September 2006 Archives

We’re back… now, with less context!

• Better life through design
• Michal Migurski reviews Amazon’s EC2
• 6 Ways to fix a confused information architecture (useit.com)
• Push my button (beyond generic Submit buttons)
• Coding interviews with OneNote (I admit I’ve never cracked open OneNote)
• A discussion with danah boyd get caught up on what the wonder woman is thinking
• tyranny of the timestamp (unique angle on the Facebook flap)
• Applied Empathy or “A Design Framework for Meeting Human Needs and Desires”
• LukeW on PeterMe’s “Stop Designing Products” talk (…and start designing integrated systems, that is)
• SocialText 2.0 launches, congratulation Ross, Adina, et al.
• Second generation tag clouds (note to self: Invite Joe Lamantia onto tag 3.0 panel for sxsw if it gets picked)
• IA for [Web Developers | The ‘Come to Me’ Web] (two talks by Thomas Vander Wal)

…and, we’re outtie.

In response to a thread on the IxDA mailing list about how job ads seeking “Leonardo da Vinci” (that is, someone who can design, do illustrations, and write code) may be trying to pack too many requirements into a single req, Dave Rogers posted a link to an article her wrote nearly a year ago for gotomedia, The User Advocate: One Size Fits None?, in which he writes:

I also recognize that the “one size fits all” designer is how the Web was won. Because the visual nature of the early Web was transformative, it was natural for visual designers to take the lead. Already savvy users of computer design tools, they added some straightforward HTML skills to their palettes and hung out their shingles. Pioneers are always generalists. But those days are long past. The settlers have moved in, cities are rising. As business leapt into the Web with its show-no-mercy requirements, the gaps in the early Web designers’ skills-notably in interaction design (IxD), usability engineering and information architecture-became increasingly evident. Specialists began to emerge. Requirements analysts. Usability specialists. Interaction designers. And information architects.

We’re hiring like mad right now and I’m wrestling with some of these same issues. I gave up trying to find an IA who was also good at functional requirements, specs, and use cases (although “back in my day” we did all those things while walking uphill in the snow against the wind both ways) and now I’m looking for separate individuals: an IA/user experience expert and a tech writer / spec writer.

Chris Fahey is in the middle of publishing a series of blog posts on the topic of class and web design. (In part two, he asks What class are you?.)

Interesting topic (and somewhat taboo, here in the States, at least).

Last year, Jared Spool wrote an essay about a disruptive intranet redesign in which he used the analogy of finding your well lived-in home entirely changed on waking up one morning (Designing Embraceable Change). In it, he discusses how to make it easier for people to embrace changes in their information spaces:

To design for embraceable change, the design team has to be well aware of the existing Current and Target Knowledge points, as well as the new points. Field studies are the ideal technique for learning the existing points, whereas usability testing will give a detailed understanding as to whether the new design has an acceptable knowledge gap. These two techniques are essential for any team who needs to tackle this difficult problem.

Over the last few months I’ve posted notices here whenever Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (the legendary authors of the first two editions of O’Reilly’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, aka the Polar Bear book) have announced another survey for their third edition.

Now the IA Institute has published all of the survey results.

Here’s Jay Rosen’s announcement of a $100,000 grant for his NADN project: PressThink: Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone

My first thought was, “This sounds like a job for George,” but George already has a job….

I like that Rosen wants to have both a paid editor and a paid “network wrangler” to pull off this “pro-am” journalism experiment.

As I disclosed last time I posted about this, I am an advisor to this project. Rosen was in SF recently to do some brainstorming about the NADN website. I wasn’t involved in that meeting (it sounds like it was a very fruitful meeting) but I did have a chance to get together with Jay over dinner last week and I’m very excited about the potential of this project to catalyze an evolution in journalism beyond how it’s currently practiced.

More on this when I have time to reflect and write.

File under useful: CSS 2.1 Reference : Cultured Code

Tracy Rolling, the community advocate for Platial.com (“the people’s atlas) recently sent me a heads up about a new styling feature for the DIY maps that Platial makes it so easy to, er, make.

