Tag: design

A great post from Mike Montiero:

So as much as I’d like to just show you the greatest logo I’ve ever made for anyone (…and trust me, if Paul Rand himself saw it, he would realize he was merely the Pippen to my Jordan.) I’d like to be properly compensated for it. Because I put a lot of time and effort into it. And it’s how I earn my living.

And that time and effort was used to make sure I delivered something that actually met your needs and objectives. You guys have numbers to meet. (I imagine at least a 10% increase to last year’s $14.5B in revenue, and $967M in net income.) And plans for the future based on meeting those numbers. So do I.

That’s one side of the issue. The other side of the issue is that crowdsourcing design often doesn’t work. You can crowdsource opinions or small tasks, but crowdsourced creativity successes are the exception, not the norm.

If you’re the type who uses lorem ipsum content in your mockups, it might be worth considering some content with a bit more character. H.G. Wells, Herman Melville, and others contribute their public domain works to a pretty useful content generator.

It’s worth mentioning that filler content isn’t always the best approach. I personally try to use realistic content as often as possible these days, and chances are pretty good that your users won’t be producing the same content Melville would.

This would be even more useful for me if there were a decent API behind it.

Harry Brignull:

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

Use for good, or use for evil.

Really great explorations of technical and visual possibilities on the web, themed around the posters of World’s Fairs. Gorgeous and inspiring.

Found by Michael Angeles:

“If for any reason you are unwilling or unable to click the giant button, please email us…”

Gotta say, it pops and can’t be missed. DESIGN PATTERN.

Adam Rifkin:

Put another way, Google designing social apps is like Microsoft designing iPod packaging.

Anything social by Google has been an abject failure, in my view. They’re just terrible at doing anything that doesn’t make Google better as a company. For most people at Google, life is 98% work, 2% sleep, and they design products with that lifestyle in mind.

Derek Sivers:

In the case of a hotel room: I had already reserved the room, planned my trip, and checked in before realizing they were going to force me to use their unique non-standard interface.

For you website designers: your design choices are like this light switch. Your users have already come to your site, now they’re forced to use your interface.

In my view, interaction design has almost nothing to do with art. The art that may occur on the web is graphic design. Unfortunately, many don’t know how to draw that line.

Make smart choices when it comes to the interactions. Make bold choices when it comes to the presentation of those interactions.

Yahoo has its own styleguide out, along with some great resources for writing content for the web.

It includes everything like basic web-friendly content advice (“Write strong headlines”) to the nuances of international grammar differences:

When referring to your own or another company, use the third-person singular pronouns it and its. In the United States, a company is treated as a collective noun and requires a singular verb and a singular pronoun. Referring to a company in the plural (they, them, their, theirs) is chiefly a British convention.

At least now I can cite a slightly less stuffy reference than ALA or Chicago.

Everything Android gets right are things the iPhone got right first and still does better. Every “unique to Android” feature seems, at best, a technological demo.

The fact that Android is open is probably a major part of the problem.

When you have to cater to almost any hardware stack, how do you really optimize for things like battery life? On some phones, the display is far less efficient than others. Some devices have the 4G modem as the top draw of power while others have a very efficient 3G modem.

How can you design software that integrates features into the whole system when only a small percentage of devices will have that feature in the first place?

Android ends up being a duct-tape solution to compete against the iPhone, and fails.

Open systems work really well when the audience consists solely of geeks, and when the solution focuses purely on technology. Beyond that, a closed system with good taste guiding it clearly produces better results.

Worst copy ever:

The SXSW PanelPicker is a two-step online system that allows the community to have a significant voice in programming Interactive, Film, and Music conference activities for SXSWeek 2011 (March 11-20).

Basically, if you know what is going to be of interest to the industry in just under a year or so, you should propose a talk.

That said, if you believe you qualify for the above, you’re probably:

1. Overconfident
2. Not really all that good at what you do
3. A social media douchebag
4. A marketer
5. From the future
6. Going to change your talk in the last few weeks anyway

I’m in that last category, but I’m hoping to meet a few from the second-to-last. I hear they have flying cars.

A soon-to-be classic from McSweeney’s:

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

Dustin Curtis:

There has been a lot of discussion about the pixel density in iPhone 4’s Retina display, but most of those discussions are missing the point. The Retina display isn’t revolutionary because of pixel density — some Android phones have featured almost 300ppi for months. iPhone 4 is revolutionary because it has increased interface definition.

Yup. If you’re doing it right, you’re quickly finding yourself using the concept of a “pixel” less and less, especially on iOS devices.

Fast Company is taking notice:

One of the things that excites people most about technology is that it is seen as a gateway to the future. So how does that explain the recent glut of lo-fi adverts, software, and user interfaces that seem to be being spewed out by so-called hi-tech companies?

Perhaps you’re knowingly nodding your head, too, with the recognition that no matter how high-tech a design solution may be, the best ones often start quite at the other side of the spectrum, with pencil and paper or simple boxes and arrows.

It’s nothing new, but definitely put in a current context. Hoy writes:

I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last. It’s 2010. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many smart restaurateurs (or the agents that work on their behalf) simply fall flat on their face when it comes to their online strategy. While I believe their intentions are genuine, many simply don’t understand the values of accessibility and usability. It frustrates the hell out of me - not so much as the president of a standards-based web design company, but as a human being.

+1

Why is Apple so controlling? Why do they have phones that are all nearly identical? Why do they have particular restrictions on background apps? It all comes down to battery life. Battery life is not just another feature on some specifications checklist. It is the driving philosophy behind every design decision made on the iPhone.

He suspects that Android will only develop more battery life issues, and things are already getting pretty bad.

