Date: April 7, 2010
Speaker: Bill Scott — Netflix
In any field of design, designers can enhance their craft by studying the work of others. Through the careful exercise of breaking down real-world solutions into their underlying principles and patterns, previous lessons can be applied to new sets of problems we encounter. Designing for web interfaces is no different. By necessity we are constantly searching for inspiration and practical guidance in solving the problems we face as designers each day. A powerful approach is to capture these lessons into “design lenses”. A design lens allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. Lenses were originally created for game design but are just as powerful for user experience design.
In this talk, Bill will introduce the idea of design lenses and discuss several lenses inspired from fields of study as diverse as theater, magic, game design, storytelling, Shaker furniture, motion graphics, and comics for inspiration in designing rich, interactive interfaces. By teasing out some of the key takeaways from each of these disciplines, a fresh light can be shed on our own corner of the design universe.
About Bill Scott
For a long time Bill Scott couldn’t decide if he was a designer or an engineer, but finally gave up trying to classify himself and just decided to live in both worlds as much as possible. He has enjoyed working with technology for 25 years, and enjoyed interacting with people for even longer. It seemed only natural to blend these two loves together. These dual passions drove him to create one of the first successful Macintosh games (GATO, 1985), build war-gaming interfaces for NATO, found and lead the UX design team at Sabre, write OpenRico’s AJAX framework, manage the user interface engineering organization at Netflix, publish the Yahoo! design pattern library, and even write a book about it all (Designing Web Interfaces, O’Reilly).
Photos from the event taken by Ann Marcus.
See more photos from the meeting on Flickr.