And, by the way, I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general. They usually seem to understand, though, that I’m a sucker for people who’ve read my book or follow my blogs or both and say they like my writing. Still, I won’t blog about anything! I’m not a total flattery whore.

OK, so back to Platial. Tracy demos the new feature in her own blog, The Sputterly Utter, and describes the service and the process like so:

Platial, the website which allows people who don’t know what an api is to create their own Google mashups, has just launched a new feature called Mapstyler. Now you can build your own map and then give it a custom style for publishing on your website or blog. People can also upload their own css files and custom markers, to have their way with Platial maps and integrate them into their blogs and websites.

Note to Woody: Investigate for Bikr?

In Boxes and Arrows, Stephen Turbek suggests making wireframes look as realistic as possible, and argues that the old idea of clearly distinguishing wireframes from design is actually counterproductive (Real Wireframes Get Real Results):

How many times have you been asked, “So, is the new website going to be black and white too?” after presenting your wireframes to a client or a usability test subject? This question is almost a traditional part of being an information architect. Wireframes do not clearly define what they mean to convey, leading to confusion. This is most apparent in wireframe usability tests with users who don’t know anything about the project or process. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps that will make wireframes be understood by anyone. They don’t even have to be much more work. It’s simply a matter of choosing to “get real” from the start.

Now, here at Extractable we prefer to do usability tests with prototypes, so we don’t have that specific problem, but I have tended lately toward dropping in the client’s actual logo, using their brand colors and generally making the wireframes look more realistic and my anecdotal experience so far is that clients do prefer that to utterly abstracted grayscale featureless wireframes full of lorem ipsum and x-boxes indicating where the images should go.

The first round of panels proposed for SXSW Interactive 2007 were those proposed by past speakers (I had two proposals in that round). Voting for the first round is now closed.

2007 SXSW Interactive Panel Proposal Picker (Round Two) starts today, featuring panel proposals that were submitted in the last few months.

Go check out all the creative ideas and vote.

Amazing amounts of work going on around here, so it’s been hard to find the time to blog (I know: excuses, excuses). Here are a couple of things I’ve been meaning to post about recently:

Jared Spool’s new SpoolCast:

I go to 20+ conferences a year and while many of the conferences have excellent programs, I often find myself learning the most from the after-hours activities. Often, these activities happen in bars, with a group of like-minded, extremely bright people. No specific agenda is on the table, yet somehow, the conversation turns out to be fun, thought provoking, and interesting. Inspired by some excellent podcasts I listen to regularly, I thought we could reproduce the fascinating discourse I’ve experienced at these non-official conference events for everyone’s benefit. I contacted some folks who I thought would make great conversation and, to my surprise, they all jumped at the chance to partake in our little experiment. From this was born the first SpoolCast. It’s a 90-minute recording of fascinating conversation on topics of user experience, usability, and design. In this inaugural recording, we discuss:

• What can we learn from the new Brown University web site?
• What does it mean to be usable?
• Why is MySpace so successful?
• Which is better designed, the new Brown Web Site or Craigslist?
• How important is the design of a home page? (I think not so much. Everyone else disagrees.)
• The value of social networking
• The UPA Body of Knowledge project
• The design experience, as it applies to conference design

and Alun Machin’s Everyday Usability group on Flickr (quoting Jackie Moyes from the IxDA discussion list):

He’s collecting photographic examples of bad usability that can be used during World Usability Day on November 14th Please submit photos, and pass this link on.

Today’s been pretty stressful. This was just the chuckle I needed:

From the oldie-but-goodie file, here’s Painless Functional Specifications from Joel on Software.

Bonus: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

Blogger (and former Kos front-page poster) Kid Oakland has been gradually building a network called Blogs United to help local political bloggers learn from and support each other:

Local bloggers are citizen journalists and activists. They are a vital part of the emerging netroots infrastructure. My goal this election season is to show how local blogs are changing the political landscape of the United States. And my goal with Blogs United is to try to provide a forum that is useful to local blogs and bloggers themselves. Something is going on here just below the radar. I’m committed to tracking it and helping to explain it.

