A chat with Kevin Budelmann
A few weeks ago I took a trip down to Holland, MI to attend a segment of the Lakeshore e2e (entrepreneur to entrepreneur) Series. The series provides a platform for the business leaders of today to share their ideas and insights with the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. The night I attended, Kevin Budelmann from People Design was the speaker.
I have always held a high respect for People Design, and it was a great experience to hear what Kevin had to offer to the “entrepreneurs of the tomorrow.” His keynote presentation addressed experience design planning and how each person in a business is a representation of the brand. From the presentation, I began to better understand the concept of designing for the NEEDS of the audience.
Kevin began by explaining that design is a verb, a process, and a way to innovate. As a designer, not only do you have to know your customer, but also your customer has to know their customers. What will the final customer experience throughout the purchasing process? In many cases, businesses operate as separate entities: marketing, sales, distribution, and customer service. In such a system, there are often communication breakdowns and promises cannot be kept. The experience and the image of the company will be based on individual communication interactions between the company and the customer. These interactions are called touch points, opportunities to make an impression. The more transparent the business can be at each of these touch points, the better the personal relationship with the customers will be. By strengthening the relationship between the business and their customer, it will be easier to understand exactly what the customers needs are, and the company will establish a brand based on the collection of experiences and the customers perception of the company.
As the designer, I am creating an experience that will meet the needs of the final customer. Meeting their needs requires that I consider the audience, examine the priorities of the customer as well as the business, research, define the audience demographics and ethnographic, and create actual user personas (fictionalized model defining the usability). After considering all of the factors, the innovation takes place and you begin helping people.
After attending this meeting I was encouraged to apply what I had learned from Kevin to the newsletter project I had been working on for my communication design class. Before creating the final prototype for class, I sat down and created four user personas for the possible readers of my newsletter. By doing so, I made decisions not just because they looked nice, but because the needs of the users had led me towards the decision. Overall, considering the users needs not only prevented designing just to decorate, but it also helped me create something that is custom tailored to suit the needs of the audience.
Goodbye Ugly White Space!
I am updating my website right now and I have been testing on different platforms. The links that I have are lined up vertically on the side and in Safari, they ran flush up against eachother, but in firefox and Internet Explorer there was a 4px gap between them. I could not figure it out so I looked up some resources and I got it all figured out. In the HTML for IE and Firefox I had to group all of the images together with the div. This was confusing for me because I had always thought that the asthetics of the markup had little to no effect on the asthetics of the page. However when I changed my html markup, the space had magically disappeared! The answer to all my problems is demonstrated in this example code for images, but can be translated into code for image links as well: To get rid of the extra white space created around images in IE and Firefox, instead of writing your code to look like this:
Communication Design: Newsletter
My current project in Communication Design is to create a newsletter for a toy company called Playtime Inc. I chose to use the newsletter title: Across the Board. I’m pretty excited about this project, however I am a little nervous about the advanced inDesign techniques we are supposed to use. I will have to do a little research on how to make tables using style sheets. I’ll be posting my progress as I work on the project. Here are some of the designs I have created for the nameplate.
Several different grid styles were considered for the layout. Here are some examples:
Ty po graph y
I joined the Nice Web Type flickr group today for two reasons. 1. It is really nice to see good typography on websites (boring answer) and 2. For now, am going to make the assumption that websites are worth my time when websites have good typography. I really like being able to see very original and interesting sites that still remain clean and organized. Its pretty inspiring… in fact now I want to change my blog’s asthetics.
It was cozy in my cave
For the past few years I have refused to have a blog simply because I thought they were lame. I didn’t really care to share my thoughts and feelings with the rest of the world. I didn’t realize that blogs offered so much more than just thoughts and feelings about daily activities. Since I have entered the world of blogging, I’ve found myself fascinated with all of the tips and tricks that other designers are willing to freely share with the rest of the world. However, I’m starting to get the feeling that while I was staying cozy in my sheltered non-blogging cave, I’ve fallen a little behind. So, it’s time to catch up.
As I was blurfing, (yeah, I made that up… blogs are all about being original & awesome, right?) I came across this blog called Passionate, Creating Passionate Users and as I was looking though it (and loving the awesome visuals to help explain what is being discussed) I notice that it looks an awful lot like the Head First books. So, I’m pretty sure it has some sort of connection with the books. Anyways, I think this is a really helpful blog that I will be looking forward to referencing as I peruse my technical skills through blurfing.
web 2.0 = synergy
I read an article today called “Web 2.0 for Designers” although it was published nearly three years ago, it really brought up some interesting points about how the web is changing. The web is no longer a place that is static, it is a living breathing…. (thing?). Design is no longer controlled by one person. The efforts put in by the users most often the designer’s intentional look for the page. This article relates to the presentation by Khoi by reminding designers that we have to create the path and let the users fill in story.
When the users, designers, story editors, writers, and anyone else who is involved put work into somthing, the sum of their effors create something that is greater than all of its parts alone. This is called Synergy. A great web 2.0 page is a compilation of synergistic work put together in a way that establishes a good experience for the users and works well with the computers, databases, and technology.
Khoi’s Presentation
Khoi’s presentation highlighted some of the key differnce between interactive and print, and one of the most outstanding difference is CONTROL. A designer has nearly full control over any printed piece, yet the user in interactive design demands control over the page, what brower they use, if the enlarge the text, if they use screen-readers, the list goes on.
Khoi also emphasized the importance of good narrative, story telling. I know that this is really important to me if someone wants to keep my attention and keep me interested whether it be a site, move, or even a conversation. I think it is good for a little mystery as well. I don’t want something to be over-explained to me. I’m not dumb, I can figure it out. I think it makes people feel good to have figured something out on their own. That sense of accomplishment is possibly what will make them want to come back.
As I was listening to the presentation, I understood how it is hard to let go of some of the control, but I also feel that because I grew up using the internet it is not as hard to give up that control. I feel that it is a part of this generations culture to view the internet as a living breathing thing that is always changing, improving and ultimatly mantipulated by ourselves as well as people other than ourselves.
From this presentation, I will definately take with me a great point that Khoi made. People want to have a great narrative presented to them, but they want to be guided and have a clear understanding of what they are doing and where they are at. As Khoi stated, “we have to meet the sweet spot.”
