Thought Archives

DESIGN

As a DESIGN | MEDIA ARTS major and Film minor at UCLA, I spent a fair amount of time collecting all kinds of design artifacts, links, resources. Most designers have their own repository of go-to resources. This is mine, open sourced, so everyone can benefit from what I've learned over the years!

This should explain most things: Designer vs. Client 
This should fill in any missing gaps: Brutally Honest Illustrations on Designers

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DESIGN DEFINITIONS

Naming a few of the lesser known...

Affordance 
Creating a visual cue to let users know something exists, and/or
when a control behaves as its appearance suggests. Something that has zero affordance is the right-click menu. On the screen, you have no idea what menu options may be available. 

Heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface (UI) design. Think of it as a series of rules/tests you challenge a user experience with to understand if it's consistent and intuitive. Heuristic evaluations reveal where user experiences fail or break down.

Human Computer Interaction (HCI) involves the study, planning, and design of the interaction between people (users) and computers.

Human Factor Design
The multidisciplinary study of human biological, physical, psychological, and social characteristics in relation to environments, objects and services. Most commonly, this is typically concerned with ergonomics. 

Low-fidelity prototype e.g. napkin drawings
A quick and easy translation of high-level design concepts to help quickly communicate framework or ideas. These may be sketches, drawings, shapes, paper cutouts etc. 

High-fidelity prototype e.g. polished accurate product mockups
A prototype which is quite close to the final product, with lots of detail and a good indication of the final proposed aesthetics and functionality.

Experience Map 
A visual representation of all the different navigation paths of your users’ interactions patterns. This might resemble something like a massive family tree, organizing what branches and connects to what - illustrating the full picture of how people may move around the experience.

Contextual enquiry
Interviewing users in the location that they use the website or app, in order to understand their tasks and challenges.

Glossary Glossary II

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DOCS & CLIPS

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CLASSES

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AGENCIES 

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