Again, it’s all about balancing constraints. If you want to run seventeen apps at once, or play flash games, you have to expect you’ll get a couple hours out of your phone, max. Apple isn’t willing to create a device where consumers need to be charging their phones five times a day.

Khoi Vinh:

While the letterforms on that virtual page may look gorgeous, it’s apparent to any designer that the text is far from perfectly typeset. It’s hideous, scarred as it is by unsightly “rivers” of bad spacing within the text. No self-respecting typographer would dare call that perfect.

It really is a JV move of Apple. Jeff Croft suspects it could be related to the use of Webkit throughout the platform, but even that wouldn’t be an excuse for these kinds of mistakes.

The biggest issue one might have using the web on an iPad:

When I sat down to a redesign of the Gameplan admin interface I suddenly came to a realisation, :hover doesn’t work. It’s entirely possible I’d skim read this somewhere, but somehow the implications for my design work had passed me by until I saw an iPad in use.

For many, we often think about how many clicks a user goes through to complete a given interaction, and it somehow feels like the use of hover can alleviate part of that friction. If you care about the iPad or the similar copycat devices sure to appear before too long, that option is fading away quickly.

Of course, we can all take heart in the fact that well-done progressive disclosure is possible regardless of the number of clicks or taps involved. It’s about ensuring that every step in the interaction is clear and valuable more than it’s about fewer clicks.

It’s another one of those constraints that might make us all better designers.

The highlights:

• Same design as the phone taken by Gizmodo
• Clever glass and stainless construction
• Better battery life
• Screen resolution is quadrupled to 300+ dpi
• Front-facing camera for video calling (aka “FaceTime”)
• Better rear camera with flash
• Faster, with the A4 processor

From where I see it, Apple keeps pushing the bar further than the other manufacturers can reach. They’re working on making every feature feel like it’s always been there, spending a year or more on pieces like the retina display, and then the competition feels forced to slap together an answer in a couple months.

AT&T notwithstanding, the average consumer shouldn’t have much of a problem choosing this device over the myriad android phones.

As of next Friday, I’ll be steering the UX and design efforts over at Posterous. That said, I’ve made a posterous site:

As anyone who even slightly knows me could tell you, I’m interested in myriad random topics. At the same time, my main site, Jounce, is pretty strictly centered on web-related topics — design, development, business, etc. So welcome to jackson.jounce.net, where I’ll be making shorter, more frequent posts on pretty much anything I find interesting.

If you’re interested in other topics and my take on them, do check it out.

Harvest is looking for a completely inexperienced UX designer.

They’re tired of:

…designers who are so ingrained with preconceptions of how the internet should work they cannot think beyond tabs and check boxes; who seek approval from fellow designers while forgetting how to make things simple for regular folks; who avoid complex problems and call our non-design “opinionated design”.

I love it. I told a friend to apply.

I’ll be talking more about this ANY DAY NOW, but college and university campuses have a tough time with design debt, in this case the process of trying to both honor and improve upon their architectural legacy.

This article takes a look at some of academia’s greatest successes in this endeavor, including my alma mater, Bowdoin College.

The lesson for web designers? When thinking about adding to an existing design, don’t be afraid to move away from the precedent, as long as you do it intelligently and creatively.

A really great effort for a publication assembled in just two days.

There’s a hubbub now, since CBS, which presents the show “48 hours” is calling for the magazine to drop the name, citing trademark infringement. The thing is, I completely agree with CBS. They have a video news magazine with the title 48 Hours, and some folks think it would be okay to name a print magazine (which has elements of news) 48 Hour? It certainly caused brand confusion for me when people started linking to it a couple weeks ago.

CBS, even though they’re the big, evil corporation, is totally in the right here.

Still, the magazine looks pretty solid. Give it a look-see.

As with all Nielsen publications, take this with a bit of salt, but it’s certainly worth a thorough read.

Can we just adopt this as a universal standard? Please?

Always worth a skim or two.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says that while the change sounds minor, it will save money on ink when students print e-mails in the new font.

30% savings. Not so bad. Who knew your typeface selection could be a function of how environmentally conscious you are?

Good reference

On putting destructive action triggers near other UI triggers, this example coming from Gmail, where the Send and Save Now buttons are adjacent:

I can tell what you’re thinking. Did he click Send or Save Now? Well, to tell you the truth, in all the excitement of composing that angry email, I kind of lost track myself. Good thing we can easily undo a sent mail! Oh wait, we totally can’t. Consider my seat, or at least that particular rash email, ejected.

Yukio Ota designed the “Running Man” exit sign, which competes globally with the American red “EXIT” sign. The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

This is part five of a pretty great series from Slate about the language of signs.

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increasingly industrial economy. […] Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]

When in doubt, non-designers are best encouraged to stick with one typeface. For the designers and more adventurous among us, this is an unappealing limitation, and we work two, three, or even four typefaces into a composition.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones to the rescue with an awesome guide to navigating the caverns often found in such fusions.

Paul has a solid writeup and synopsis of the talk Talbs and I gave at SXSW this year, “Jacks of All Trades or Masters of One?”:

This is a good talk. They have loads of humour in it. That always works well.

Thanks, Paul! You can find the slides on Slideshare.

We’ll see…

Data visualization magnate Tufte will be part of an advisory board that oversees Recovery funds and keeps the public informed of how those funds are or aren’t being used.

I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary.

Good to see that the administration is putting such a high priority in ensuring that this kind of work has some real design thinking behind it.

Thorough overview of best practices in designing achievements. While these mostly happen in games, it’s more and more common to use game dynamics in more traditional apps. If you’re considering this kind of thing, there is a lot to consider:

When players come across poorly designed achievements, the bottom line is that it lessens their psychological investment into the system as a whole. It is impossible for this to happen without also lessening the sense of accomplishment the player feels when he does earn an achievement in this system.

