TED Talk: How Giant Websites Design for You + Take-Aways

I came across this great TED Talk on design by Margaret Gould Stewart, Director of Product Design at Facebook.

This talk covers several interesting design stories. Find out the following answers by watching the video:

  • The designer at Facebook invested about 280 hours to update the Facebook “Like” button from Facebook Like Button Old toFacebook Like Button New. Why was that?
  • When the YouTube team decided to change their start rating system to Like/Dislke buttons, they encountered big obstacles from the community, how did they solve this issue?
  • The Facebook team made great improvements around the “report” photo feature by touching on the users’ emotional aspects, how did they do that?

I think everyone can get valuable take-aways from this talk —

For you, me, everyone out there in this world who use things in their daily lives: we can get very efficient at using bad designs. It’s not right. We can be more picky, and that desire will drive more better designs.

For all the designers:

  • Design is detailed. We need to get tiny things right, because those people who use our products count on us.
  • Design is a combination of art and science. Use a data-driven approach in our design process, so that we can know better about our users, and how they interact with our products.
  • Design is changing. Nothing can last forever, at some point our designs will fade away, but we should be very proud to be part of something that may just change the world.

 

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