UI – Say Yeah!

FITC Spotlight UX: July 9th, 2020

Kate Matesic — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 21:05:01 +0000

FITC’s Spotlight events are back in an all-new virtual format. July 9 brings us Spotlight UX, with talks focused on best practices for user experience design and product strategy.

Traditionally an in-person event, bringing together a group of passionate designers in one spot, this year, the conference will be taking place online on July 9th, from 1 PM to 5:30 PM EST.

The online conference will feature the same quality of great UX content we know and love from previous FITC Spotlight UX events.

There’s something for every UX professional in this lineup.

We’re excited to hear from the great speakers who will be giving talks at the event, including:

Jared Spool, Center Center
Scott Jenson, Google
Catt Small, Asana
Kate Moran, Nielsen Norman Group
Jessica Moon, Adobe

Spotlight UX is sure to be jam-packed with insights for product and UX designers to expand their skill set, all from some of the best-known designers in the field.

We encourage you to take this excellent opportunity to learn from these designers and grab a ticket to the event!

View the full conference schedule here.

Save 50% with discount code mediatemple and catch this event for just $20.

Get tickets

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to level up your product strategy and experience design methodologies and execution, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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FITC Spotlight Recap: strategies to boost your UX practice

Kate Matesic — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 14:00:25 +0000

June 2019 represented the most recent FITC Spotlight: UX/UI, held at Toronto’s Telus Tower.

With FITC Toronto scheduled for this week, April 19-21, 2020, but cancelled as a result of social distancing measures, it seems like a great time to share this wonderful content from last year and wish the FITC team well during this difficult time.

The most recent FITC Spotlight: UX/UI focused on strategies to boost your UX practice, as well as a number of design methodologies.

The Say Yeah team immersed themselves in the conference programming and had the chance to connect with several of the speakers. Here are some of our highlights.

In conversation with design leaders

We had the distinct pleasure of being able to dive deeper with some of the great speakers from Spotlight UX/UI. Here’s our audio recap and transcript in conversation with Ha Phan and Haley Hughes.

Catch Ha’s take on using AI in digital products and Hayley’s approach to bringing emerging tech to her design practice, with further discussion from both Ha and Hayley on experimentation and prototyping, and on being a woman in the design industry.

Your browser does not support the audio element. Please read the transcript below

Transcript

Lee Dale:

Welcome. You’re listening to Say Yeah’s digital disruptors podcast. We’re here at FITC spotlight UX UI, I’m Lee.

Kate Matesic:

And I’m Kate.

Lee Dale:

Now, if you don’t know FITC Spotlight is an annual best practices and upskilling content series, covering topics like coating, VR design ethics, and UX UI. Every year, Spotlight UX brings global leaders and interaction and experience design to Toronto. This conference is known for really challenging attendees to step up their game, both creatively and professionally.

Kate Matesic:

It’s like our annual checkup that urges us to rethink what’s happening in our field, and how we can show up better. Through conversations with peers and design leaders, attendees were encouraged to think about the impact they can have as a UX UI designer. We were so inspired by this year’s speakers. They covered everything from design systems thinking to iteration to micro animations in interesting new ways.

Lee Dale:

Today we’ve got some killer insights to share from two of our favorite FITC spotlight speakers. You’ll hear from Hayley Hughes, UX Manager at Shopify, and Ha Phan, Senior Product Manager at Pluralsight. They’ve got solid things to say about design practices and wicked smart advice for women in our industry.

Kate Matesic:

Here’s Ha’s take on using AI and digital products. For her. It’s more about the data you’re working with and about working within limitations, which combined to make a strong AI product. When people think that they’re building products with AI. They think that there’s something magical about it.

Ha Phan:

The key thing to building a good AI product is really understanding how to collect data. It’s kind of like a it’s kind of like a toddler who you teach to do one task, and it doesn’t know how so then you basically have to collect all the right data so that over time the toddler gets better and better and better to do that one task.

So for me, building a product isn’t about anything complex, but really understanding how you roadmap data collection. And then what is it that you’re trying to do with the data? And I think it’s a really hard thing to teach people. And I don’t think you can teach it unless you have lived through one of those experiences, know what questions to ask and how you might frame the experiment to kind of figure out how you want to use AI and how to improve it. It’s basically about having the right data and data collection.

Kate Matesic:

Now let’s hear from Hayley who’s really discerning when it comes to bringing emerging tech to her design practice.