Awesome essay on the iPad and how it will impact book publishing. Great illustrations, great thinking, and it makes me want to see what this guy does with the iPad in the coming months.

In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.

We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.

This kind of interface revolution has happened with the web, mobile, the iPhone, and will happen again with the iPad, and it’s always exciting.

A very thorough guide to the new styleguide the BBC is using online, covering not only the results, but a bit of the process too. Jealous? I am.

Kontra, in a scathing review of Google’s strategy in Buzz:

Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice-president for search and user experience, says 60-80% of Google’s products may eventually fail. Unfortunately, the few that survive are neither all that inspiring nor market leaders. What Google lacks is not infrastructure, engineers, money, time or even great ideas. It’s the ability to delight users. What Google is missing, in other words, is strategic design.

I’ve been noticing similar things the last year or two, and seldom have I seen or heard much that would contradict it. Read the whole post. It’s spot-on.

Always torn about these compiled CSS things. When troubleshooting, it puts yet another layer between you and the styles, which can make it much harder to really leverage Firebug like a master.

This looks pretty sweet though, that objection notwithstanding.

PPK claims that by designing only for the iPhone, we’re setting up for another IE6-like event.

This article counters that:

When Koch damns developers for professional hypocrisy and incompetence, I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

It’s still early on for the mobile web, and I think that gives us reason to push things a bit more than would be appropriate in a Y2K, IE6 world. If developers don’t accept the limitations of conventional mobile browsers right now, mobile manufacturers may well start moving things forward.

If we can get close to parity or unanimity in the mobile browser space, we’ve succeeded, and then need to start getting back to traditional principles of progressful degrahancement and the like.

The single most important skill a product manager/designer/guy/girl can have…

Fantastic article on fidelity in interface design:

The trick is to figure out which details help users identify the UI element, and which details distract from its intended meaning. Some details help users figure out what they’re looking at and how they can interact with it; other details distract from the idea you’re trying to convey. They turn your interface element from a concept into a specific thing. Thus, if an interface element is too distinct from its real-life counterpart, it becomes too hard to recognize. On the other hand, if it is too realistic, people are unable to figure out that you’re trying to communicate an idea, and what idea that might be.

Phil Gyford:

For some time I’ve been meaning to test my small collection of PDA/smartphone gadgets to see which of their methods of input was quickest. The iPhone’s software keyboard? The Newton’s handwriting recognition? Palm’s Graffiti? With the possible imminent arrival of a tablet from Apple that will save the world, it seemed a good time to get round to the test.

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”

John Siracusa looks at his reviews of the OS X preview releases and the first 10.0 release.

What’s most amazing is how gracefully things seem to have improved in those ten years. The old screenshots now look dated and sometimes downright ridiculous, and Siracusa’s evaluations were nothing short of dire in the beginning, but it’s slowly and steadily become the clear market leader.

One of the best things about Apple is their willingness to put something out that might be a bit of a reach, and then to go back and iterate and fill in the gaps. They pay a boatload of attention to making it a great experience in the first place, but they are always willing to acknowledge that improvements can be both subtle and major.

Dave McClure:

If investors don’t have operational backgrounds in design, development, or marketing from proven consumer internet companies, you probably don’t want their money.

Agreed.

A fairly wide-ranging conversation with a Facebook employee about infrastructure, privacy, security, and culture. A lot has changed since the beginning, and none of this should be terribly surprising.

When I visited the new Facebook HQ a few months ago, the receptionist shared a couple stories of people trying to force their way in there, so there’s an element of physical security that is becoming increasingly important around there.

Christina Wodtke on why she’s over wireframes:

I haven’t heard much lately about why wireframes are so awesome. I know they are incredibly useful as a thinking tool. I can’t work through an idea without getting out a pencil and scribbling out some wireframes on a pad of paper. I’m not sure they are good as a communicating tool.

The article itself has a reasonably articulated argument, but the discussion is probably more valuable.

Wireframes are just a tool, and all tools can be used inappropriately just as easily as they can be used well. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say that in certain situations, wireframes aren’t particularly valuable, and Christina may exist in one of them. I think most folks, however, find themselves in scenarios where there remains a legitimate need for the wireframe, both as a thought aid and as a communication tool.

Hah, indeed.

Worth reading from A-Z.

Great circular visualization. As for the numbers themselves, they’re from W3Schools.com, which clearly has a standards slant, so take them with that grain of salt.

I’ve always wondered why there wasn’t a better design for that awfully large plug. Now I’m wondering why no one else thought of something like this years ago.

David Thorne to his least-favorite client:

Disregarding the fact that you have still not paid me for work I completed earlier this year despite several assertions that you would do so, I would be delighted to spend my free time creating logos and pie charts for you based on further vague promises of future possible payment. Please find attached pie chart as requested and let me know of any changes required.

And that’s just the beginning. This is par for the course when you’re having designers do work for you on spec.

There’s been an ongoing spat against Malcolm Gladwell by the scientific community:

To try my hand at Gladwell’s technique: Conventional wisdom suggests that if getting Gladwell’s level of popular traction means sacrificing aspects of both science and journalism, it might be better to have no Malcolm Gladwells at all.

Gladwell is great at communicating fairly complicated issues to normal people by simplifying, and it’s led to an incredible level of popularity for him. In the course of doing that, sometimes things can be over-simplified, much to the chagrin of the archetype scientist.

We often have the same issues on the web. The web is a complicated place, and there are lots of moving pieces, most which a given client has no chance of understanding. So clients often understand and rely on the simplest of rules, many of which simply aren’t sturdy enough to rely on. See Jakob Nielsen.

