Sharon:
I’ve been reading a lot about Lean UX these days and have to admit I’m falling in love with it. After all, what’s not to love about a process that promotes the idea that you don’t have to generate a huge paper trail in order to create a brilliant user experience? Free yourself from the time-consuming, stale, obsolete deliverables you’ve been slaving away over and join us with our lightweight research methods and prototypes!
Sharon:
By now, we've all seen responsive designs that have given us endless hours of fun resizing our browsers and watching what happens. And now that you’ve seen it, you totally want it, right? But is it really what you need? While I’m a big fan of responsive design, it’s not a panacea for all the ills of the web. Here are a couple things to consider when determining whether or not responsive design is right for your site.
Sharon:
Over the years I’ve watched my wireframes go from scribbles on the back of a napkin to architectural-looking blueprints complete with gradients and icons and detailed pagination mechanisms. And, truth be told, it saddens me. The spirit in which wireframes were intended, way back when we first realized that websites had to be planned out, was to get ideas for content down on paper before we started plodding away at development. They should inform, not dictate, the information architecture, content development, and visual design processes that follow.
Sharon:
We’ve all heard the sayings “less is more” and “keep it simple, stupid,” but I prefer the one from Dave Ruse, a designer I work with who recently quipped, “simple is hard.” After spending the next few days toiling over a homepage wireframe in an attempt to simplify things, I came to appreciate how right he was.
