Well Designed

Book Notes by Julaine

Well Designed

Build a product concept map

  1. identify the nouns and verbs
  2. order the lists based on the emotional value
  3. sketch product concept map by creating a main armature out of nouns and verbs
  4. Add missing nouns and verbs to the map
Sketch User Path Through the Design Experience
  • hero flows.
  • How do users move through the system?
  • Tell > fail of their experience
  • define the visual mood. the visual mood communicated through colour, typography, composition, balance, saturation and imagery
  • iteration: making informed changes to an existing design
  • variation: an exploration of alternatives

Embracing humanity is what leads to great products. It's not easy to do; it's not fast; it's not cheap.

Rank your backlog tasks based on how much support your emotional value proposition

Keep lists, track and usability defects, produce a design

process is:

  • determine a product-market fit
  • identify behavioural insights
  • sketch a pro check strategy
  • polish the product details

A products personality is critical to its success and can be established through a rigorous process of ideation

Design is about humanizing technology and finding ways for technology to intergrate into the fabric of our culture

  • the added complexity of extra features in products always serves to diminish the experience a person will have with any feature
  • your product should have a sense of character that shows the company's values and culture-designers consider multiple features
  • make a list of assumptions of existing behaviour
    •     what do you think people currently do
    •     why do you think that
    •     where do you think people do it
    •     how frequently do you think they do it
    •     when do you think they do it?
  • then find out how these assumptions compare to real life.

Research Goals

Understand behaviours, learn to empathize

Always ask to see examples

Watch at the extremities - find anomalies.

Bibliographical Information

Well Designed: how to use empathy to create products people love - jon kolko
2014: Harvard Buisness Review Press. Boston, MA
ISBN 978-1-62527-479-3

These are notes I made after reading this book. See more book notes

Just to let you know, this page was last updated Thursday, Jul 03 25