A pretty awesome visual and textual analysis of the classic book format.

Ev Williams:

The larger point, though, is that this feature should make Twitter a more powerful system for helping people find out what’s happening now that they care about.

A good explanation behind a new feature that will quickly affect millions of people, especially important since the new retweet mechanism has a little quirks worth understanding.

Jakum Linowski has a pretty snifty system for annotating sketches to consider states and various sorts of interactions.

A little late to this, but the guys at Steepster, a tea review site, have a fantastic post about how they overhauled their ratings system:

It turns out that the average rating for products on sites with 5-star scales is around 4.3. To us, this says that we need to dive deeper — zoom in to a level where it’s clear what the difference is between a really great tea and the best tea you’ve ever had.

There’s a lot of great thinking here. Rating scales are like identity systems in apps — easy to overlook them, but it can have a huge impact on the final product.

Dustin Curtis:

A FEW MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article expressing my displeasure with American Airlines‘ hideous online presence. I also spent some time mocking up a redesigned version of their website. To my surprise, the head of user experience at AA.com emailed me an amazing response describing some of the design problems faced in large corporations. You should read my original article here and the response from Mr. X here. An hour after I posted the response, American Airlines fired Mr. X.

One one hand, he violated his NDA, which is generally a bad thing and sometimes worth termination. On the other hand, the fact that what he said was even covered by an NDA is a bit absurd. The biggest secret he might have revealed was forthcoming transparency into fares and sales policies — and that’s only a shocking announcement if you often fly AA.

In any event, the firing of this guy is sure to hurt AA more than his post could have.

While it’s interesting that Torrent communities are using this to ban users, I think there are potentially a lot of ways to use this kind of hack in positive ways too, to improve the user experience based on the types of sites and interactions you know they’ve used before.

Of course, the privacy concerns don’t go away.

This is pretty hot. Moves from sans to slab-serif seamlessly, among other niceties. If only you could set this up and export to OTF.

From CXPartners:

We can offer three design tips to ensure content below the fold is seen.

Less is more – don’t be tempted to cram everything above the fold. Good use of whitespace and imagery encourages exploration.

Stark, horizontal lines discourage scrolling - this doesn’t mean stop using horizontal full width elements. Have a small amount of content just visible, poking up above the fold to encourage scrolling.

Avoid the use of in-page scroll bars - the browser scrollbar is an indicator of the amount of content on the page. iFrames and other elements with scroll bars in the page can break this convention and may lead to content not being seen.

Nate Eagle on the PBS Design blog:

There’s nothing terribly difficult about hitting cmd+click for me: I’ve got two able arms with able fingers attached to the hands that join them, but Twitter’s completely right that I always want its links to open in new windows and that I appreciate not having to think about it. Twitter’s my base, man: I want to have my place saved while your picture of your adorable bull-dog loads in another window.

The answer? Inconclusive, but I can identify with Nate’s indecision.

They dropped Paul Rand’s interesting logo, which was designed in 1985, and replaced it with Yale University’s main logotype, which, while clearly not as inherently interesting, does indeed convey the character of the University and much of its community reasonably well.

While this may have been one of Rand’s most interesting logos, it wasn’t one of his best, and certainly wasn’t as timeless as many of his others. Instead, it created the perception that the University and the Press were very different entities, moving in different directions, and this is apparently something they wanted to rectify.

Based on the comments on Twitter, I’m apparently one of the few who thinks this was a good decision. As a graphic design artifact, and as an important element of the history of logo design, it will surely live on. As a logo, its time had come.

Interesting concept screen from Larva Labs:

Larva Labs proposes an intelligent home screen that creates a meaningful hierarchy out of a user’s information. Designed for an Android-based handset, our home screen is intended to appeal to Blackberry owners and people struggling with information overload

Tom Watson on the value of taking outlier cases into account:

Now these things on their own are valuable, but the collateral benefits are why you should do them. If you were designing a car, worrying about extra leg room might make you rethink the entire console. Making a design polished isn’t achieved by making it work for your mom or the average user. You end up with something average.

Some solid tips on presenting from Jason Santa Maria. Including this nugget:

Your slides are not your talk. Even though slides are what most people equate with “the talk,” depending on your presentation style, they are actually one of the least important aspects.

Can’t tell you how much I steam when someone asks me to “send my presentation.” Like, do they have a time machine?

Most content creation tools (think WordPress, MT, Blogger) relegate content creation to a secondary page. Adam Mathes argues that this is bass-ackwards, complete with examples:

Twitter gets it right. This is why anyone - even confused celebrities who barely comprehend technology - can actually use this product. You show up, there’s a box at the top, you type in it, and it shows up below with other people’s stuff you can read.

If content creation is the primary action, it should be presented that way.

Written in 2002:

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

Funny read. I think a lot of this will even out as the industry becomes more mature, sheds some of its silly social media expert influences, and begins to have some recognition of authority. That day can’t come soon enough.

The Most Excellent and Right Honourable Doug Avery tries to clear up the mysterious Save for Web color shift:

This comes down to a matter of taste. As you can see, Row 4 [sRGB, no embedded profile] produced great, predictable results as long as you remember to turn on Color Proofing while you’re viewing things (and in CS3, it’s off by default every time you start Photoshop). This indicates that sRGB is workable, you just need to be careful that you understand what you’re seeing.

I still prefer the monitor profile [no embedded ICC profile] (Row 8), it simplifies the entire process and makes my results even more predictable. It also might makes things easier if you’re in a hurry and need to mix screenshots into a comp without the colors mis-matching.

Click the link, view the poster, pick your poison, and never have an issue again.

