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Articles by Emanuela Cozzi
Designing for the Unexpected
I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented? Article Continues Below Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design#section2 When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Getting Feedback
“Any comment?” is probably one of the worst ways to ask for feedback. It’s vague and open ended, and it doesn’t provide any indication of what we’re looking for. Getting good feedback starts earlier than we might expect: it starts with the request. Article Continues Below It might seem counterintuitive to start the process of receiving feedback with a question, but that makes sense if we realize that getting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research.
Asynchronous Design Critique: Giving Feedback
Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most effective soft skills that we have at our disposal to collaboratively get our designs to a better place while growing our own skills and perspectives. Article Continues Below Feedback is also one of the most underestimated tools, and often by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved.
Reclaiming Social: Content Strategy for Social Media
“We want to go viral!” says the chief communications officer. “Can’t help you” used to be our standard answer. But by doing this, we’ve left social media in the hands of marketers and self-appointed “gurus” more concerned with Klout than user needs. It’s about time we reclaimed social media. Article Continues Below If the web industry had a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, social platforms would be at the very top—the least essential thing.
The Nearly-Headless CMS
If you’ve been paying attention to the CMS scene lately, you’ve probably heard the terms “headless” and “decoupled.” These terms describe websites and applications where the CMS is not used to render the actual site or application. For instance, it could be a website where the front-end is a JavaScript framework like AngularJS or React, and the CMS supplies the content via a JSON API.
Privacy is UX
Government snooping. Identity theft. Sale of personal data. Privacy is out there in a big way. But it’s not in here, meaning on most product development teams. Article Continues Below I’m a member of those teams, as an experience designer with a foot in strategy and user research. I’m also a longtime public radio reporter (tech was a big topic of mine), so curiosity is my strong suit. I noticed that, at the agencies and tech companies I’ve worked for, privacy never seemed to be discussed much.
Content-First Design
Article Continues Below A few years ago, I started getting into video games like Katamari, Animal Crossing, and Borderlands 2. Their designs are astounding; each feels like I’m having a natural conversation with the game, and each introduces content in the moment I needed it. As a result, the game experience feels so dang smart, and I feel like a hero whenever I play. Here’s an example from the very first minute of Animal Crossing. All you’ve done is started a new game.
80/20 Practitioners Make Better Communicators
I spent the better part of 2014 working on two redesigns: one for a major pizza chain, the other for a major bike retailer. The five of us working on the redesigns were excited beyond words—two large-scale sites about two things we loved: pizza and bikes! We all wanted to be heavily involved in every phase of these projects to ensure their success. Along the way, we learned important lessons about how to fine-tune that involvement to arrive at a better outcome.
Brevity vs. Clarity
Article Continues Below A few months ago, my good friend, Olivier Lacan, tweeted: Why do CSS author seem to agree that “btn” stands for button while “large” doesn’t need “lrg”? Stop abbreviating because others do it. — Olivier Lacan (@olivierlacan) September 6, 2014 He rightly points out that a lot of commonly-accepted abbreviations exist only because a critical mass of people use them.
Thoughtful Modularity
Article Continues Below I spent most of the first week of December down at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Orion, NASA’s next-generation spacecraft. As part of NASA Social, I was lucky enough to get some behind-the-scenes tours, and to talk with scientists, engineers, astronauts, and even the Administrator himself.
The Implicit Contract
I work with lots of different teams and different developers. I usually know innately, as does the team around me, whether the teams we’re working with are good or not. We rarely disagree on the evaluation. Article Continues Below But what does good mean? I find that the most valuable web developers interact with each other along a kind of implicit contract, the tenets of which are based upon web standards and proven ways of doing things that we’ve cobbled together collectively over the years.
Let Them Eat Cake
There has been a growing debate lately that pits accessibility against usability, but there’s no reason we can’t have both. If you can make a page more usable without making it less accessible, by all means do so; do not let your inability to translate certain usability enhancements into accessible functions or features restrict your use of those enhancements. As long as the enhancements do not restrict accessibility, go for it.
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