Design Insights #28 - Secret Menu from AirBnB, The past, present and future in a design prototype and more...

All over the world, the importance of click-through prototypes for building better and realistic interactive prototypes is growing and becoming more and more popular amongst UI and UX designers. Click through prototypes allow everyone to think through complex flows without having to deal with layers of code. This is why this trend is popular amongst designers, entrepreneurs, start-ups and even brands in order to improve their web and mobile apps. Thus, interactive prototyping and design collaboration tools are nowadays all the hype and this trend is here to stay.

A drawing is worth more than a thousand words and a good political drawing tells a whole story.

A design prototype also addresses a problem for an organization. It reframes the problem by shining a new light on the challenge at hand. It makes the stakeholders look at the problem in a new way.

Each time a product team begins a new project, the list of things to do can be overwhelming. A strong design process can create structure, efficiency, and a clear path to completion.

A crucial moment during the design discovery is not to be restricted by limitations. Each limitation will have a negative impact on creativity – it will prevent genuinely innovative products. Only when you free your mind, you can come up with a genuinely creative design decision.

The goal during the discovery stage is to connect the information from both discovery processes together and create a robust product design direction. After both teams finalise their activities, they should meet and discuss their design decisions. This is the moment to merge the design decisions and establish a solid direction for design. It’s vital to stress a few important moments:

Today’s internet is bland. Everything looks the same: generic fonts, no layouts to speak of, and an absence of expressive visuals. So I asked my students to redesign it, and here’s what they created.

One of the fundamental principles of design is a deep and meaningful connection between form and content; form should both reflect and shape content. Separating them breaks this principle and creates generic content containers. In a design sense, templates are meaningless; the form adds nothing to the content.

Offline, experiential moments are at the heart of Airbnb. They’re how we erase barriers, experience new cultures, and form meaningful connections. Each spring, professionals with a passion for design and writing gather at the Confab conference in Minneapolis—a city known for its love of the arts—to discuss best practices and content trends, and to learn from one another’s diverse perspectives.

The reasons for the deficiencies in human-machine interaction are numerous. Some come from limitations in resources, some come from self-imposed limitations. But most of them come from the lie we tell ourselves that people are logical animals. We have to accept human behaviour the way it is and not the way we want it to be. So we have to design products that mirror our thinking model.