A good article arguing against crowdsourcing design. The key takeaway:

While design sites tout the “community” aspects of their sites, the truth is that they play a winner-take-all game where work is purposefully not collaborative. The power of crowdsourcing comes from when many people working together can achieve something big, like when hundreds of people spend a few minutes each tagging museum photos through the Extraordinaries or when 50 people each contributing $50 can collectively fund an artist’s dream project through Kickstarter.

The debate goes on…

Launched today. For amateur typophiles like myself, this will be an addicting site.

Amy Hoy on interface patterns and pattern libraries:

Consider creative writing, which is a much better parallel to interface design than architecture. When you write, you can do anything. You choose words, rhythms and structure to communicate your ideas, not just what you say. You still need to hold up a coherent thread, and help the reader to follow along, just like with a good interface design. But you have, as it were, endless possibilities when you face the blank page.

I think Amy’s spot-on here. Patterns are the fallback for interactions when you don’t have anything better, but shouldn’t be the initial go-to.

Brian Suda has one of the better articles I’ve seen discussing the shortfalls of the pie chart, how you can use other options, and how you can make the best possible pie chart if you’re forced to use it for some reason.

Mike Rundle has a pretty great post outlining the common types of iPhone application interfaces, major apps that use each type, and the advantages/disadvantages of each.

Brent Simmons, developer of NetNewsWire, talks a little bit about the seemingly-easy feature requests:

“Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.”

But of course it’s not as simple as just writing a quick script. It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that.

The difference between highly-functional software no one likes to use and highly-functional software everyone likes to use lies in the thought process Brent goes through to implement this pretty simple little feature.

This is why it’s more than possible to release too early.

NPR made a great video tour of their soon-to-be-launched redesign of npr.org. NPR News’ Scott Simon shows off the features of the new site as he’s seeing them for the first time himself.

As a result, the site comes across as being really simple and friendly to use. Good move by NPR’s web team.

Oliver Reichenstein at Information Architects Japan seems to define the UX field as the generalist discipline I have been advocating.

Can’t say I’m necessarily inclined to disagree, but many of the UX professionals have a skillset in alignment with information architecture, which is more design-focused. In order to truly be at the center of the process, the person negotiating these concerns needs a background in all of them.

Still, in the end, Oliver takes a pragmatic approach:

On the other side, whether you perceive a job as dull or fun largely depends on your character. Some people love organizing, others, like me, love to create chaos. Some people, for instance, actually hate to think, and that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily stupid. The trick is to create teams where everyone does what they like most. Making work fun seems to be the same challenge as making different people work together.

Hot on the heels of last week’s Refresh DC talk on HTML 5 and CSS 3 where we previewed a few of these, here are some demonstrations of 3D Transformations using CSS3.

If you don’t have a WebKit nightly build, watch the video. There are some amazing demos here, and we’re not far from really being able to use these on the web.

Alex Payne echoes my unwritten rationale for bailing on Fever, the self-hosted feed aggregator/reader:

The $30 question, though: does Fever really float the best, most relevant content to the top in a personalized way? Can it dig through all the noise on the web and show you what you need/want to know at a glance? The free answer: sort of.

Alex also has some nice commentary about feed readers in general, and how they can be a bit of a burden more than a blessing. I’m still using a feed reader, for sure, and I do wish that Fever were the solution to the problem.

Trammell and the Digg crew were considering moving on from IE6 support, so they asked their IE6 users why they hadn’t upgraded. 70% of respondents indicated that the IE6 choice wasn’t their own, but that of their workplace environment.

This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.

Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.

This is going to be the frustrating part — it’s one thing for users who choose to use a crappy browser, but it’s another when a large population just doesn’t have a choice. Some really major consumer sites are going to have to kill IE6 support in order for admins to care.

Benjamin Pollack, who works with Joel Spolsky and the StackOverflow team, responds to a Hacker News thread suggesting that SO could be copied in a week.

On the part where he’s suggesting that developers only think of sites as database schemata:

Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema—and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow’s source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.

It’s the smart developers who realize that simple concepts often take a lot of work to implement well, even if they can be quickly implemented poorly. I’m glad I work with smart developers.

This may be my favorite A List Apart article ever. Patrick Lynch presents a thoughtful, well-argued position on behalf of visual design on the web:

Recent design writing and interface research illustrate how visual design and user research can work together to create better user experiences on the web: experiences that balance the practicalities of navigation with aesthetic interfaces that delight the eye and brain. In short: there’s lots of evidence that beauty enhances usability.

There’s not a whole lot that’s incredibly new here, but Lynch’s argument — which includes conscious and sub-conscious cognitive processing and a discussion of the difference in role between classical (clean) and expressive (Comm. Arts) aesthetics — brings a lot together quite nicely.

Hopefully the non-visual designers reading this appreciated it as much as I did, and the visual designers didn’t stop reading three paragraphs in due to the relative lack of graphics and long paragraphs :)

John Gruber, in his overall write-up on the new C&P functionality on the iPhone, summarizes Apple’s philosophy when it comes to releasing these types of features:

That we had to wait two years for the iPhone’s text selection and pasteboard is a good example of one aspect of the Apple way: better nothing at all than something less than great. That’s not to say Apple never releases anything less than great, but they try not to. This is contrary to the philosophy of most other tech companies — and diametrically opposed to the philosophy of Microsoft. And it is very much what drives some people crazy about Apple — it’s simply incomprehensible to some people that it might be better to have no text selection/pasteboard implementation while waiting for a great one than to have a poor implementation in the interim.

I tend to agree with the Apple stance. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the great, but do let greatness be the enemy of the good/fair/poor.

HTML5 isn’t all about new elements, it’s also about new APIs which can be of great use to web applications. Canvas, local storage, and mutable DOM prototypes are among these.

