Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
“I didn't have a way to go from being a webmaster to doing UX full time,” Petersen
says now. “My development experience helped me make things, but I was starting to realize
that I didn't know what things to make… So I enrolled in the [Masters] program… where
I went out in the field and talked to actual people, researching their needs… I still do it
today.”
Sun Sachs, the Vice President for Product, Design & Engineering at Townsquare Media,
was a pioneer in UX design, learning some of its most essential principles as long ago as
the mid-1990s. “I was working as a bike messenger in downtown Seattle,” Sachs recounts,
“and I had this idea to create a website experience that was fully immersive and took up
the whole browser screen. I wasn't thinking about consumers then, but I wanted to take
the [user] through a choreographed set of experiences. I wanted it to be like… a restaurant,
where you walk in, and the experience is designed to be consistent. I really wanted to do
something totally different. This was back when most sites were just animated GIFs and
graphics, and very squared off sites.” Sachs got the opportunity to make his idea work when
a department head at his school asked him to redesign the department's website. Sachs cre-
ated his full screen experience, considering user needs at every turn. The site worked.
Sachs has had other epiphanies along the way. “At AOL we created a well-crafted,
beautiful experience, with balance between text and images. Then we found [users] didn't
want that. They wanted text. It was hard to stomach because we'd done everything right.
But people didn't want it. That's what designers sometimes miss. It's not always true, but
often their natural way of thinking is that, if we put things together the right way, properly
organizing our hierarchies, and dividing information into digestible bits… that's what mat-
ters. That's basically correct, but sometimes what the user wants is counterintuitive to that
kind of organizational thinking.”
What all designers must learn is that users are people. People are often irrational. Some
of the uses they find for our products will strike us as being so obvious; we'll wonder
how we could've missed them. Others will seem illogical, and even counterproductive. But
those uses give us key data on the desires and needs of people. That's one of the many dis-
coveries we've made while reinventing the wheel, so to speak.