Disclosure: I’m a member of Blogs United and am helping K/O with some technical stuff.

There’s a lot of buzz in the interaction design world about the new Brown University website. Seems like they’ve broken out of the now-traditional, near-clichŽ set o’ tabs across the top of the page to present a more dynamic peek-a-boo shutter-blinds effect on their homepage (pro and cont).

Beyond the homepage, much of the site looks like any other website out there (although the admissions area and a few other areas are much more dynamic and sport a unique look and feel).

Still the homepage is exciting and presents a lot of choices in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. Look for the other Ivies (and other universities and colleges in general) to take this as a needed kick in the pants (at best) or to follow suit with a copycat design (at worst, not that that would be such a bad thing considering the tired designs of most college websites today).

Back in late July, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced an initiative called NewAssignment.Net. (Full disclosure: I am one of a medium-sized set of advisors to this project.) The goal of NADN, in my words, is to leverage blog networks and traditional editorial expertise to define, assign, write, and edit news articles covering assignments that might otherwise go unreported. To hear the project explained much more effectively, in Jay’s words, check out this interview with NPR’s On the Media.

Thomas Vander Wal explores the design implications of text strings (Domain of Digital Design Includes Strings). I used to think I was the only one who cared about the text in a file name or a url, but actually of course a lot of people do. Unfortunately, most CMS’s still produce butt-ugly urls, and I have to admit that I don’t have a well defined process in our user experience practice for defining the url structure for a site. Sometimes we specify the url paths in our content matrices, but not always. Now that people are more aware of the SEO implications of their urls (and the interesting but strange fact that Google views a hyphen but not an underscore as a word delimiter), there’s more attention to this level of the user experience. And that’s a Good Thing.

Nice kit for putting together paper prototypes: Paper Prototyping Graphics (Design Usability Resources) from Information & Design, for the arts and crafts crowd.

LukeW (from Yahoo) explores some ideas for Refining Data Tables at UXMatters. (Nice illustrations, too!)

Check out this Folder tree with Drag and Drop capabilities based on unordered list tags.

Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software”:

The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would say. We’re simply seeing an evolution of what’s come before. The revolution is that so much of it has become mainstream (MySpace is mainstream) and the barriers to launching a service that incorporates participation have fallen so low. Not that there is some new fangled set of features that everyone must go out and implement to stay relevant. Knocking some hot air out of the hype is warranted. Some of these newer services resemble those dot coms that launched in the late nineties that didn’t grasp what Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger, and others, were *really* doing. You know, those sites that thought if they had a clever domain name, niche, and a particular set of features, they were on their way to riches. … By and large it was “social media” that survived the original dot com crash. And I expect that, by and large again, the best “social media” will survive whenever next bubble pops. So when the next time of reckoning comes, and it will, look at what lives on. And think about why. Burn this in your brain - the Web *is* social software.

Can I get an amen?

At ACM Queue, John Canny, the Paul and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley, writes about the future of human-computer interaction, For many years HCI has been evolutionary, not revolutionary. Is this about to change?. He begins by making a case for the centrality of HCI in product design:

[I[t’s not a good idea to separate “the interface” from the rest of the product, since the customer sees the product as one system. Designing “from the interface in” is the state of the art today. So HCI has expanded to encompass “user-centered design,” which includes everything from needs analysis, concept development, prototyping, and design evolution to support and field evaluation after the product ships. That’s not to say that HCI swallows up all of software engineering. But the methods of user-centered design - contextual inquiry, ethnography, qualitative and quantitative evaluation of user behavior - are quite different from those for the rest of computer engineering. So it’s important to have someone with those skills involved in all phases of a product’s development.