While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) duke it out with their own technologies to implement multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors’ lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard.

I think this is still a long way off, but we can always be hopeful.

Joshua Porter posts a good reminder about how important even the smallest copy can be:

Microcopy is small yet powerful copy. It’s fast, light, and deadly. It’s a short sentence, a phrase, a few words. A single word. It’s the small copy that has the biggest impact. Don’t judge it on its size…judge it on its effectiveness.

It’s also some of the most fun copy to write, especially if your product has a really strong voice.

Back when I worked at Grassroots, one of the few truly-designery projects I worked on was a logo for Canada Day Across America, the Canadian government’s crowdsourced celebration of their independence for ex-pats in the US. This was back in 2006 or so.

Today, it looks like the program, and the logo, are stronger than ever. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make it back down to the Canadian embassy this year to celebrate on July 1.

I’ve never been much of a visual designer at heart, but this is one of those past projects that I frequently look back on with some satisfaction.

A beautiful article from Rands/Michael about getting it together in a crisis, and then making progress based on that experience. A little bit about communicating with employees, a little bit about running meetings, a little bit about staying same, and a lot about being a great manager.

Great article on Seed Magazine about the shortcomings of many of the data visualization methods we often see these days:

Some of the most confusing new visualizations are the popular network diagrams, which are intended to show connections between nodes and invite inferences about the forces that govern the connections. Numerous groups have produced maps of social networks, internet traffic, and other complicated phenomena, but the impression one gets is merely of connectivity, rather than of any of the patterns the visualization purports to convey. Few obey the principles of perception-informed design or Edward Tufte’s rules for graphical integrity, which state that graphics should make viewers think about the subject matter, not design.

As is often said, great design should be invisible. Crazy infographics may be cool, but they often don’t really make things more understandable than a more simplistic approach

Andy Clarke suggests a universal IE6 stylesheet for all sites:

That is why I’m now advocating to my clients (and to you), that where feasible, not to waste hours in time and a client’s money on lengthy workarounds in an unnecessary attempt at cross-browser perfection. Instead, you and I should provide simple but effectively designed HTML elements. This means just great typography for headings, paragraphs, quotations, lists, tables and forms and no styling of layout.

I think we’re still a ways off from this being acceptable for sites intended to be mainstream, but it’s probably a nice intermediary option down the road, and perhaps appropriate now for sites with very limited IE6 audiences.

The always-smart Seth Godin writes about the two ways to work with talent: giving the blank slate mission, where you have folks do their thing and hope for the best; or the well-baked and defined mission, which is more predictable in its output. On the results:

The strategic mission takes more preparation, more discipline and more difficult meetings internally. It involves thinking hard without knowing it when you see it.

The clean sheet of paper is amazing when it works, but involves so much waste, anxiety and pain that I have a hard time recommending it to most people. If you’re going to do this, you have an obligation to use what you get, because your choice was hiring this person, not in judging the work you got when you didn’t have the insight to give them clear direction in the first place.

Perfect. The client who wants the designer to just do their thing but doesn’t have time for frequent input is an impending disaster.

Google’s announced some new options for search, including topical, content-type, and chronological filters, as well as an ability to explore related terms.

Additionally, rich snippets bring structured data to the results page, based on data provided by Microformats or RDFa. A clear call from Google:

We can’t provide these snippets on our own, so we hope that web publishers will help us by adopting microformats or RDFa standards to mark up their HTML and bring this structured data to the surface. This will help people better understand the information you have on your page so they can spend more time there and less on Google.

It’s an old standard that body copy should have a line length shorter than 75 characters per line. But on the web, the acceptable number is higher. From a post I did today at Viget, I cited research that demonstrated that users can easily handle 95 characters per line or higher:

What is the new standard? Tough to say, but 100cpl seems to be within the range of feasibility. There may be a good opportunity for some new and more thorough research in this area that could offer some valuable new insight.

I suspect this is due to print being a largely-vertical medium, and the web (especially since widescreen became prevalent) is more and more horizontal.

Quite the noisy, ad-infested design, but a really great compilation of fifty truly interesting infographics of all sorts. There are a few visualization patterns here worth remembering in the future.

John Siracusa:

Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it’s presented in large doses. It’s impolite. It’s unnecessarily obsessive. It’s just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what’s wrong with it to begin with. This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent.

It’s like the professor who tore apart your papers. Hated at the time, but now you look back and think about how much better a writer you are.

I don’t think any creative business can succeed without serious (and sometimes harsh) criticism coming either externally or internally. It has less to do with measurement than it has to do with this editing eye.

Naresh Jain comes to similar conclusions to my talk about Agile last year, with a somewhat different angle. In the end, as he says:

Bottom line, Agile is not a Silver Bullet and don’t fall pray to marketing gimmicks. Question dogmatic claims. Adapt Agile to your needs and take baby steps.

I also like his line in the slides: “Agile coaches and project managers are becoming the process police.” Kinda the antithesis of the Agile notion of people over process, eh?

Hyperbolic, but interesting nonetheless. Joe Clark posits that Google is no place for the creative brain. Instead, every aspect of its culture is tailored to the highly-focused, quantitative tasks that eschew the notion of “taste” entirely:

My impression of “Googlers,” which I concede is based on little direct knowledge and is prejudicial on its face, is one of undersocialized, uncultured, pampered, arrogant faux-savants who have cultivated an arrested adolescence that the Google working environment further nurtures. Their computer-programming skills, the sole skills valued by the company, camouflage the flaws of their neuroanatomy. Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use.

To Joe, the high-functioning prefrontal cortex differentiating babies from adults is a liability, not an asset.

