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Designing for Overcoming Information Overload

Industrial Design
Posted by DT
May 31, 2007
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Check out Hackzine’s video blog on how this (apparently famous in his field) blogger named Scoble reads 622 Feeds a day. It’s interesting to see in today’s internet environment, the deeply wired net surfer has to deal with the fact the blogs and post feeds have risen into the realm of information overload. If you don’t really know what a feed is it’s that orange cube and rectangle blue box on the right. You can get more information in my “What is RSS?” post.

“Verbal Design” (actually Copywriting) as I shall call it, can play an important role on getting people to cut through the junk and get to the good stuff. I see this is very similar with the struggles designers have when creating designs to stand out in our market place of visual form overload.

Take a look at any of your electronics chains K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Circuit City, or Best Buy and you are faced with row after rows of products that, at a glance, look the same. The few points Scoble brought up in this interview can also apply easily into the realm of design strategy. Here are some of his more salient points:

1) A header that attracts or is important to me: Read a good looking product design.
This is the acid test. No matter the BS a designer can spew about his/her design if its crap, I’m sorry its crap. We as designers have to be honest with ourselves first if not we can cheat the client, but honestly it will be our downfall.

2) Who it’s written by?: Read which brand is it made by, or anyone famous designed it?
The power of branding and a branded designer can give designs that extra edge it needs to beat out the competition.

3) Information I want to pass to my readership: Read know your target market and what appeals to them.
Similar to design of written text, knowing your target market well can help position your product design in a way that better appeals to that reader/buyer etc.

Do check it out the rest of the video to see the interesting similarities and how people adapt to filter out the junk that comes from information overload. This is great for blogging as well! Wow killed 2 birds with one stone today!

Via Weblogtools