Hayley Hughes:

With a lot of emerging technologies at my disposal. I think that the way that it’s influenced how I design has to do more with the kinds of questions that I have to ask as a designer, there’s a lot of complexity when new platforms and new tech hardware,new environments come into play. And so, as a systems designer, a lot of the questions I have are what do these new technologies have in common? How do they serve people? Not the other way around. And how can we better integrate them into our lives.

And so, you know, trying to best understand when they’re appropriate, and when, you know, a certain kind of technology might not be desirable, becomes, you know, kind of a scenario based way of designing as opposed to in the past, I think it was more artifact based. So you have to design this poster or create this book. And, you know, in that way, it’s a kind of one to one experience with a reader or a visitor at a museum and now it’s oftentimes a multi dimensional space with many, many people involved.

Lee Dale:

One of the cool overlapping opinions we discovered is a shared love of experimentation. For both Han Haley experimentation helps them create better products and more fully understand the problem space. They’re working in products that reflect a stronger understanding of users and a clear vision of the problem they’re solving. Let’s hear from her on an essential skill, building experiments to test and continually improve your digital products.

Ha Phan:

Like I feel like building a product is not like making a cake doesn’t mean that you’re gonna go through all these process and in the end there’s a cake. The method depends on the question you’re asking. So I work in search, and search, use, not a thing where if you just build the UI works, you have to work a long time on the relevance engine.

So basically, so basically,for our team, the first goal for us was to figure out like, what is the baseline for relevance? That makes sense, right? So the goals are really important because then they create a benchmark that you can stand on an issue, okay? Next, you can improve it and you can iterate on it. But understanding the goals and why you’re doing it is important.

So we both have qualitative methods where we understand the user motivation. And then we carry that hypothesis out to all the way through to quantitative. So we know that when users are using search online, there are real metrics that measure success. It’s not just qualitative, but being able to carry that hypothesis all the way through the quantitative. I think, understanding how to build experiments and to design experiments make you stronger, as a designer and as Product Manager.

If you don’t know how to build the experiment, you don’t, you haven’t really understood the problem you’re solving and you can’t isolate the assumption that you’re trying to test. So for me, if someone works in technology, and can’t design the experiment, then I would question if they understood the problem at all.

Kate Matesic:

Hayley reminded us that early prototyping is just as important as late stage product experiments. Here’s how she uses play in her design practice.

Hayley Hughes:

I’m always experimenting. As a designer.I think one of the kind of first principles is to, you know, continually hypothesize and to come up with new theories for how, you know, things can work in the future. And so, for me, experimentation, and prototyping and iteration come into play in really low fidelity. I work a lot in paper prototypes and things that are maybe less focused on shifting to test, A B test, and more so experimenting at a much earlier stage in the process where I can bring people in and they can give me feedback on the ideas that I have before I even bring them to the screen.

Lee Dale:

We wanted to ask Hayley and Ha their honest opinion on working in a male-dominated industry. They offered us tips on how to stay confident, and how to embrace one’s identity as a member of an underrepresented group.

Ha Phan:

At our company, we actually have goals and outcomes that are directly tied to diversity. You hear a lot of tech companies saying, Oh, yeah, they’re inclusive or diverse. But at the end of the day, the numbers still are the same. At the end of the day, they still have a really low percentage of minorities or women working in the workforce, right? at our company, we actually have a true measurable outcome to kind of like go beyond what the regular finals are, and try to like recruit women and minorities into you know, into all the different roles and also in the leadership roles also. So it’s not just the individual contributor but also senior management.

From my perspective, my team is composed of people who are really young And I’m really old. And when we have one lead engineer who’s you know, who’s not the 20 or 30-year-old engineer. And I think that that creates like a healthy balance. Everybody’s equal, and everybody’s super honest.

I grew up with three brothers, so I know how to take the punches. But, but I think that having a broad perspective like that, it’s like you, you have this check and balance that’s natural, and you automatically over time build trust, and you automatically you know, empathize with other people who are not like you. So in my team, we already work that way.

Kate Matesic:

Ha and Hayley had more great advice. Here’s how they stay inspired and keep growing as designers

Hayley encourages Junior designers to find role models

Hayley Hughes:

For aspiring designers and early career professionals in the field, one thing that I would always encourage is because you’re coming at it with fresh eyes, and

you have the beginner’s mindset, never to lose that. And always to ask for forgiveness, not permission to try things out. Because when you’re just getting started, there’s a lot of things you may not know. And you can use that to your advantage to feel able to ask people questions because they expect that of you. So keep growing, never stop asking questions and always speak up

Kate Matesic:

And Ha Phan speaks about her own mentorship experience with extra advice about battling self doubt.

