 Now everyone seems to be doing it and there's kind of this fear that I have that we're just doing like decorative distractions because we have the capabilities to do it so we're doing it. If you're designing for a user, go and talk to that person or that person representing the group that this product is relevant for. We've reached a point with design tools where they feel like they're guiding the way we're actually creating things and too much control has been handed over to them rather than sort of the more individualistic custom stuff that when we're creating things as designers. What are your thoughts on that? I think we have made a lot of progress with design tools and that's very good because it makes it very easy for a lot of people to pick up a tool and design sites and to me or applications and to me that ties in with design systems that often you can load whole libraries working on a project right now where we have to use material design and I can just load all the components and we can start doing that and that's great, it speeds up the process but it also means someone who is not very experienced can make something that looks good that seems to make sense very quickly without actually thinking it through because that's not their job and so they're not designing with necessarily the right intent, they can put all the things together but they're not thinking through visual hierarchies, information architecture, how pages fit together, user journeys, all those things might not be designed for, each screen is designed for on its own and so that will look good but if then someone starts using it, things kind of might fall apart or don't really make sense or become confusing and that's because the tool makes certain things easy but it doesn't replace someone using intent in every kind of design decision laying out information, deciding what information goes on a page or doesn't go there and how things tie together Do you think they're making us more lazy then or potentially making the makers of things not consider context or like quick wins, easy fixes? I don't think they make us lazy, I think what they do is they make it even harder to do good design in terms of their business person, someone management commissions a job and sees a junior person can kind of do something that looks alright because that's often how they look at things, right? Or this looks fine then why do we spend so much time on information architecture or visual hierarchies that those are not concepts that they're familiar with and for them it's this looks okay, colors matched, buttons consistent, so it's fine and so I think in some ways they make it a lot easier and faster to do things but in other ways they make it a bit harder to defend why things take time why the invisible things of design just need to always be there and the tool doesn't replace that So in terms of a UI design, motion animation is quite popular now we've come to a point where before to understand animation and motion was quite complicated you had to have some sort of animation background or at least understand how the human eye works but now everyone seems to be doing it and there's kind of this fear that I have that we're just doing decorative distractions because we have the capabilities to do it so we're doing it and I know you've done a lot of studies with eye tracking and interfaces about how someone can navigate through something using their eyes I've done a lot of research on HCI and UX and I've built a lot of prototypes and I've started with doing just eye tracking studies looking at where people look on the screen and how you lay out the information that it makes sense but then what I found a lot more interesting is actually building interfaces that you can explore with their eyes and when you get to that point it becomes even more critical to think all of those things through because you don't want any information that distracts you need to really actively think about at every step in time where you guide the person's eye because it's the only way for them to navigate around and visual attention is very limited and it's linear and as the eye moves it abstracts a lot of information so our eyes are not getting the rich picture that we think we are getting most of that is actually processed by the brain and interpreted based on experience, previous knowledge and so on so what we are seeing isn't really what the eye is perceiving and so it's very important to design again with intent for those things and a lot of, especially for mobile apps tools nowadays come with all kinds of animation builders that you can do and again what the risk is that you are losing the intent in what is the purpose of that animation so for example you have, if you touch a button and it kind of glows up which is one of the material design things that makes a lot of sense because that is intent it confirms visually that I am selecting this button but then I was just looking at the Google Calendar for example where you can, if I create an event I can choose the color that I want to coat this event in and then the whole header changes and it uses the same animation and yeah it looks nice but it over focuses it takes me off my journey I am trying to create this event, I am filling in all the details maybe there is a reason why I want to change the color and suddenly half of the screen is animating the color change that is unnecessary, it doesn't serve any purpose other than a little bit the vanity of the designer wanting to say I can do this and it looks cool but it distracts the user and it is maybe not a highly critical situation in that case it is just a little bit maybe frustrating or annoying but it is the general risk that you are actually just designing for the animation's sake dark sky, the weather app, I really love that app and it is very nice for looking at weather in the next 10 minutes, half an hour and so on but the key animation or the key interaction with it is just sliding left and right from your day view to different locations and then there is this global map where you can look at the temperature and the rain on a world map you are swiping left to get to that view so what this communicates to me is I can swipe right again to go back to the other view but I cannot do that because I am now in a globe mode where I rotate the globe and I don't need to hunt for the X in the corner to go back so the animation is there because it is a common thing you swipe left and right to switch between screens but it doesn't make sense the right way to design that interaction would be to make the map accessible from the place where you exit it again so they are consistent and they meet the user's expectation where I go to it I can go back to the other screen or you can spend more time thinking about how to solve the problem and come up with a completely different interaction but the inconsistency is just what breaks this and it is introduced because it is so tempting because these animations are cheap and you can add them easily and you don't have to think through the problem or the loss which makes the thing look like you have done something amazing even though it is just a setting that you have just included I think there is this temptation because animations are I think today a hot topic and it is something that would have been traditionally very hard to do and you can do it out of the box you pick the animation you want just like people I