Web Designers in London

The Future of Web Design: London boasted a packed house of incredible attendees, awesomely informative talks and fun sponsor activities, like a cocktail party for industry folk, etch-a-sketch logo design contests, and a walking tour of signage and typography in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood.

But the content truly rocked this show. Here’s a few highlights from my favorites.

“The Art of Deception” by Stephen Hay

Benevolent deception is present in UIs all around us. These deceptions give us the illusion of control.

Every design choice you make falls into 1 of 2 camps: you’re either frustrating your user or delighting them. Use these 7 clarifying techniques to guide your user toward delight:

1. Use fewer props: Only include what’s absolutely necessary—ditch the rest.
2. Take advantage of memory: Consistently deploy design elements to avoid negative surprises.
3. Visually clarify your props: Be clear about what everything does.
4. Make the hidden visible: If something (like navigation) needs to be there, put it there.
5. Eliminate time lags: Design with performance in mind.
6. Eliminate interruptions: Any diversion between point A and point B is one diversion too many.
7. Make procedures clear and flexible: Help users get stuff done, but don’t be too prescriptive about it.

“Getting there faster: rapid prototyping and iteration” by Billy Kiely

Now, the most creative people in companies are tackling much larger business problems than basic design challenges. Socialize your designs early and often with your team. This will help you uncover problems you didn’t know you had.

More and more businesses tap their creative folks to solve complex business challenges through design, instead of just asking them to react change requests. Because the business landscape is changing, we need to change the way we design, and how we get that design approved and reviewed.

Here’s 3 tips to help you shift your design process in the right direction:

1. Focus on your story

Bad data handling jeopardizes the validity of real scientific trials and, to compound the issue, we hand data over to insurance companies, sales organizations, and less-than-ethical companies without much thought.

Plus, we’re removing all context and cultural detail from that data, which further abstracts our humanity and often results in wrong insights. We can’t forget that robots are not localizers.

To keep our humanity concrete and our data useful, we need to: Design content as the “legos” of the internet—evergreen building blocks that work with each other. And design with empathy, letting go of our inherent biases to treat our users better.