Ha Phan:

So I come from a family that, that we’re first-generation immigrants, and so you come up

You built, you grew up with the idea that you are the are displaced. So you kind of so you already come to the table thinking that you have to compensate, overcompensate. So, the so I think that that’s a default I have is that it doesn’t matter. I already know that I don’t fit apart, I already know that I’m displaced. So I just have to work harder than everyone else.

I told people at my company that I feel like I have to work harder than other people. Because I don’t fit the I don’t fit apart because in most of my jobs, I’m always working on the latest technology. I’m always on the team. There are no women, like no women at all, like within like, like on the r&d team at GoPro with our men at the startup was all men.

I didn’t feel uncomfortable about that. I just felt like I was invited to the table but I didn’t belong.So I didn’t feel bad about it. I just thought that the way the world works, right? So I think that because we don’t see a lot of women or minorities in certain roles.The default is that we automatically build a bias, even women themselves, we already have, we automatically have a bias that

that person doesn’t fit the role of that person needs to prove himself. Like if you had another person who we can have a mental model that fits the role. We gave them the benefit of the doubt, but the other person who didn’t fit the role, we have to prove themselves. So I always feel like I have to prove myself. And it’s consistent. Even the people who say, yes, you know, we, we support diversity, but there’s a built in bias that there’s still something I have to overcome.

So that’s consistent in my career.I haven’t I have not been resentful of where I kind of it feels to me likelike icing on the cake, kind of like an invite to the table, I get to do really cool things. And by overcoming it, I became a better person.I learned a lot more, I’m more self aware than most people. So I just use it to my advantage. So my advice to young woman is to,you know, learn as much as you can.

You know, you can’t really become someone overnight. You can’t grow up overnight. So you just have to take your time and learn as much as you can reflect a lot.And then so that when the time comes, and when you’re ready, you can, you know, basically take advantage of the opportunities that come your way.The one thing that my mentor used to tell me when I am in doubt, he says, if not you then who? Then, if you if you answer the question by saying there’s 1000 other people who will do that

Then you realize where you are, and you got to work harder. If you realize that everybody else, no one can do the job, even you, then maybe you still want to do it because no one else can do it, either. And if you what you answered by saying, Yeah, I think that I’m the best day that they got, then you own it. And when by answering that question, you own it. So that’s the question I always ask myself when I’m in doubt, and that’s the advice I would give. Not every not just young woman, but anyway,

Lee Dale:

We hope you enjoyed our digital disruptors episode from FITC spotlight UX/UI. Be sure to check out the Digital Insights section at sayyeah.com for more event recaps, videos and podcasts.

And here are some additional highlights from the talks.

Unlocking systems thinking: moving beyond components

The first speaker of the day, AirBnB’s Experience Design Lead for the Design Language System, Haley Hughes, spoke about the importance of integrated, value-driven design systems.

Rather than using a single design system, which would be defined by components (e.g. buttons, icons), Hughes suggests developing a more ambitious, all-encompassing, broad system. Her more holistic approach governs all the values-based decisions of the designers.

Hughes described how she nudged the AirBnB team to create a hierarchy for design systems, which was crucial to their success. For example, here is Hughes’s hierarchical approach for AirBnB:

Lowest Level -> Efforts + Components
Middle Level -> Experiences
Highest Level -> Services + Journeys + Rights (values as models)

Hughes’s talk also addressed common concerns from designers relating to these systems. Primarily a fear that designers could be replaced entirely by a well-developed design system. Reassuring the designer-filled audience, Hughes suggests we focus on how we drive change beyond individual components, and instead use design to influence processes and institutions in a more meaningful way.

Her memorable final words:

“Don’t just be good, do good”

Wizard of Oz prototyping

Pluralsight’s Senior Product Manager (and GoPro’s former Principal UX Designer) Ha Phan’s talk had a whimsical tone. She described prototyping and conceptual models for interaction with a familiar classic pop culture reference: the Wizard of Oz.

The Wizard of Oz, 1939 MGM film classic. © Warner Bros.

Phan spoke about how prototyping draws out two of our key innate skills: it leverages our intuitive ability to problem-solve, and it helps designers ask better questions. Naming this ‘Wizard of Oz’-style prototyping, Phan suggests a method of research that “fakes” technological interactions. By performing user research with non-technological creations, teams can rapidly prototype new and wilder ways of interacting with projects. Who needs a yellow brick road? The detours are all part of the adventure.

