Mel Choyce

  • ADHD anti-patterns on the web

    I’ve spent most of my life ignoring my untreated ADHD. Instead, I’ve devised personal hacks to work around it, such as:

    • Excessive caffeine consumption
    • Picking classes which highlight my skills
    • Gravitating towards a career that is compatible with my work habits
    • Etc.

    My girlfriend was diagnosed with Autism earlier this year. I started learning more about Autism and the neurodiversity movement. That helped me explore my own neurodivergence; I thought more about how my ADHD effects me.

    I have a lot of trouble reading (rather unfortunately — it’s one of my favorite hobbies). I lose focus easily. I lose my place. I find myself rereading the same sentences over and over again. I’ll get down to the end of a paragraph and realize I didn’t absorb anything. Usually I can push my way through, but reading on the web is full of distractions that break my attention. Paying attention to my symptoms helped me identify web patterns which inhibit my ability to process information.

    Here are two patterns I find particularly difficult:

    Collapsible headers

    You know the kind: sticky headers that collapse upwards when you pause a page, or scroll down and read. But the second you start moving upward, they leap back into place. Designed to increase focus, this pattern instead jolts me out of whatever I’m reading. It often covers the content I scrolled back up to re-read. I find this particularly difficult to handle on Medium, especially on my phone or tablet. If you’re logged out, there are currently two bars that appears when you scroll upwards.

    While reading, I often find myself having to go back and re-read a previous sentence to absorb the message. For me, collapsible headers reduce my focus, not enhance it.

    Animation

    Animation is distracting. Please use it with intention.

    If there is something animating on the page, that is all I can focus on. I can’t keep my eyes from moving along with it. Sometimes an animation or gif is so distracting I have to hide it with my hand.

    I can deal with animation when it’s an integral part of the article itself — for example, if I’m reading a post on animation techniques — but when animation is decorative or superfluous, it hinders my ability to read. (Worst of all are animated ads stuck in the middle of articles.)

    If your site uses these two patterns, ask yourself: does it improve the user experience? Or is my content harder to engage with now?

    Just food for thought.

    mel

    , , ,

  • Portfolio Design Tips

    In the past couple of months I’ve gotten involved with hiring designers at Automattic (which is a pretty new and kind of weird experience for me). I’ve seen enough portfolios that I’m starting to get a feel for what’s effective and what misses the mark. Here are some tips:

    Optimize your images

    Don’t make me wait. Your images should be high-quality and retina-friendly, but they also shouldn’t take forever to load. If your design tool of choice doesn’t do the optimization for you, there’s a bunch of free tools you can use to whittle down your file size without losing too much quality. I want to see your big, beautiful portfolio examples, but I don’t want to have to wait for them to load forever.

    Make your projects easy to browse

    Should be intuitive, and yet… I’ve reviewed so many portfolios where it’s not easy to go from one project to the next. Simple navigation, whether it’s a grid of projects or even just a Back / Next link at the bottom of your project, is enough for me.

    If you worked on a project with others, clearly state your role

    Design is often collaborative. That’s awesome. But if you’re showing projects you worked on other designers (or art directors, etc.) try to be as explicit as possible about what part of the project you were responsible for. Don’t make whoever is viewing your portfolio try to guess which part is yours and which was done by someone else.

    Write case studies

    Show me your sketches and your process. In my opinion, the worst thing you can do is just throw a bunch of screenshots or mockups on your site with no sort of explanation or guidance. What were the project goals? Did you accomplish them? What was your process like? Why did you make these decisions? It doesn’t need to be an essay — even a paragraph is fine — but it needs to get me into your head and see the project from your perspective. A couple screenshots isn’t going to do that.

    Remove your older projects

    I’ve seen a lot of work from 2011-2013. It usually looks outdated, because it is. Just cut it. If you’re worried about not having enough work, spend more time on your recent examples and work them into case studies. Older or mediocre designs bring down the overall quality of your portfolio. It’ll be stronger without them, I promise.

    I know this is probably kind of ironic, given I haven’t updated my own portfolio in quite some time and it’s pretty sad and outdated. I’ve honestly been thinking about redoing my site and removing my portfolio in favor of just my blog — but that’s a topic for another time.

    PS: Automattic is hiring Product Designers and Marketing Designers!

    mel

    , ,

  • Good Design is Environmentally Friendly

    I recently gave a talk at WordCamp Maine about good design. In this presentation, I had a section on Dieter Rams’ principles of good design. When I was writing the presentation, I thought about how I could apply one of Rams’ principles, “good design is environmentally friendly,” to the web. This principle states:

    Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimizes physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.

    “Environmentally friendly” is easy to understand when we’re thinking about industrial design and the production of physical goods. Eco-friendly design is sustainable; the creation, production, and eventual disposal of that product does not harm the environment. Like a good girl scout, our well-designed products might even leave the environment better than we found it.

    This concept is a little bit trickier when you think about the web. As designers and developers, the products we build don’t often impact the environment at all. (The exception is perhaps our physical tools themselves: computers, tablets, and phones.)

    Instead of the physical environment, we can apply Rams’ principle to the digital environment. Eco-friendly design does not harm an online community or its denizens. This means protecting our users’ information and privacy, and shielding them from abuse and harassment. If our designs don’t protect our most vulnerable users, then they are not eco-friendly.