Ethan Marcotte improved and codified a technique I roughly used a couple years ago on a project, but felt a bit kludgey about: allowing the browser to auto-resize images to allow for fluid grids/pages.

If you’ve been looking at the little test case on Windows, there’s a good chance that the image quality, well, looks awful as it scales down. The challenging bit is that this isn’t a browser-specific problem, but a platform-specific one: native image scaling on Windows just, well, kind of sucks.

On IE, he has fluid images replaced by a spacer image, and then uses AlphaImageLoader to have IE render the image well, and resizes the spacer image on browser resize, making IE work reasonably. Firefox 2.0 and earlier on Windows remains janky. Still not perfect, but certainly much better.

Steven Frank has a ponder on the state of UI metaphors and the obsolescence of the desktop. He contends that the real innovation is happening on mobile devices, with fewer standard conventions:

The benefit of pinch-to-zoom over previous zooming methods is so immediately apparent that it justifies the learning curve. That the learning curve is extremely small also helps. I find it fascinating that a huge portion of iPhone usability training is done via the TV ads, pre-sale. They’re both marketing and instruction.

And back to the desktop:

And this seems to me to be the barrier to moving forward to any sort of next generation of computer interface, whatever it might be. Numerous projects (Squeak comes to mind) have put forth ideas as to how we might interact with data in the future. As amazingly revolutionary and beneficial as your new idea may be, you can’t escape this albatross of legacy data.

Filesystems may come, but good, new metaphors seem to be few.

Ben de Castella has an interesting take on the impact of the aforementioned engineering-centric design philosophy at Google:

While people may not be prepared to shell out for PC software, mobiles are a different story. Mobiles are the ultimate lifestyle accessory and one that consumers are used to paying for, even if indirectly through operators. While design may not be too much of an issue when you’re getting something for free, when you’re shelling out hundreds of dollars it suddenly becomes more important, particularly when it is something that goes everywhere with you.

I don’t think it’s a matter of one or the other. All parts of the team need to value and understand the thought/design/engineering process of the rest of the team in order to come to the best conclusions. Apple seems to indeed embrace both design and engineering, while Google seems to only embrace the latter. This is a legit criticism of the G1 to almost anyone except developers, unsurprisingly.

I was asked to do a quick little eval of IRS.gov, and the premise was that “everyone thought it sucked.” It looked nasty, yeah, but there was a lot of good stuff going on there. Over at the Viget UX Blog:

So when a taxpayer is at that dreadful time of year, filing tax returns, finding out that freelance gig comes at a high price in April, or wondering why her employer’s automatic withholdings didn’t cover the load this year, it’s going to be incredibly difficult for that user to say that IRS.gov is anything other than Beelzebub’s homepage. Any slight flaw becomes an enormous headache and a source of angst and confusion.

Can you imagine a world where the overwhelming majority of people actually like the IRS homepage? It’d take more than an act of Congress…

Mr. Spool has a term to codify our need to disorient ourselves when we’ve been neck-deep in solving a problem:

To us, it looked like he was daydreaming. He’d just finished leaning all the raw materials against the wall, basically in the positions they’ll occupy once the project was completed. Then he stepped back and stared at them, with this quizzical expression on his face. Apparently, this was hunkering.

Hunkering takes a bunch of forms, but it’s not always stepping back for three or four minutes. For me, it sometimes requires stepping not just back, but away from the problem, and coming back a bit later. It’s a necessary part of my toolkit if I expect (or my client expects) a quality solution.

The results are in, and this time, rather than a big honkin’ PDF of results, the ALA/AEA folks used HTML (HTML5, specifically) and CSS to display the data.

Of interest to us UX-types is the finding that usability/information architecture roles had a among the highest levels of job satisfaction, a very high propensity to value their education, and that job satisfaction rises with educational attainment. I’d suspect that among UX-related roles, those findings would be even more pronounced.

For employers, it’s worth noting that job satisfaction correlates more with the frequency of raises than it does with the size of the raise. Going more than a year between raises represents a major drop-off in satisfaction, and quarterly raises seem to be the sweet spot.

I also happened to notice that UX-related fields were near the top with respect to salary, but that was just a passing curiosity, of course.

James Melzer has some good thoughts on language in the context of critiquing IA, and some word pairs that he uses to evaluate and critique work done by others.

An interesting note: he pairs “crowdsourced” as the antonym to “designed.”

Some beautiful motion graphics here by Rob Chiu. It reminds me of the opening scene of Stranger than Fiction, with infographics abound.

It’s certainly doesn’t seem cohesive, but it’s some powerful and awesome eyecandy.

My friends up at Happy Cog are redesigning Mozilla.org, and like Mark Boulton’s Drupal Redesign, they and Mozilla are opening the process up to the public. Right now, you can see a pretty large body of work behind three general design directions.

I can’t wait until I have a project that calls for this kind of transparency during the process. It seems to me to be a win in at least two ways: everyone gets a say, and yet since it’s hundreds or thousands of people, it helps stakeholders keep perspective better than when it’s twelve people around a table.

Another perspective from Kevin Fox, a former Senior UX Design Lead at Google:

Also please keep in mind that everyone has opinions on design, and that your UX professional has devoted years of their life to learning to separate their subjective opinions from their objective understanding about how the larger audience will interpret an interface. It’s not as demonstrable as code that passes unit-tests, but trust in it anyhow.

and to the users:

Google could easily increase their revenue in the short term with just a few poor decisions, but they don’t. This philosophy of ‘put the user first and the money will follow’ is so ingrained into the Google culture that many designers and engineers for whom this is their first corporate job don’t even realize that this is unusual, and that is awesome.

There are two sides to every story. Good to hear Fox’s.