“Designers like to envision the future without constraints, but the future still has constraints. However, we get to set the focus of our future.”

Her experiences at GoPro were a major portion of her talk, with some especially memorable examples of how Phan paired her expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) with her strong understanding of our hard-wired storytelling skills. Phan encouraged designers to create tools that enable people to connect through emotional storytelling, which ultimately results in the most intuitive, memorable, and powerful experiences.

Designer at scale: introspecting on personal narratives

One of the most thoughtful, raw talks was senior Google designer Joel Beukelman’s Designer at Scale. Beukelman’s presentation centred on building a personal narrative, looking inward to explore your identity, and finding inner clarity on both your UX practice goals and your broader life goals.

Beukelman gave the audience many interesting self-evaluation tools, which include applying a journalist’s 5 Ws (Who, What, When, Where & Why) to define your career, and rating yourself on an axis of craft, commerce, and self.

At each stage, Joel returned to this core question: Why? A question that should be applied to your UX practice’s purpose, your existence, and cultivating a clear self-awareness of your role as a designer.

Beukelman recognized that all your other aspects of life—family, friends, hobbies, etc—will impact your craft, too. These factors are critical for him, especially at the time he chose to leave Google, and then returned a year later. Ultimately, he concluded that ego is the enemy of creativity, and encouraged attendees to continue moving in their careers, which means that a clear sense of self-awareness is essential.

Don’t miss out on the next Spotlight UX event

Spotlight UX/UI is always a great opportunity to connect with a wide range of UX designers and to hear best practices from accomplished design leaders.

The Say Yeah team encourages anyone working or studying in the UX space to keep an eye out for upcoming FITC events and the next Spotlight UX event, whether it’s held in person, or online.

Can’t wait for the next event?

Check out our Spotlight UX/UI 2018 Recap: exploring user experience and interaction design.

Spotlight UX/UI 2018 Recap

Experience design as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy and experience design methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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Join us at FITC Toronto April 19-21, 2020—CANCELLED

Kate Matesic — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 18:32:34 +0000

FITC Toronto returns this April! Boasting another packed lineup of global experts, we’re bracing for a deluge of inspiring and innovative talks and workshops about design, innovation, and technology. Join us at the Toronto Hilton from April 19th to the 21st to immerse yourself in three days of cutting-edge interactive, digital media, and design insights.

The Say Yeah team thoroughly enjoyed last year’s conference, where we spoke with digital professionals from many varied creative industries.
Check out last year’s recap video:

Our top 5 must-see talks include:

Building Foundations: Accessible Design Systems and Education, Tiffany Tse, Shopify
XR for Social Good … Maybe: Anastasia Victor, PLACE
Finding Yourself, Over and Over Again, Jessica Hische
Merging with the Machine: Designing Wearable Tech, Sophy Wong
Robot Overlords: Human-Centered Design for a Robotic Future, Krys Blackwood, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Plus, our own roundtable on inclusive design

Our team is attending all three days, documenting the brilliant insights from speakers and attendees – AND – our CEO Lee Dale will be hosting a roundtable on moving beyond accessible practices towards inclusive design. We hope you can join us for the workshop and you connect with us as we capture soundbites with our film crew!

Feel free to connect with us before the conference to discuss all things inclusive design and digital transformation via Twitter @sayyeahto or email us hello@sayyeah.com.

What else can you look forward to at FITC?

Beyond the talks, FITC Toronto features vendor booths, interactive experiences, and valuable networking parties. Attendees can expect to experience everything from mini-golf to art soirees.

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Spotlight UX: Elevate your user experience skills

Caroline Dinnall — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 20:44:41 +0000

If you’d like to broaden your User Experience (UX) skills or discover why UX is necessary today, there’s an event coming up just for you!

On Sept. 17, our very own Lee Dale will be participating at FITC’s (Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity.) annual Spotlight UX 2016.

Lee has been invited to speak at Spotlight UX for the second year, this year as one of four panelists sharing their expertise on how to excel as a user experience professional.

Spotlight UX is a one-day event for industry professionals and features renowned speakers, aiming to teach the importance of user experience, and how to effectively leverage experience design to drive business.

This event is an opportunity to dig deep with user experience experts, where they will share details about their career paths and experiences. From failures to success, they will lay it all on the line. This event runs from 9:30am to 5:30pm, with the Let’s Talk About UX panel at 2:00pm.

