual states, and their final artifacts skew towards wireframes over mocks, and plans over “looks-like” prototypes. I fundamentally disagree with the idea of being a designer who stops so far from the final, intended result, as ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is everything. The only thing that matters is what made it out into the real world, what the user actually interacted with.

There are some more exotic variations on the interaction designer title like Digital Interactive Designer or Behavior Designer which can swing either way, either implying a deep knowledge and expertise of what drives human behavior and how to design for specific behavioral outcomes, or nothing, because we’re all trying to make people do stuff.

But Lo! How can a designer bear to be described by such a tiny piece of their potential, we can do oh so much more! We’ve grown into unique snowflakes capable of creating anything in the world. We can create any service, any manifestation of an idea, any experience…as long as it is a website or an app. So now we have User Experience Designers, or UX Designers, who, yes, design interfaces (“but we think about so much more! Please listen to my keywords: user research, data, ideation, blah blah blah”). The issue here is one of marketing. We want to show we are great designers, and great designers use tools (as appropriate) like user research and data to identify problems and build empathy. They consider the entirety of a user’s experience with a product over time and multiple contact points at both a high and a low level of detail. They consider everything from cultural contexts and cognitive ergonomics to the exact right shade of blue.

But the user experience designer moniker is inherently flawed. We are not truly “designing experiences”. A person’s experience is deeply personal, subject to their perspective, feelings, and even what they had for dinner that night. We are not affecting it directly, but hoping to influence it through the filter of their perception. The same way job titles are only loosely related to what people actually do, a user’s experience is connected to, but not entirely defined by the designer’s choices. To quote Tim Brown:

“Designing for the web is like visualizing a tesseract. We build experiences by manipulating their shadows.”

Plus, it is an entire product team’s responsibility (the entire company’s, even!) to help create a positive user experience through the parts of a usage situation they can control.

Product Design

I think the general vagueness of a term like user experience design, or perhaps the fact that few designers who label themselves as such have sufficient expertise in such a broad range of skills, is the impetus behind the rise of the Product Designer title. It has certainly come into vogue over the past couple of years. I personally understand and use the term to mean a creative expert in the design process who is both a visual designer and an interaction designer; the product designer is a professional who can take barely formed ideas from conception to completion within the business constraints of time and money. Alas, even with this term there isn’t a solid definition. Some people mostly agree with me, while others see it as a higher, more conceptual level of design when compared to interaction or visual design, or put the focus of a product designer on understanding behavior. Still others use it like user experience design, as an umbrella term that contains and subsumes other, more narrow definitions of design.

One thing is clear: these days, designers in the internet technology industry need a broader set of skills than ever. Both in terms of soft skills like creative problem solving, emotional intelligence, etc., and “hard”-er skills, like Illustrator mastery, typesetting, etc. The tools of the trade are becoming easier and easier to use (thank god for Sketch), and companies like Apple have helped bring the experience of good design to the masses. That means that more and more, designers must think about higher order problems, like whether their design problem is even the right one.

Job Titles and Your Personal Journey

Every designer follows their own path to discovering the right label for themselves, all the while those labels change around them as time passes. You simultaneously figure out what your job title means to you as you figure out what it means to other people. It is a continuous act of self discovery as you gain wisdom and skill, designing a career while learning more about your craft and how you like to practice it. There is a tension between what you actually are and the person you could reasonably sell yourself as, between the skill sets you actually have and those you could have, or what you have accomplished and your potential. Not to mention fitting that square peg into the round hole of the job market or the needs of any one particular company. The effect of a job title on your marketability is not insignificant, and the proof is in the dollars:

Even among designers of similar seniority, there is marked difference in compensation for UX Design, UI Design, and Visual Design. — Daniel Burka

In the end there is a line to walk here, treading carefully as you balance your past, your potential, and your integrity (the truth).

