I’m sat in a lecture theatre in Apple University, at 1, Infinite Loop, and the guy presenting to us says, “when designing product, we start and end with this... ‘how does it make me feel...?’...”
Our initial designs for realsmart learning maps are nowhere near where we have ended up. We’ve archived these notes probably for nostalgic reasons so we can see the design process and the moments of breakthrough, the moments when we were able to simplify things.
We spent a good number of months getting the feel right. I was driving people crazy talking about the architect, Christopher Alexander, and ‘increasing the life’ between the fundamental elements of our design.
I know how I want realsmart to feel like. That feeling you get when you hear a great song for the first time, but you feel like it’s existed forever. It must have, because you know somehow where it’s going to go, but it manages to surprise and excite you anyway when it does it.
And if it is a song, it’s a three minute pop song. You get it in the first minute, and you listen on repeat to finally know each note, each dynamic, like that dropped beat in the middle of Blondie’s Heart of Glass, so you know its secrets.
Now this is hard to achieve when you’re talking about an app fundamentally designed to allow us to learn more and learn it faster! Not as exciting! But you know... for a metaphor on how to achieve a feeling, that’s it!
“Ok, so what does it do...? Ok so I can do this, right, ah ok so then I can add stuff here, and share and... oh wow! I could use this for X and I could use it for Y and... does it do...? Yes, great! Wow, it’s so easy and fast. Let me think about this for a bit... yes, yes I’m gonna do this with it, now!”
Then it becomes your old friend and you can annoy everyone by saying, “oh, you’re still doing things that way... ok, but you really need to have a look at this. I can show you if you want...? No, it’ll only take 3 minutes...”
Our initial designs for realsmart learning maps are nowhere near where we have ended up. We’ve archived these notes probably for nostalgic reasons so we can see the design process and the moments of breakthrough, the moments when we were able to simplify things.
We spent a good number of months getting the feel right. I was driving people crazy talking about the architect, Christopher Alexander, and ‘increasing the life’ between the fundamental elements of our design.
I know how I want realsmart to feel like. That feeling you get when you hear a great song for the first time, but you feel like it’s existed forever. It must have, because you know somehow where it’s going to go, but it manages to surprise and excite you anyway when it does it.
And if it is a song, it’s a three minute pop song. You get it in the first minute, and you listen on repeat to finally know each note, each dynamic, like that dropped beat in the middle of Blondie’s Heart of Glass, so you know its secrets.
Now this is hard to achieve when you’re talking about an app fundamentally designed to allow us to learn more and learn it faster! Not as exciting! But you know... for a metaphor on how to achieve a feeling, that’s it!
“Ok, so what does it do...? Ok so I can do this, right, ah ok so then I can add stuff here, and share and... oh wow! I could use this for X and I could use it for Y and... does it do...? Yes, great! Wow, it’s so easy and fast. Let me think about this for a bit... yes, yes I’m gonna do this with it, now!”
Then it becomes your old friend and you can annoy everyone by saying, “oh, you’re still doing things that way... ok, but you really need to have a look at this. I can show you if you want...? No, it’ll only take 3 minutes...”