Few days back I got an email from Steven Walker – Product Design Manager at Groupon – asking about working with Groupon. After Google, AOL and Intel this was another thrilling offer but it didn’t work out because of single simple reason: relocation. While I prefer working from home, these great companies need people sitting together working on great ideas. Let’s see how it goes in future, but thanks for considering me, Groupon.

A generalized definition of minimalism could be when something, an object or idea, is stripped down to its essential elements. In minimalistic art in the 1960s, furniture and objects were stripped down to the elements that made them structurally sound. These were parts which defined the furniture and was translated into different objects and structure oriented art. Living minimalistically is similar in the ideas of focusing on the elements that are what define us and re-evaluating what is important. Our job as designers is the same. Our job is to craft, refine, and communicate the message of our clients through design, regardless if it is in a minimalist or maximalist style. There should be no erroneous design elements that take away from the focus of your project or message.

This comment from Nate Eagle digs even deeper:

Minimalism comes from the idea that design should eschew elements that are merely decorative rather than functional. Because you jettison all the decoration, you’re forced to hone and optimize the fundamental machinery of a design, and you’re right to point to grids and typography as essential for that.

I think one of the reasons we like minimalism, in general, is that it helps improve these basic aspects of a design since there are no remaining tools for a designer to cover up or distract from a shaky foundation. Good minimalism is hard and involves a lot of work, but it’s work that’s likely to improve you as a designer.

So be careful when thinking about Minimalism, it’s not trend but a solid timeless design practice.

Once you’re dealing with an app that has a dozen screens and hundreds of states, you can’t hold the whole product in your head like a poster. I noticed that our team was emailing around individual screens, talking about individual screens, and naming all the screens just to keep track. But we weren’t paying any attention to how the screens and features fit together.

We were thinking of the product as a set of screens. But there’s a problem with working this way: it’s not at all how people experience the product in real life. People use products in little flows that last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

→ Read full article at The Design Staff

Ellen Lupton in Thinking with Type says:

The purpose of prime marks, or hatch marks, is to indicate inches and feet. Their use to mark quotation is a common blight across the typographic landscape.

Details Matter :)

Books I’ve read:

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After designing the mockups for PopSurvey player, I was thinking of presenting them to my team in some better way and the best way would be to present them on iPhone itself. To achieve that I saved the files in dropbox folder, named them (see screenshot #2) so each mockup appears after one another as they’d in real survey on sliding i.e. First survey intro, then questions and at last thanks slide. It worked great for testing and presenting and team liked it. Do you guys like it too? or you use some other better way?

Following are the screenshots of mockups taken in the iPhone dropbox app.

Yesterday while logging into the app. I encountered their sign in form and thought it could be little better.

Current Sign In Form at Readmill.com

Revised Sign In Form

It turns out that answering our support calls has been an incredibly productive experience as well as potentially a profit center. When customers call, not only am I in a great position to help them as I understand the product inside and out, but their questions and feedback are essentially a free focus group. We always have a list of improvements we need to make to the product, but sometimes prioritizing can be a crapshoot. Vocal customers tell me quickly which work items need to move to the top of the list. I can only imagine how many customers of ours experience the same frustration as these callers but don’t bother picking up the phone.

Why designers fail and what to do about it by Scott Berkun from Adaptive Path at MX 2009.