don't know 10-20 years ago maybe even now in Powerboy and do all these slight animations just because they can and they didn't make any sense and I'm not saying it's that bad now but it's that easy to use them and not having to think about why am I actually using this and does it help at all and just as you would use visual hierarchies to think through how you organize information like where is the header, where is the title and how does the paragraph text fit in and how is the user's eye going from one place to the next the same applies to animation as it guides you from one screen to another or from one place on the screen to another the intent is to guide the user's eye from one place they're looking at to the next that is relevant for them especially if they're in a journey where you're designing to make pain go away so I have a problem, I need it solved it's a shopping journey or it's I don't know, I need to fill in a form you want to guide the user through this as quickly as possible so there's little cognitive load and the pain goes away quickly if you're designing for delight because it's something entertaining or it's a game then it's obviously different than animation so have a completely different purpose but again I don't think people think along those lines necessarily enough when they're using those tools and adding animations isn't that basically how to experience that I mean, I think we all look for the answer from some of the videos I've done before everything's about the answer I want this checkbox for performance I want a checkbox for accessibility is there an answer in UX is there something that someone could actually do or approach like principles that they can look at at least to have a starting point because unless someone is an expert and has studied these things how would they know or do you feel that they're just not people as an industry we're not necessarily thinking deeply enough about the problems that we're trying to solve so I think a good starting point is always to look at some of the psychological theories behind it and the principles and one thing I think is very important and when I interview people I always try to probe for the knowledge in those is Gestalt Laws or Gestalt Principles and Gestalt Laws are basically rules psychologists came up with those in Germany they're basically just rules that describe how human perception works how the brain tries to make sense of information and there's different laws of proximity of continuity of simplicity that for example if you look at different shapes and some are complex that's complexer than others that we find the simpler ones appealing and that drives design that's why products look often sleep when they're very simple shapes and so on and there's laws that mean that we're looking for things that are familiar to us so if we're seeing something we can't recognize the brain will try to make sense of it and will try to make us see things that aren't actually there the more common laws would be obviously related to alignment of information of grouping so how we lay out things so a very concrete example I like to or that's very dear to me personally is if you use white space and how you group things together to make them appear as relevant to each other it's just to use white space rather than lines lines is like outlines to group things is another way but it's often a cop out using white space and so these laws relate to how human perception works and I think it's critical to understand those in order to use tools that come with design systems and that make it very easy to put things on a screen and lay them out to understand those rules and those laws to design better experiences so if you're a developer coming into this today or like a designer what's the first thing they should really be looking at when trying to solve a problem if I was a developer or if I would have a developer to design something I would probably tell them to take a step back not just start playing with the tools straight away and do some reading and I think reading on psychology would be a good thing Gestalt laws, human perception and a very useful book is Universal Principles of Design it has those kind of laws and a lot of other laws beauty buyers, all kinds of things that explain why people perceive things the way they do why they make decisions the way they do why they like certain things more than others and so it has a theory on one side and it has really nice concrete examples on the other and it's very accessible and I think it's a very approachable book to familiarize oneself with that How do you do your research? Well, user research you should always do so yes, if you're designing for a user go and talk to that person if you're not familiar with doing user research it's very tempting or it's very easy to ask the wrong question how do you like this? should we do it like this or like that? and those are not the right questions to ask what you're trying to do is you're trying to understand again let's say, let's stick within the kind of solving kind of a real problem the user's pain, you're trying to understand what is it that is bothering them or that's hard for them that you want to design something that makes it easier for them and with that regard if for example I should suggest what's the best way to do research there is something called master and apprentice model in interviewing and this for contextual interviews and basically tells you that when you interview a user you are the apprentice and the user is the master he's the master of what he's trying to do and he's telling you what's the problem and you are there to learn about what's his problem you're not telling him or you're not trying to explain why the prototype works in a certain way that's not your job, your job is to understand why it doesn't make sense for him so that would be another thing contextual interviews would be a good thing to read up on one last thing, I mean I remember Alan Cooper the UX guru who came up with this idea of personas I remember in the early days looking at personas we would look at what's the person's demographic but he really dislikes this idea the demographic doesn't tell you anything what do you think about defining a persona or a user persona actually we just had a workshop yesterday and we used empathy maps before and I used that template again yesterday I think traditional personas that are based on demographic information for marketing if you want to narrow down who the group of customers is that you're targeting I think a lot in software design where experience is a lot more personal you want to go a lot deeper because you're designing specific journeys for a specific purpose for a group of people and so the only way you can do that well is by talking to them by understanding the groupings of course but understanding the real pain on why the mother in the morning when she has to bring the kids to school forget something a traditional persona wouldn't describe that the way you understand this is by going there observing it and seeing the problem and then once you understand it and you can actually understand it by just talking to maybe five similar people for that specific problem you can then come up with something to help fix it you've replaced the word blue with the word green and now you have a green sky you make it sound so easy it really is like I've got 12 year olds coding full VR scenes in under an hour