Attendees are encouraged to send their questions through Twitter in advance with the hashtag, #letstalkaboutux.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Get Tickets

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Turn new users into power users with content hinting

Matt Rintoul — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:10:00 +0000

Content Hinting

Users are familiar with the idea that they can scroll down to reveal additional content that is hidden off the screen. But it’s not expected that a page might load in the middle, allowing the user to scroll both up and down for additional content.

In our example below, we want users to know that they can scroll up to reveal previous dates in the month. A simple way to achieve this goal is with content hinting—revealing a part of the hidden content to imply that more content is available just off screen.

If we just started with Today, or Yesterday as the top row, there is no indication that a user can scroll up to reveal previous dates, even if that functionality exists.

By cutting the February 14^th date in half, we’re giving the user a hint that there is additional content hiding above that’s just an effortless swipe away.

Hint at unexpected interactions

Hinting at interactions helps users quickly understand how to use your product in unexpected and rewarding ways. This quickly turns new users into more engaged power users who understand and utilize the full capabilities of your product.

Looking for more product design insights?

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You catch more bots with honey: reducing form spam without captchas.

Matt Rintoul — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:13:00 +0000

With the launch of our new website at sayyeah.com we added a simple contact form to allow interested people to get in touch with us. From the moment the site went live, the most interested people getting in touch were spambots.

100s of messages quickly flooded Lee’s mailbox. Instead of prospective clients, he was inundated by offers for discount Michael Kors handbags, apparently being sold from a small fishing charter company and a diabetes care website (among many others).

We needed a way to block these useless submissions without adding any additional user requirements to fill out the form, such as captchas or simple math problems.

So how did we handle this challenge?

The answer in our case was to use a Honeypot form field. What this entails is creating a trap field. A human using the website won’t see or fill out this field, but a bot will, and when it dumps content in to it, we’ll have effectively caught the bot.

The Front End

Our basic form consists of a few fields. Name, Email, Message. This is what we’re looking for from real people trying to connect with us.

Our trap field is called Phone. This field shouldn’t be named trap, or gotcha, or lolsillybots, because it’s easier to detect something that looks out of place. By blending the naming convention in with the form, it’s harder for the bot to detect it.

Here’s our initial form, with all fields visible. The blank field is the honeypot field.

Remove from the tab index

First lets take the element out of the tab flow. If we don’t do this, when a user presses tab to jump from the adjacent field they will jump to the top of the screen with no understanding of what’s going on.

This tag goes right in the HTML. tabindex=“-1”

Visually remove the honeypot element

Next we can target the element #phone in a CSS stylesheet and position it absolutely {position:absolute;}, way off screen. {top:-10000px;}

This will ensure that the form field isn’t visible to the average person visiting your site.

Some notes:

The field should not be disabled, otherwise, nothing can write in it, and that would defeat the purpose;
You should also avoid using display: none; CSS as some bots can catch that you’re hiding the field.

The Back End

Now that we have the honeypot field in place and hidden from human eyes, we need to set up a backend method to catch and validate its value. What this will do is look at our field and make sure it meets the criteria we set, in our case, it must be empty.

How this is achieved will be different for each programming language, but for our example, here’s Express running on Node with node-validator installed.

What this line is saying is “Look at the value and ensure it’s nothing (string value=”).

If it is, continue, if it’s not, throw an error, don’t email us, call the FBI, log the request, etc. Whatever you choose as the outcome for invalid posts.

That’s it

And so far it’s working for our small submission form. It was quick to setup, taking less than 5 minutes, and dropped our spam submissions down to zero. At least for the time being.

This isn’t fool proof, and if our form had more value for the spammers they’d quickly find away around it. But it’s the first line of defence and if the bot(s) that spam us find a work around or get more sophisticated, we’ll have to up the ante.

There are many other methods for stopping unwanted form submissions, you can check out some suggestions in this post on StackOverflow.

Product strategy as a foundational skill

If you’re looking to bring fundamental product strategy methodologies and execution to your team, we’re here to help.

Get in touch

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The Minimal Homepage

Lee Dale — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 17:15:18 +0000

I’m really digging Mattan Griffel’s minimal homepage review at GrowHack.

The two key takeaways from the homepages of some of the fastest growing companies on the web are:

There is a single, clear value proposition.
Signup is the only action.

No content for people to see and share. No menu or other prominent calls to action. It’s just, “Here’s what you get from us. Sign up if you want that.”

