Meta Refresh 2013

To show how designers can evolve by basing their design decisions on the most basic forms of ideas — philosophies.

Outline

Consider this common scenario: You’re designing a product and you need some input from the user. The journey date for a travel booking website, perhaps. You might arrive at a solution by considering: common date entry techniques on the web (HTML date <input>, Javascript date pickers etc.), factors that have a strong correlation with the project’s context (e.g. range of valid dates for bookings) and any constrains imposed by the environment (e.g. device capabilities).

An alternate, bottom-up approach might be to reason out a solution on the basis of beliefs such as: every point of input slows the interface; can we avoid an explicit decision from the user? Be liberal while accepting inputs; are we too strict? Simple trumps complex; can we use a native <select> dropdown instead of a Javascript date picker?

With this talk, I hope to show how we can use such philosophies as a foundation for bottom-up decision making — a foundation that spans across projects and addresses design’s uncertainty head-on. And finally, to show how this foundation can evolve organically and encourage progress.

Speaker bio

I have been building web stuff for the last seven years and like most peers in this field, I am largely self–taught. I spend a lot of time pondering about design and the web, and more recently, about the connections (and peculiarities) between everything around us.

These days I design websites at (and help run) Miranj.

Links

• http://prateekrungta.com/
• http://twitter.com/rungta