Author
Dan Turner
Dan Turner is a semi-former journalist working now in the field of interaction and product design, most recently for PARC. Generally a generalist. He is a UC Berkeley masters graduate of the I School and has taught at SFSU. He’s also mentored at Code for America and many bike races.
Also from this author
Design to the data. That's the mantra of modern, research-driven web designers. But blindly accepting statistics and studies at face value is delusional at best, irresponsible at worst. Former journalist and current design specialist Dan Turner says be a skeptic. And don't let fear of math, or innumeracy, stop you from running the numbers. Unexamined data can lead to costly mistakes. (Hint: Tripling your page views doesn't mean much if you started with one visitor.)
Most of us would say we’re honest in our designs—but what if tiny deviations from the truth made a design easier for users? What if usability testing showed that fibs in an interface actually helped users accomplish their goals? How can we keep design decisions from turning deceptive? Dan Turner shares the lessons learned from a recent design problem, and proposes a potential framework for working ethically with false affordances.