Things seem to be stirring up around previously-linked Doug Bowman’s departure from Google, and there seems to be a bit of a designer exodus from the Google fanboy-wagon. Joe Clark:

Google, I correctly contend, is overrun with unsocialized Aspergerian math guys who think anything to do with visual design (or, for that matter, accommodating cripples) just does not compute…

Two bull-headed communities — the Googleplex and the standards-minded design community, both with laserlike focus in their own ways — seem to be coming to a bit of a head here.

A nice post by Dan Lockton about the opposite of promoting ideal behavior in an interface: preventing errors from happening in the first place.

It’s often the view on influencing user behaviour found in health & safety-related design, medical device design and manufacturing engineering (as poka-yoke): where, as far as possible, one really doesn’t want errors to occur at all (Shingo’s zero defects). Learning through trial-and-error exploration of the interface might be great for, say, Kai’s Power Tools, but a bad idea for a dialysis machine or the control room of a nuclear power station.

+1 for the design patters, +5 for the Kai’s Power Tools reference.

Douglas Bowman, one of the godfathers of web design, on his decision to leave Google after three years:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

As is now coming up over and over again, data and user research should be one tool to inform design decisions, but should not be the sole factor or measure of design success.

An initiative by .NET magazine:

The premise is simple: Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out.

While all that is true, corporate networks are the lagging party here, and I don’t see IE8 changing this yet. There’s an entire industry based around supporting IE6 and the intranets that depend on it.

I expect IE7 users to rather quickly move to IE8, but I also expect the IE6 users to be around six months from now in numbers not inconsistent with the current rate of migration.

Quoth TheAge from Australia:

Ninety-four per cent of the nearly 800,000 Facebook users who have voted in a poll on the site said they do not like the changes rolled out in the past two weeks.

Let’s see what these folks are saying in a few weeks. For all that’s wrong with Facebook, and there are certainly more than a handful, I’m glad they have the stones to know when to listen to the masses, and when to pursue their product vision.

Userfly tracks mouse motion, keystrokes, and clicks of your users so you can piece together their experience and see where your design might be falling flat. This looks disgustingly impressive.

Chris Fahey explores the question of whether or not designers need to be technical in order to be successful in interactive design.

Instead, I think a firm grounding in a broad range of designed experiences far outweighs any need for hands-on experience in the deepest challenges of technology implementation.

I agree with Chris to an extent, but think that the ability to understand obstacles toward implementing a given design is the difference between the designer who creates great stuff, and the designer who creates great stuff that you can actually use.

I’ve never seen a designer get any worse after spending mental effort becoming familiar with the more technical side of the web.

Andrew Chen has a great post about a common thread for me, the misuse of user research:

Ultimately, quantitative metrics are just another piece of data that can be used to guide decision-making for product design - you have to combine this with all the other bits of information to get it right.

Just like there’s no single risk-assessment equation in finance, there’s no single driving factor toward successful interface design. While user testing and research is an important factor in any significant design project, conclusions that are principally based on user research are incomplete and underdeveloped.

On the web, the little things can make a big difference. Jared Spool helped a major e-commerce site (anyone know which?) evaluate their checkout process, and found that one button was standing in the way of — get this— $300 million dollars per year of revenue.

The challenge is being able to find those same issues when you’re a site that can’t spend money and hire someone like Jared Spool for weeks or months.

I just went to track a package on UPS.com, and noticed that it’s undergone a bit of a redesign. At first glance it looks like they’re trying to simplify the layout, feature new offerings and service updates more prominently.

It could use a lot of polish, visually, but I don’t think it’s necessarily that bad structurally. Then again, I don’t use UPS.com all the time, so I’m not in the best position to judge.

Hot on the heels of the inauguration and the redesign of whitehouse.gov, Ali and the Sunlight Labs team had a quick look at how they would redesign USA.gov, in a way at least significantly more useful than Andy Rutledge’s flaimbait exercise of the same kind.

There are some gaps here, but it’s a really inspiring look at what could happen with just a little bit of thought and attention to user needs and quality design.

Here’s hoping some of these ideas stick outside the White House over the next four (eight) years!

IDEO is working with BUG Labs on a fairly quick exploration of a redesign for their popular hardware prototyping tool. It’s always cool to get to see the work IDEO does.

The most interesting thing about this is that they’re blogging about their deliverables publicly as the process is underway. I’ve been hoping to land a project that would benefit from this kind of public exposure, getting feedback from real users throughout the course of the process.

I think that feedback could very successfully augment or replace many aspects of a big user research process, with a potential to do so with a much smaller budget and time commitment.

Jared Spool posts an interesting set of conclusions about how design teams work.

At Viget, we tend to focus on the latter three: genius design, activity-focused design, and user-focused design. Of course, unintended design probably happens in all projects to one extent or another. How those three types fit into the projects really depends on the needs, timeline, and budget of the project.

On my own, I hope most of it falls into the genius and activity-focused categories. I don’t really do user research to any real extent for personal projects, except for informal bits here or there, and it’s certainly all low/no-budget.

A surface-level, but very valuable article about the links between ADHD and creativity. To me, everyone seems to fall somewhere along a continuum between OCD and ADHD, and I’m more toward the ADHD end than toward the middle. It’s those zones away from the middle that open the doors to really great opportunities for thought.

My friend Will Evans is still putting the finishing touches on his blog, but there’s some great stuff on here now, including open-sourced templates he uses for deliverables and a few great articles to boot.

The New York Times does such great infographics almost every time I see them. This one is no exception.

This looks pretty great

Pretty cool

A revolution in typeface design has led to everything from more-legible newspapers and cell-phone displays to extra-tacky wedding invitations.

This is a great article on type, and great to see it in The Atlantic.