sarah marissa

In Heller’s book, Becoming a Digital Designer there was a chapter that dealt with the subject designing for growth. I personally do not know that much about digital design/designers. I was interested in learning more about digital design, and how it is expanding and growing in the world today.

Some interesting facts to consider in the world of digital design…Did you know that the average life of a Web site is forty-five days? (report commissioned by the Australian government) The Internet has made more information available to more people than any other technology in history. There are 11.5 billion Web pages, and everyday 7,300,000 new Web pages are published. (facts taken from Heller , 60) There was a quote by Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, which said, “with the explosion of the Internet we live in a digital dark age.” So many sites are there one minute and gone the next.

Heller discussed that digital designers responsibilities are to anticipate, accommodate, and encourage change. You can have a well-designed system, but your system needs to be able to keep up with the demands of the project and/or business. Heller talks about how clients and designers get excited by the possibilities offered by technology. Everyone wants the best and the latest thing. But like Heller mentioned, “it is easier to add content and sections then to remove them, so don’t design a system that requires updating unless you’re sure there will be time and resources to maintain it.” Therefore, consider how much time something is going to take, and don’t underestimate.

There was a section that discussed how blogs could be bad if not updated. Sometimes people don’t have the time to maintain them, however, it can be annoying when they are not maintained. I hate when you get on a site and their blog has not been updated in months. I can relate to this because I used to work for a company who did this. They had a section that dealt with latest news and events. Well they never updated it! How does that help anyone! Can anyone relate?

Within the chapter there was a section called, The Good Way versus the Good Enough Way. He posed the question of, “What if you want your system to evolve?” Well that is where the good way and the good enough way comes into play. The good way is where you go out and study your target audience, come up with a range of choices, and then test them, select the best choice, and test it again. Companies who use this approach are IBM, and Yahoo. If you are going to change something you want to know how it is going to affect your users. People need to be able to find exactly what they are looking for.

The good enough way is to build something, watch people use it, and then fix what seems to not be working properly. Heller talked about the drawbacks and advantages to this approach. A drawback would be that you could possibly lose your audience if they don’t like what they see because your site is always changing. Which can be confusing to users who visit your site often. I personally find it rather annoying when you visit a site that constantly changes to the point where it takes you awhile to navigate through it until you find what you are looking for. An advantage to the good enough way that Heller discussed was, “It is extremely fast, and, in a world where attracting attention is crucial to success, being first is often more important than being perfect.”

There was a section within the chapter called, Getting it Together. I thought this section brought up some good points. This section talks about effective collaboration. Effective collaboration meaning learning how to interact with others – “when to go with the flow and when to dig in your heels, and how to bring someone around to your point of view.”

Heller mentions how this is an essential tool to have. Do you think working and collaborating with a lot of people is effective, or do you think working in smaller groups or perhaps individually is better?

There was a case study at the end that involved the client daylife.com. There were two main points that I took away from the study. The two points were have a passion for developing new ways of seeing and understanding in a visual context, and the importance of trying different ways of approaching a concept or idea, and then seeing which is a more effective approach to the design you are making.

I hope this posts gets your thinking about things you may have never considered.