The Proof is in Your Pudding

It is easy to fall into the trap to try and guess what is in fashion, update your dribbble profile, and apply that label to yourself. Resist that temptation and design for value, not pixels. Dave Wiskus said it best:

“If you’re really good at what you do, it looks easy. But easy is tough to sell to clients, so we designers develop bad habits in order to make our work look impressive. Substance is key.”

Once you get in the door at that company you would like to work for — and that is a difficult task that might require a certain…personal brand — it is your portfolio that will seal the deal. Concrete proof that you can execute is your biggest asset.

I think the wide variety of ambiguous designer job titles reflects not only the wide variety of skills we can possess, but also that ever-present insecurity many designers and creatives feel. Let us all strive to be plain-spoken about our work and what we aim to accomplish, with both others and ourselves. The next time someone asks about your job, try just saying “I’m a designer” and following that up with a short and sweet description of what you do and what you care most about.

And don’t worry, we are all just figuring it out as we go along.

P.S. Follow me on Medium below, or on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

Identity Crisis: Designer Job Titles was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

TL;DR

1. A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
2. A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
3. An interface should be humane; it should be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

Science fiction author Isaac Asimov once wrote the “Three Laws of Robotics” into his Robot series of stories. These laws were permanently hard-coded into every robot as a final failsafe to prevent catastrophe and protect humanity. I got to wondering, what are our final failsafes? What would our three laws be as interaction designers?

A user’s perception of an interface is inextricably connected to its form, content, and behavior. Just as industrial and graphic designers focus on form, interaction designers hold behavior as the foremost element to consider. When designing to influence a user’s experience, our three laws must be primarily concerned with how an interface behaves, and what effect it has on user behavior. They must be basic and unalterable fundamentals upon which to build other interaction design principles. Lucky for me, the three laws I would go with have already been alluded to by the master himself, Jef Raskin, the brain behind the original Macintosh project. He drops all three bombshells on the same page of his book, The Humane Interface, an interaction design book of near-biblical status. If you look closely, you will see that most popular, modern interfaces use concepts and techniques put forth within the pages of Raskin’s landmark book, including both Microsoft and Apple devices.

Law #1

Playing off of Asimov’s 3 laws himself, Raskin says that “[t]he first law of interface design should be: A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.”[1] Let us all remember that a computer is a tool you use to accomplish something; simply using a piece of software is rarely, if ever, the end goal in and of itself. Thus we can all agree that the single most aggravating experience you can have with a computer is losing work. The only thing worse than having to redo work you have already done is losing data that you cannot reproduce exactly, like creative work.

Applications should maintain the integrity of your data as you entered it and do as much as possible to prevent users from losing work. Maybe you think this is only an engineer’s concern. Developers must make sure their software has safeguards and redundancy to prevent data loss (and has as few bugs as possible), right? In fact, data protection and effort preservation is also an interface design task, as a designer must anticipate — and/or find through user research — how a user is likely to lose work or have to duplicate her efforts. This means things like including robust undo functionality, and shielding destructive actions to prevent inadvertent data loss. A great example of this in action is GitHub’s repository deletion dialog. Unlike other confirmation-style dialogs, this one forces you to type the name of the repository to continue. It is a clever technique that forces the user’s locus of attention to the repository name during the deletion process. The safeguard protects the user against her own habituated workflows.

This first law also applies to the preservation of efforts related to the content the user is working with, as well as the content itself. For example, it can take significant effort to make a selection like the subset of items you would like to perform an action on (e.g. files). Thus, consider preserving selections across work sessions, and including them in the list of actions that can be undone. Similarly, if an interface allows a user to customize or rearrange elements, that arrangement or customization should be preserved.

Observance of this first “law” is why features like Apple’s Time Machine and autosave, and Dropbox’s revision history are so great. They are acknowledgments of the fact that humans make mistakes, and that even though a user may have initiated the destruction of work or data, it may not have been their intent.

Law #2

Raskin goes on to note that a good second law might be “A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.”[2]. Too often, users are burdened with tasks because it was simpler to let a person perform the action manually than to code a system to do it automatically. In these cases, when the technology allows, the computer should do the work. An example is forcing a user to select a credit card type, when that information can be inferred from the number.