    We need to design to reduce anxiety, and design for people in crisis situations. Above all else, we should design so we don’t need to build sites like this.

    Eco-friendly design becomes even more important as our world becomes more connected. More than three billion people now use the internet. That’s a lot of people whose lives we can fuck up through laziness, neglect, or malicious intent.

    Mike Monteiro has given a great talk on this topic, entitled How Designers Destroyed the World:

    I had the privilege of seeing Monteiro present in person. His talk has made a lasting difference on how I think about our roles as architects of the web. The decisions we make can, and often do, have a huge impact on the lives of our users. It’s our responsibility to see that our impact is positive.

    Let’s leave the web a better place than when we found it.

    mel

    , ,

  • Becoming Great

    It’s easy to be average. But it‘s fucking hard to become great.

    – Nguyen Le, Being a great designer requires a lot of different skills

    I read this and laughed — not because it’s funny, per se, but because as someone who considers themselves an average designer, it’s very true.

    Here’s to slogging towards greatness. ?

    mel

  • Design Thinking at Smith College

    https://www.smith.edu/news/interterm-intro-to-design-thinking/

    The establishment of a “Design Thinking” initiative at Smith College is one of the most exciting pieces of news I’ve heard since graduating in 2010.

    While I was at Smith, there weren’t a lot of opportunities to get into design as I know it outside of connecting with particular staff and faculty members. I ended up forging my own path into design.

    By my junior year at Smith, I knew that I wanted to go into design. I got into web design as a kid, making HTML sites from scratch on Angelfire and Tripod. My first year at Smith, I worked as an assistant for a professor, and one of my tasks was designing and building her website. That led me to working with Aisha Gabriel in the Educational Technology Services department, who at the time was the “web” expert. She helped me surpass my rudimentary knowledge of web design by introducing me to writing my own CSS (versus using something like Dreamweaver and tweaking).

    I also was lucky enough to work closely with John Slepian, a digital design professor in the Art Department for both Smith and Hampshire. I took all of his digital media classes, and when I finished those, I worked with him to create a special studies focused around digital design with the goal of developing my design skills. It was a blast, and introduced me to new techniques and design methods that helped as stepping stones into my career.

    Before my senior year, I did a web design internship with a local agency which turned into a job, which turned into another job, which turned into my career after graduating. During my senior year, Smith created an Arts and Technology minor. The work I’d been doing with John, and the classes I’d been taking on web design, development, and digital art fit snuggly into it. I swapped over my art minor for arts & technology without reservations.

    I think the creation of an Arts & Technology minor was finally Smith conceding that the two departments, Art and Computer Science, can fit together wonderfully. The introduction of a Design Thinking J-Term workshop, and a subsequent semester course, is a bold step towards creating a future where design thinking is embraced by all fields. By creating the initiative, Smith College is making a strong statement about its commitment to creating strong women leaders who have the tools to not only pursue their dreams, but also improve the world through empathy and human-first design.

    I wish Design Thinking had been offered while I was at Smith, because it would have helped my professional development tremendously. Learning about user research, prototyping, and creative problem solving is an asset to any field. I would encourage any Smith student interested in building solutions that improve the lives of other people to check out the class, and all future Design Thinking initiatives.

    mel

    , , ,

  • Don’t try to be clever

    Don’t design to prove you’re clever. Design to make the user think she is.

    — Jeffrey Zeldman, The Year in Design

    You should read the whole article, but this last point really stuck because I often see people frustrated with themselves when something goes wrong on a site or app they’re using, as if the error was somehow their fault or caused by some personal shortcoming. Nope — it’s our fault! Sometimes it’s specifically my fault.

    The clever solution isn’t always the best.

    mel

  • Sketching with Sharpies

    I love sketching, but I always find sketching with pencils a little daunting; there’s this constant desire to go higher fidelity than I should when I’m starting a project. Maybe it’s because of art — I associate pencils and sketching with drawing, which I always approached as something polished. If I wanted to set myself free and do something gestural or sketchy, I always found conté or charcoal easier to let loose with. Pencils were a tool to create something I would eventually show off. (The fact that you can erase pencil probably plays a huge role reinforcing that belief.)

    Lately I’ve been trying something different. Instead of sketching with pencils, I’ve been using sharpies. (For a while I was carrying around a miniature whiteboard and markers, but that started feeling a little ridiculous.)

    Sharpies are great — they come in a variety of weights, they never look polished, and they are completely un-erasable. You can’t casually make sharpies look like anything other than sharpies. They are inelegant, imprecise, and easy to draw with. As long as you have a thick enough paper to draw on, sharpies are a great way to get ideas down without having to commit to anything. They eliminate that desire I have produce something polished. Sketching with sharpies has improved my design process.

    mel

    ,

  • Make the most of the options you have

    Life is a series of necessary restrictions, Iron Bull. The small-minded beat against every wall they find. The wise learn to make the most of the options they have.

    — Vivienne, Dragon Age: Inquisition

    Although this is a video game quote, I find it particularly relevant to design.

    mel

    ,

  • What I’m Reading This Week

    This week’s reading includes:

    Still to read this week:

    mel

    ,

  • Modern Design

      

    mel