What makes a great interaction design blog? Do people understand what we do? How do we write better? Do designers or clients care about our topics? What's our focus?
These are questions we asked ourselves as we looked over our writing from the past year. After an internal review, we decided to narrow the focus of our blog to seven topics. We believe our writing will improve by focusing on just a handful of concepts and allow our design experience to shine through the massive amounts of web clutter. We'll be adding an eighth topic in the coming months as we document the development and release of our debut product.
Here is a list of the topics:
Topics Defined
We went through a few iterations before narrowing the topics. Below is a table of the notes we created over IM and Google Docs in the past year. The list isn't perfect, but it's a great tool for challenging our ideas and helping us stay on target (the table was exported from Google Docs, so it might be wonky in some browsers). Let us know if we're veering off our goals!
| Topic | Reader |
Sub Topics |
Our Content |
| Design Strategy |
Founders Entrepreneurs Start-ups Design Strategists Design Managers |
Strategy Use Cases Service Strategies Product Positioning User Needs Selling Design Analytics Web Audit Marketing Influences |
'Before they got big' stories. Failing smart. When to open up, when to narrow down. Hiring and team culture. How does our advice at the center of design thinking contrast or compliment what entrepreneurs hear from VCs? |
| Interaction Design |
Product Managers Project Managers Designers Interactive Designers Developers |
Methods Design Decisions Functions Content Interfaces Architecture Sketching |
Successful UI decisions we've made, 'How To' examples. Specific examples of best practices around the execution of a UI concept. This showcases our core skills with asking, sketching, peer review and presentation. How do you break down a problem and sketch a solution when you suck at drawing? |
| Implementation |
Designers Developers |
Implementing Design Tools Coding Tips Visual Design CSS Tricks Color |
Execution at the code (XHTML/CSS, PHP, Rails), visual design, maintenance and integration level. Don't separate them into design and code, keep it tight as one category. Front end designers love executing great thinking and visual design into the code. Mm, validation, savvy trickery, and SEO friendliness. Developers will love the info about integrating design work into what they do. This is often a headache. Craft, attention to detail, people who excel at this, instinct, natural, passion for design. |
| Business & Startups |
Founders Entrepreneurs Startups VPs Product Managers Freelancers |
Business Examples Start-up Concepts New Products |
Lessons learned working with 75 startups. ZURB has unique expertise in this area. How do you get scrappy and get something done? How do you apply design to solving a business problem and not just a user problem? |
|
Sparks |
Touchy Feel-y Types Writers Clients Designers Web Developers Freelancers Founders |
Fired Up! Pleasant Surprises Friday 15 3 Minute Lessons Book Reviews ZURBwords Funny Videos Great Links |
Inspiration from the team, visual wow, bursts of creativity. The youtube videos of the charcoal animation and IDEO resume are great examples of this in action. Colorful, cranky observations about odd product design, customer service, etc. Redesigns could go here. What's awesome is taking a bad experience worth complaining about and turning it into something useful that shows our thinking. Example: The MBP flip top compared to Vaio's implementation. Yum v. yuck. |
| ZURB |
Clients Talent ZURB News Press |
ZURB News New Hires Inside ZURB ZURBwired Lecture Series Newsletter Mentions |
Examples of things going on at ZURB- people tend to like seeing the "inside" |
| Happy Clients |
Clients Prospective Clients Talent Press |
Client News Case Studies Client Wins New Clients Press Releases |
The story behind our work- a conversational approach to a case study. Broad views of our work.. Cool things happening with our clients. |
|
The Product |
Customers Clients Designers Press Product Managers Project Managers Startups |
Features Case Studies User Stories Bug Fixes Releases |
Eventually this might move into it's own blog, but it's great to leverage the main blog to drive traffic. This should highlight real world examples where we had a problem and then applied it to our solution. |