Also count the time and mental effort required to learn a new interface or a system’s data model towards the balance of total work required. It may be less work for a user to perform a single action less efficiently than to first learn a new method before doing it faster. A user likely only interacts with a small set of interfaces all the time. For the rest, it may be worth trading in the speed of performing an action for one that is easier to intuit.

Spotting a situation where you are forcing the user to adapt their own mental model can be tricky because it usually comes from design decisions that impose a structure on a user’s content (often a technical requirement) instead of letting them decide how to organize their information, or using a structure with which they are already familiar. Great interfaces bring information in the system to the user in the way(s) they are most likely to want and/or understand it. Take for instance the way most banks expect you to save money. Normally, you have to set money aside by using one or a couple of separate savings accounts, or maybe deal with a single account and keep track of what not to spend yourself. Simple chooses a better alternative. Instead of forcing a user to think of saving money within the structure of how it’s implemented (i.e. in bank accounts), Simple allows you to set money aside for any number of “goals,” and that amount, along with pending transactions is subtracted from your “Safe-to-Spend” balance.

Law #3

What I consider to be Raskin’s third law is really what the entire rest of his book is about. He says that an interface should be humane; it should be “responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties”[3]. This is really the core of the entire discipline of user-centered design, and from where most other interaction design principles are derived. Good interaction design is always about respecting the limitations of the human mind and body. It entails being sensitive to both our visceral, physiological responses, and our cultural values.

One example of making an interface humane is designing around the fact that people have single locus of attention. Take, for instance, having a light on the caps lock key of your keyboard. On its own, this light is not a good solution for avoiding slipping into caps lock mode by mistake because the user’s locus of attention is generally not on the key when they press it. Password inputs on the Mac handle this nicely by providing a visual indicator that caps lock is active within the input field itself, where the user is actually looking.

An example of being “responsive to human needs” is staying aware of what a user cares about when performing an action or going through a workflow (hint: it is what they are trying to accomplish and not your app). See how Amazon automatically shows you whether the lens you are viewing will work with your recently purchased camera.

This last “law” is where the meat of the interaction design discipline is. There is a great deal more to know about designing interfaces in today’s world such that it is humane, from Gestalt principles of perception and the graphic design principles they inform, to the relevant bits of cultural psychology. Our work is rarely final. As time passes, the technology landscape and our cultural context slowly changes, so we truck along, continually evolving our designs and design processes.

These three laws, however, are a fundamental set of guidelines that I find myself returning to repeatedly as touchstones of a successful interface. They are useful to keep in mind as you make decisions about how an interface should look and act, regardless of the aesthetic style you end up with.

Recap

1. A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.
2. A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.
3. An interface should be humane; it should be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

This post was originally published on uxdiogenes.com

P.S. You can follow me on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

The Three Laws of Interaction Design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As I began to clear out my desk that last week at Squarespace and thought about saying goodbye to my colleagues, I realized I felt the same way I did my last week at college, knowing the end of my time on campus was drawing to a close. It was just as difficult to mentally prepare for my move back to California as it was to pack up my dorm room for New York two years earlier.

I began my tenure at Squarespace as an intern through the NYC Turing Fellows program, after which I was hired full time as a Design Engineer and then made my way over to a Product Design position a few months after that. The company was at around 60 people when I started, but it had ballooned to almost 200 by the time I left. It was an invaluable experience for me, and now that I have had time to reflect on it, I can finally put into words the lessons I came away with after my time there.

1) Your Culture is Your Product

If you were to get to know the personalities of the people at Squarespace and how they interact with one another, none of the choices made in the product would surprise you. It is a direct extension of Squarespace’s culture, from the arresting imagery to the stark settings interface.

Although I discovered it during my time there, this concept is not a new one. Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh has written before about how your culture is your brand because company values shine through at every touchpoint with a brand, from conversations with employees to the little cat that drops items into your shopping cart. Company culture informs decision-making and execution, translating to the thousands of small decisions that make up a product.