He goes on to suggest that the next leap forward in HCI will involve “context”:

Let’s start with the cellphone. It has a tiny screen with tiny awkward buttons and no mouse. From start to finish, it was designed for speech. The microphone and speaker are small but highly evolved, and the mic placement in its normal position is optimal for speech recognition. We’ll get to speech interfaces shortly. If it’s a smart phone, it probably also has a camera and a Bluetooth radio. It has some kind of position information, ranging from coarse cell tower to highly accurate assisted satellite GPS. This is all “context” information, in contrast to the “text” you might type on the keyboard or see on the screen. Normally, WIMP interfaces rely entirely on the text you type (let’s include mouse input) to figure out what to do. Context-aware interfaces use everything they can. This is particularly relevant to mobile phones. When you’re using a phone, you’re either in some “place” (cafŽ, restaurant, store) where you do rather specific activities, or you’re moving between places. If the phone can figure out what that place is, it can also provide services that you want there, or that complement services that that place provides (e.g., song previews in a music store, comparison pricing in a supermarket, stats or replays at a baseball game). When you’re between places, the phone can use other pieces of context to figure out what services to offer, or it can wait for you to ask. Let’s work through a concrete example: It’s 7 p.m., it’s raining, and you’re walking in San Francisco (you’re from out of town). You open your phone and it displays three buttons labeled “Dinner?”, “Taxi?”, and “Rapid transit?”. Selecting “Dinner?” will present restaurants you’re apt to like (using collaborative filtering) and even dishes that you may want. The other options leverage the fact that the phone “knows” that you aren’t driving and that it’s raining. It also selects “Rapid transit?” (using that name rather than BART as locals know it, since you’re not local), rather than bus or tram options since it knows your destination and/or because BART is easier to figure out for out-of-towners than the MUNI bus and tram system. The system’s “smarts” are built on knowledge of other users’ behavior, knowledge of your own behavior history and preferences, and the immediate context, which includes time, place, weather, Bluetooth neighborhood, etc. These three pieces represent the three fundamental facets of context that we use in all our work: immediate context; activity context, which is about the history of the particular user and a few others (because many activities are cooperative); and situational context, which is about how other actors typically behave in that situation. Context-awareness is a dream for marketers. Imagine this: Instead of the user initiating the request for “Dinner?”, the phone beeps and presents a message, “Aqua restaurant (a leading San Francisco seafood restaurant) is two blocks away and has a special on salmon-in-parchment for $20.” Now, I’m a very rational person, but I also have a weakness for the pink fish, and when I’m tired and wet and I see that, it really doesn’t matter what the other options are. That is an example of a proactive service, which if executed right, should be a boon to both consumers and advertisers. Before you raise the specter of a Minority Report-style advertising assault, I should tell you that I don’t expect to let just anyone send that kind of message to my phone. I’m going to charge a lot for that (probably in whole dollars), so an advertiser had better be very sure of a conversion before trying it. If so, then I am likely to use that service at that time, and then it’s very useful to me. If Aqua restaurant beacons this message to a few seafood-loving out-of-towners in the neighborhood that night and gets two or three conversions, then the restaurant will be ahead. If I get a half-dozen of those in an evening and one of them gives me a good service, then I feel like I’ve won. If none of them works out, well then at least I’ve earned my BART (rapid transit) fare home, and some change.

It’s a long article but well worth reading the whole thing.

My friend Freeman Ng alerted me to this post at Slashdot: Slashdot | Bloggers 1, Smoke-Filled Room 0:

MarkusQ writes “A few days ago a bi-partisan bill (PDF) to create a searchable on-line database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, financial assistance, earmarks and other such pork was put on ‘secret hold’ using a procedure that does not appear to be mentioned in the Constitution or in the Senate bylaws. This raised the ire of bloggers left and right and started an all out bi-partisan effort to expose the culprit by process of elimination. As it turns out it was our old friend the right honorable Senator from Alaska, Mr. ‘Series of Tubes’, Ted ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Stevens.”

Interesting stats from this article: Poor Usability implicated in Rejection of Mobile Internet:

Three quarters (73%) of people with access to the Internet through their mobile phone are not taking advantage of it. Amongst the reasons for not using mobile Internet were being frustrated by slow-loading pages (38%), problems with navigating websites from a phone or PDA (27%) and some websites being completely unavailable on mobile phones (25%).