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What's your source of realistic mobile UI inspiration, not just dribbblesque rubbish?

5 years ago from Piotr Zięba, Product Designer at Vivy

  • Arturo Rios Gutierrez, 5 years ago

    Observe your users, what apps do they use? What are their mental models? And then come up with a hypothesis. Test your hypothesis. Rinse and repeat. That's it.

    2 points
    • anthony barbato, 5 years ago

      he literally wanted places for inspiration, you missed the point completely. User testing is 100% separate from looking at how other individuals and companies solved problems.

      8 points
      • Arturo Rios Gutierrez, 5 years ago

        "Inspiration is for amateurs - the rest of us just show up and get to work" - Chuck Close. If you did your homework, you should have figured out the mental models of your users (through user interviews, contextual inquiries, user testing of your competition's product) and then address the technical constraints of the platform, in this case iOS and Android, with pretty documented guidelines. That gives you a lot of room for ideation. I am not against looking at other individuals and companies work, but no problem/users are the same. And I wouldn't say that Dribbble is a good place to looking at how others solved problems. How do you know they were solved?

        1 point
        • barry saundersbarry saunders, almost 5 years ago

          That Chuck Close quote is about waiting to be inspired before beginning to work, not about doing research.

          2 points
          • Arturo Rios Gutierrez, almost 5 years ago

            Interesting! What is the difference between looking for places for inspiration and waiting to be inspired? Possibly one is active and the other is passive. Both of them are accomplished when you reach inspiration. I don't believe in inspiration. I believe in well-conducted research, and translating that research into actionable insights, which inform my design decisions, which I test to validate my assumptions. If there is any "source of inspiration" that can serve as a shortcut to this process do let me know. Thanks!

            0 points
            • barry saundersbarry saunders, almost 5 years ago

              I guess my question would be, what do you consider 'research'? Does that include understanding what kinds of interfaces people like and are familiar with?

              0 points
              • Arturo Rios Gutierrez, almost 5 years ago

                Absolutely. I think that might be (part of the) research. The problem is that a lot of designers start looking for "inspiration" on Pinterest, Behance, Medium, Dribbble, before actually knowing what are their research questions, and the behaviors they want to encourage through the solution. Laura Klein has a fantastic book called "Design Better Products" which shows how to decide your research efforts. Joe Leech also speaks about procedural knowledge vs declarative knowledge https://youtu.be/mxzK4sWfvH8?t=16m48s

                I appreciate a lot your replies. Thanks Barry!

                0 points