I also saw first hand at Squarespace how the source of a company’s culture is its “ruling body’s” personality and values. If you are a friend of CEO and Founder Anthony Casalena, you will have a good idea of what his employees care about in the workplace. Squarespace’s culture is a direct extension of his ideals, and it manifests itself in every aspect of the company’s product. Look to the values of your company’s leadership, and you will begin to understand what the company is likely or unlikely to be able to accomplish. Plans aligned with the culture—notice I didn’t say mission statement—will succeed, and those that do not will be poorly executed and doomed to fail.

If you can’t think of an example of how this is true in your company, take a look at how Google’s design language did not evolve until new CEO Larry Page mandated that it should. Google is a perfect example of how a company’s products and brand are a result of its culture, and how that culture is a result of its leadership.

During the very last all-hands meeting I attended at Squarespace, Anthony spoke to us about how he and the leadership team got together to distill the company’s values and presented 8 that would eventually end up on this page. He stressed that the list was an attempt to put into words what we already believed in as a whole, not what they would like us to believe in, or thought sounded good for the company. Indeed every value in that list described how we worked and what we cared about, so there were no surprises.

2) You Are What You Eat

Or rather, in the case of a creative, what you consume. To quote Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris again:

“[Designers] are cultural scavengers and the appropriation of elements are accidentally or unexpectedly found in their work. [sic]”

I was continually amazed by the examples of good art, photography, and design work that the other designers collected and shared, and my exposure to it made me better at my craft. I believe it is important for every creative to seek out and immerse themselves in great work. Tellingly, the custom at Squarespace was to surround yourself with beautiful, functional tools—digital and physical alike. It was very easy to tell whether a design had reached the right level of finish because it would suddenly claim its place on the USM desk, among the anodized MacBooks and beautiful Phaidon hardcovers on the bookshelves.

Try it. If you are a designer, ask yourself: how does this piece of my work measure up to the other work I love? Did I put in the same amount of care and attention to detail?

3) The User’s Experience is Your Brand

At Squarespace we cared about each individual user having a good end-to-end experience with the product more than the abstract idea of an aggregate, generally positive user experience. How does a single user experience Squarespace, starting from exploring the homepage and continuing all the way through to signing up, creating a site, maintaining it, and interacting with customer care? Using that perspective, the focus when designing and building version 6 was first to make sure that a creative with a portfolio would love the system. This (relatively small) group was a good first choice because it was one of the hardest to design for, and the notion was that solving their needs meant that we would meet those of other, less demanding users in a beautiful way more easily as the system continued to evolve. It was only after providing that group with an experience we were proud of that we moved on to focus on certain kinds of small businesses, like restaurants, etc.. It is a strategy that allows for better design through focus, and more often than not, doing less better leads to more universal appeal.

Anthony was fond of referring to a customer’s Squarespace site as their online clothing, and Squarespace’s brand as more akin to a luxury fashion brand than that of the typical technology company. This ended up being an apt metaphor because high-end brands look at creating product experiences in the same way. You might imagine your average tech company leaving an element a few pixels out of alignment or releasing a feature with missing details just to “get it out there.” Can you imagine Prada or Louis Vuitton allowing a handbag with crooked detailing or releasing an unfinished pair of shoes? A user’s concern is about whether a product meets their needs and delights them, not whether it mostly meets most people’s needs.

Putting it Into Practice

These three lessons also highlight how important it is to choose your company carefully as a designer. Choosing a company that doesn’t just pay design and user experience lip service will make the difference between work you can be proud of, and losing steam trying to execute or painting capybaras. Evaluating a company through the lens of these lessons can show you what it would be like to work there as a creative. 1) What is the culture like and what do the higher-ups care about? 2) What sorts of digital and physical tools and objects are the designers surrounded by? 3) How does a user feel about using the product for the first time? These are the questions I would think about when evaluating working at a new company.