This is scary for anyone to consider, particularly when you’re launching a new product with the mindset that content converts and you have to prove your product to people.

And I love Mattan’s rebuttal of the typical concerns people voice when considering a minimal homepage.

When I tell people these things they often complain: “But everyone knows Twitter and Facebook, so they don’t have to explain what their product is about. No one has ever heard of [my startup] so I actually need to explain it to people.”

You are wrong.

Maybe you and I already know what Twitter and Facebook are about, but we’re not the people they’re trying to get to sign up on their homepage. 2.4 billion people use the internet and more using it each day. Believe it or not, there are still people on earth who haven’t heard of Twitter or Facebook. Those are the people these homepages are trying to convert – not the luddites who refuse to sign up (trust me, Twitter and Facebook stopped caring about them long ago).

Read Mattan’s full post for more on content sharing and other assumptions people fall back on when launching a new product.

And, of course, if you’re making any changes to your signup flow, be sure you’re tracking conversions based on where users are arriving from, how they fit into your target audience, whether they’re new or repeat visitors, and what they do once they hit your homepage.

Not sure about any of this? We can help.

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Slide To Unlock, Obvious Once Again

Lee Dale — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:40:00 +0000

We previously discussed the issues with iOS 7’s confusing lock screen, which sported a prominent up arrow and “slide to unlock” text sitting just above this arrow. This lock screen design gave the initial impression that you now slide up to unlock your phone, rather than the necessary flick of your thumb to the right.

From the initial iOS 7 beta:

As reported by MacRumors, today’s iOS 7 Beta 4 corrects these issues, with an updated lock screen sporting a right facing arrow.

Better still, Apple has prioritized the key function of sliding to unlock and prevented arrow fatigue by doing away with the up arrow in exchange for a flat bar to indicate access to the settings panel which slides up from below. Now, the only arrow on the lock screen is next to the action which gets you into your phone.

Finally, to make these interactions even easier for fumbling hands, the slide to unlock text now sits further away from the bottom of the screen, preventing any accidental activation of the settings panel or the camera when you’re moving your thumb to unlock the phone.

Here’s how these welcome improvements look:

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Refining iOS 7’s Icons. And What To Do About A Very Confusing Lock Screen.

Lee Dale — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:24:00 +0000

Following Apple’s iOS 7 announcement earlier this week, there’s been a lot of discussion around the default icon set (pictured above, right). Detractors have focused on inconsistencies, concerns around a lack of cohesion between icons, and a general disdain for the colour palette and icon styles. Designer Leo Drapeau’s taken a stab at addressing some of the more moderate considerations with his iOS 7 icon refinements (pictured above, left).

He offers some nice takes on both simplifying some of the icons (Camera, Game Center, Stocks) and differentiating others (Reminders vs Notes), but I don’t agree with his decision to go back to the iOS 6 corner radius (where icons appear smaller inside their rounded corner squares).

The new, larger iOS 7 icons have a beautiful playfulness and resonance with the smaller padding. Resetting them makes them appear less touch-friendly.

Update: Neven Mrgan wonderfully illustrates an issue with the larger icons based on their varying weights:

And yes, you need to scale to ensure lighter weight icons are not overwhelmed by their fuller cousins.

Now back to Leo: I fear he’s lost the plot in the dock, with a more complex Phone icon, under-styled Mail and Safari icons, and a thin, more conservative musical note which almost disappears when compared to the other icons.

For me, there are five concerns that stand out with the iOS 7 icons.

1. Game Center’s reflective bubbles, which are incongruous with every other icon.

2. Music’s vibrant red/orange, which is outside the colour palette of the other icons (or at least appears to be because of the dark to dark gradient, rather than light to dark gradients of the other icons).

3. The Reminders icon, which has no charm, particularly in light of Leo’s wonderful reworking.

4. The overly complex Settings and Compass icons.

5. A Camera icon that shows something that isn’t anything like my iPhone. I’m sure they still aren’t using a floppy disk as a save icon, right? The previous camera icon was a lens. Perfect.

Some minor efforts in finding consistency will resolve most of these issues, but there’s no doubt these new icons better suit the expression and the experience of iOS 7’s overall redesign.

Icons aside, the most important concern stemming from this redesign is found on the lock screen, where ‘slide to unlock’ has lost its arrow, trough, and the block that slides through it from left to right (pictured below).

Certainly some visual cues need to be added so you know how the heck to unlock your phone. I bet 50% of people try to slide up, rather than from left to right:

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