My favorite thing to do is to watch a person use their phone. Sometimes, without thinking, I’ll catch myself fully leaning into my friends to watch as they swipe and tap. I’ve always found the numerous ways that we can interact with them fascinating. The way we are each given the same piece of lego blocks and decide how to play with them.
In product design there’s a formal practice for this called User Testing. It occurs in an interview-like setting where you literally just watch someone use the new software that you are building. It’s my favorite thing to do as a designer because instantly you learn the ways in which your design succeeds and fails. Workflows that you found helpful and streamlined are revealed to be clunky and hard to navigate and the experience of seeing someone use the thing you’ve been laboring over is exhilarating.
At work I’ve been conducting these interviews to gather feedback on a new tool we are building. But I also was able to have an informal “session” the other week with my partner. They were using my website and I started to secretly observe them. The way I had naturally been navigating the site turned out to be different from how the average person might use it, and watching them click from page to page prompted me to rethink it’s design.
The result is a small redesign of the homepage and shuffling of how the information is laid out. Where before I wanted to section off each discipline into its own page, I’ve now decided to just link to everything table of contents style. And yes, I did all this as a form of ✧・゚: *✧・゚:* ~ procrastination ~ *:・゚✧*:・゚✧ for a bigger project that I should’ve been working on. Enjoy!
Elsewhere…
A new semester is starting! I’m teaching Generative Typography at Cooper again this Spring and also a new course called Animating Variable Type with Code.
Inputs
Air Gear (This was my fav manga growing up. I’ve thought of this single page so many times since I first read it as a teenager.)
I did a mail swap with the folks at Anemone. I truly love their practice and every dispatch they send is a must-read as soon as it lands in my inbox. They sent me a Long Calendar and a copy of their Climate Emergency Reading Recs zine. In return I dropped some of my Risograph prints in the mail.
Outputs
I gave you a new website to browse. Isn’t that enough?
-mello
P.S. - In the spirit of keeping the mail flowing, reply to this newsletter with your mailing address and I’ll mail you a pen plotter postcard print
P.P.S. -