I am thankful to Squarespace for giving me the opportunity to learn these lessons so early in my career as I know I will take them with me for the rest of it. So long, Squarespace, and thanks for all the fish*.

*Confused? Then you’ve forgotten Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This post was originally published on http://uxdiogenes.com.
P.S. You can follow me on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

What I Learned About Design at Squarespace was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(This post was originally published on uxdiogenes.com)

Some design projects are doomed to failure before they even begin. No, I am not talking about really stupid ideas. I’m referring to when you skip the oft ignored but essential starting point for every creative project: acceptance.

What is Acceptance?

One of the reasons I love the The Universal Traveler’s map of the creative process is that it is one of the few that includes the mental step of acceptance. Acceptance is the pre-flight phase of the creative process where the decision is made to commit your mental (and sometimes physical) energy to the task. The Universal Traveler describes it as follows:

Acceptance is a voluntary agreement to adapt yourself and your needs, at least in part or for a trial period, to something else. Acceptance is an act of self-giving.

Fundamentally, acceptance is a prerequisite to commitment. Both design students and professionals bump up against problems with lack of acceptance, as their projects may have been assigned to them by a teacher or a boss, respectively, and not chosen by their own volition. These projects get half-baked solutions and are pushed aside at the slightest distraction. Even personal projects taken on by choice can suffer when acceptance is withdrawn part-way through due to project fatigue. I would argue that acceptance level management among all members of a design project’s team is crucial to its success. Acceptance is not only important to designers, but to anyone undertaking a new project (including marketers and software engineers), because creative problem-solving requires buying in to the problem and committing to solving it.

Why Stay Conscious of Acceptance?

It is important to pay attention to your level of acceptance of a project because lack of acceptance blocks flow. For those unfamiliar, flow is a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the former head of the psychology department of the University of Chicago and the leading researcher in the field of positive psychology. In his research into what makes life worth living and the source of happiness, he discovered a mental state that appeared when people were at their most satisfied. This flow state is one where you are completely immersed and engaged in a single task, akin to what most people describe as being “in the zone.” Time disappears and nothing exists outside of the task at hand. Creatives are at their most productive when in the flow state, and a lack of acceptance puts up a mental block that prevents extended, 100%-focused time from occurring.

With some close self-monitoring it should be easy to spot when your acceptance of a project is low and your involvement is not sincere. Staying aware of your acceptance will allow you to better appraise your limits so you know which kinds of projects you should take on and which you should avoid, meaning more successful projects and better overall output.

Fully Accept Your Projects

Before you begin working on your next project, think about whether you have fully mentally accepted it as your own. In some cases where it is possible, it might be best to pass on the project to someone else. In the more frequent case where you have to (and will) work on the project regardless of your personal preference, accepting it and fully committing to it will benefit your state of mind during the project as well as the end result. Remember that “[t]he most profound choice in life is to either accept things as they exist or accept the responsibility for changing them.[^1]”

[1]: The Universal Traveler, Don Koberg and Jim Bagnall

P.S. Feel free to follow me on Twitter here.

Design Process Phase 0: Acceptance was originally published in Daily UI/UX Inspirations on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As is always the case after the World Wide Developer’s Conference, the internet has been abuzz with talk about Apple and its new goodies. In design spheres most of the talk has been about the radical redesign of the UI of version 7 of Apple’s mobile operating system, or iOS7. I have to assume I am not the only one tired of seeing iOS7 articles dominating my feeds, but I think it is important to talk about what we can learn about the art and science of interaction design from iOS7 and the reactions of designers and non-designers (muggles?) to it.

Why You Should Care

Put simply, the set of interface patterns provided by iOS, its bundled applications, and Apple’s human interface guidelines, are a cornerstone of modern interaction design. To quote a certain expat Dane colleague of mine:

“[Apple has] singlehandedly brought humane computing to the world at large in ways that most of their competitors have only dreamt of…[a]nd iOS is the summation of their work; an operating system so simple, yet powerful, that babies, the elderly and even cats can use it.” — Michael Heilemann

Apple is also arguably the consumer product design leader of the world right now, and creators should always keep an ear to the ground when their craft is concerned. Plus, since lazy companies and their employees like to mindlessly copy industry leaders, watching top players is a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of the digital interaction design world.

