Figure ground is a funny thing. In essence, it simply mean "forground and background" which should be pretty obvious to have. However, what its all about is how the forground and background of anything plays together, so that you as a designer can use the mechanics of this to your advange.

A lot of people think of figure ground as something that is only for visuals, but in reality, it is for everything that you design. So, sit down, and listen, learn and become smarter as we go through all of the things you should be aware of when designing and how to take advange of figure ground.

You will learn

• What Figure Ground is
• That figure ground is more than what the eye can see
• When do we learn it as humans
• Where can you use this when designing

This is the last episode of the season, but we are going to return in the fall with some brand new episodes.

Recently, I wanted a cup of coffee from a coffee machine. I put my cup roughly where I believed that the coffee would come out, I then pressed the coffee I wanted, and then waited.. and waited.. and waited.. then looked at the panel, and found out that it asked me "Are you sure you want coffee?" .. I clicked yes.. and 40 seconds later I had my coffee.

This is an example of poorly placed friction.

In this episode we are discussing the 3 categories of Friction

1. Interaction friction
2. Cognitive friction
3. Emotional friction

You wil learn what they are, and how to use them

Prototyping is the art of creating early models to test ideas, emotions, and processes. To make it easier we have split it into three main types:

1. Bassive prototypes (like mood boards or soundscapes),
2. Business prototypes (minimum viable products for market testing)
3. Interactive prototypes (hands-on user interactions).

On of the main benefits of Prototypes testing, is that you get earyl understanding and you can iterate and refine concepts before committing resources. Overall making the whole thing a bit cheaper to develop.

We also talk about seeking truth in feedback, where one easy method is asking what to change and why.

Data collected through prototyping becomes valuable only when analyzed and understood.

Prototypes save time, validate ideas, and turn creative concepts into polished, functional designs.

In this episode you will learn

• What a prototype is, and what different flavours they come in
• When and what to use prototypes on
• How to listen to feedback and understand
• How to collect and use data

Resources

The lean startup - Eric Ries (yep, I looked it up :) )

How to win friends and influence people - Dale Carnegie

The worlds WORST Chewbacca sound effect is in this episode.

If you never heard about Diegetic and Non-Diegetic sound effect, you are not alone, but after listening to this episode, you will know what it is. And you will know how bad Thorbjørn is at saying.. Dialec.. Diaga.. Diegetic!

We are going through movies, games and a lot of other things in this episode, and applying the knowledge that Martin is giving us.

You will learn

What a a sound effect is, different types

Why use sfx? What is the benefits?

SFX in the context of design - how we get there

Emotion

References

The Gunfighter

I Hate Fairyland - Comic Book

How to Sound Design Your Life

A composer is a person that decides how you should feel, and then, makes you feel that. Sounds familiar? In this episode we are doing something that we dont do often, interview a person, and this person is Michael Coltham a composer whos box, is bigger than Martins!

Michael tells us all about how he works as a composer, what the process of creating a new composition is, which is not unlike Design Thinking, and how the itterative process of creating a new piece.

In this episode we get all around the topic from music to support your brand, music for film, Dynamic music for games and the list goes on. I promise that there is a lot of learning for you in this episode of Hidden By Design.

In this episode, you will learn

• What a composer is

• Why should you use music in your production
• Music in context of design

Resources

If you want to get a hold of Michael, here is how you do this

Black Lab Music - website: https://www.blacklabmusic.co.uk/

Here's his Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5T664fmEeBDgjy6BbfXYJd?si=c_0LzxN9T0eDOoXCjdXAcg

You can find and follow Michael Coltham on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcoltham/

"This is Dave's printers. I'm not here at the minute. Please phone me back, see you later."

If you want to hear Martin fail at making an example of a bad voiceover, this is the episode. Even trying to do a bad job, he does great!

In this episode, we are learning what voiceover is, and how it is VERY much design, the preperation, the understanding and the performance. In this episode, which is the first of a 3 part miniseries about Audio, we dive into voice over, what it is, and how it ties to Design.

A voice actor is designing the appropriate piece of voiceover for the context it will be used in, the audience that its for and the effect we want it to have.

Also, if you listen closely, you will hear, that I am not following Martins advice of drinking enough water, so my voice becomes more and more dry in the episode.

You will learn

• What voiceover is and genres of voiceover
• Why use voiceover / benefits
• VO in the context of design - how we get there
• Emotion

Resources

Emotional Design

How emotions makes you do

Identifying Bad Designs

What is a problem statement really, and is it really nessecary? (Yes it is ;) )

"Job to be done" is a tool to help you really understand the problem and stay focused on the problem rather than on the solution.

Thinking of the good old phrase "Fall in love with the problem, not the solution", job to be done is here to help you keep your love for the problem strong.

This episode is the first episode where we take a specific tool for doing and understanding design and investigate and try to explain it. The jobs to be done tool, have 3 elements

1. Its stable, and does not change over time.
2. It have no geographical boundaries.
3. It is solution agnostic.

Anyways, listen to the episode, where we explain what this actually means.

Resources

The free book - Job to be done

Episode about Intuitive Design

Postels law, also known as the "Robustness principle" originally comes from the development and ideas of how the internet should be designed. The TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) was designed with the following sentence as a central point "be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others".

How is this related to design you might ask? Well, really simple, because this can be directly applied to how you should think about design. Think about an input field and how it should be conservative in what it shows.

There should be a field, there should be a small explanation on what is expected in the field (email), and an example in the field helping the user (example@email.com) This should make sure that the user have a clear understanding of what is expected, and the context of the situation. However, once the user starts using it, the input field should accept that the user might make some mistakes. This could be the situation where the user is copy/pasting the email from another loaction, and there is a space at the end of the email. There is no emails that end with a space, (or starts with a space) but instead of just throwing an error in the direction of the user, we should silently understand that the space is not a valid charater and remove it, and handle the situation without bothering the user.

And this does not only apply to UI design, which is often used as an example on where to use this, but also when you are working with UX.

Here we are back to the basics that we talked about in the episode "What is Design" where we talked about the importance of understanding that the actor (our user) makes decisions in an environment (the context) and that we have to design our solution (object) in a way that caters for that. In the end, we know what we want the user to do, but we accept that there is a high chance that they will do something different (and something that could be considered an error) and we have to help them recover from these actions.

Give this episode a listen, its good !

You will learn

• Who Jon Postel is
• What Postels law is
• How to apply Postels law

References

Die Antwoord

Nudging

What is design