Now, on to lessons learned from iOS7 and the community response to it.

Lesson 1: Understanding “It Sucks” (Or, Always Ask Why)

Design is equal parts art and science, so there is a fair amount that is entirely subjective (beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that). By now we have seen people take a quick look at iOS7 and say “it sucks,” or “it’s awesome.” Gut reactions are important, but not necessarily super useful on the road of continuous improvement. Much of the immediate negative reaction is familiarity bias and loss aversion.

We love what we know and we’re afraid of what we don’t, so we don’t want to see our old friend replaced with this new thing. It’s irrational, but it’s human nature. —Chris Clark

When evaluating a radically different design, we have to let users spend some time with it to avoid the immediate distaste for something unfamiliar and different. That said, we must also consider our design’s first impression. Is the gestalt of it turning people off? Has thought been given to the design as a whole in addition to the individual details that make it up? Part of the initial negative reaction to iOS7 lies in how theinconsistency of the new iconography in iOS7 and the disharmony of the colors on the home screen leave something to be desired.

Similarly, if the first response was “it’s awesome,” we have to make sure that the beauty isn’t only skin deep. Is the interface still delightful after continued use? Does it actually help the user meet their goals? The redesigned apps in iOS7 make clever use of layers, transparency, and motion to indicate context, which helps users understand the relationship between different states and views of the interface. I am happy to see designers understanding how motion is the body language of your interface, and can play as important a role as sizing and contrast when showing hierarchy. However, in the move to the new aesthetic, the interface introduces problems that the previous version did not have.

Lesson 2: Separating Style From Substance

On one hand, Apple’s radical redesign is messing with what could be considered a “tried and true” formula. Of course, the change is at least partially motivated by market trends and need to draw customers in with something shiny and new. On the other hand, we have to remember the ultimate goal behind pursuing a “flatter” design: to better solve interface design problems. Flat design is not a goal in and of itself; remember the questions we should be asking ourselves. How can we make this friendly and approachable to new users? How can we account for the different skill levels and sensibilities of different kinds of users? How can we make clear all available functions while optimizing for the most common workflows? To quote Apple’s own marketing materials:

“[O]ur purpose was to create an experience that was simpler, more useful, and more enjoyable — while building on the things people love about iOS.”

Apple succeeded in meeting this goal in some areas and failed in others, but the goal remains the same. A novice designer might recognize a general trend towards less ornamented or three dimensional designs and think, I will just have to make everything flat from now on. That person would be missing the point. Every designer who thinks that way pushes our discipline towards the nasty, trend-mongering, fashion industry end of the spectrum. As my a teacher once told me, “don’t do what the experts do. Do what the experts did to become experts.”

Lesson 3: We’re Still Figuring Out Modern UI Design

Design is about imparting meaning. It is functional story telling and communication, and like story telling, it is about intimate knowledge of your audience. It is applied psychology. And as always, as we venture into the wild and largely uncharted territory of the human mind, things get messy. Frank Chimero makes a good point:

“Interface designers for the iPhone have an unusual problem: the phone is so successful, the designers’ target audience is practically everyone. How do you even begin to design for that?” — Frank Chimero

Technology is one of the fastest changing industries, and the interaction designers in the industry are still figuring out what works, and whatshould be improved. As we mature as an industry, and trends become popular and fade away only to resurface again in a different form, our techniques and understanding will improve.

Keep Calm And Carry On

In the end we all have to trust in disciplined process and iteration. I will leave you with a last quotation from Seth Godin:

Great work from a design team means new work, refreshing and remarkable and bit scary.

P.S. You should follow me on Twitter @uxdiogenes.

P.P.S. If you are interested in further (good) reading about iOS7, check out this roundup.

iOS7: What Have We Learned? was originally published in I. M. H. O. on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.