wake up!

Designing Social Interfaces - Rough Cut | O’Reilly Media
Originally uploaded by xian

The unedited, 500 page first draft of our book is available now in PDF format for review by anyone who can’t bear to wait till September for the first (“real”) edition to come out.

Yay!

Erin Malone and I introduced some of the fruit of our effort to carve out a pattern language for social user experience design. At the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis this past week we taught our pattern library workshop and then delivered this tandem presentation:

south by, in a nutshell

this is a screenshot of a sampling of the tweets about the core conversation i did with erin malone re social design patterns.

there was one that said we weren’t prepared and were just promoting our book, too.

i do wish we had explicated an example pattern. the summit talk with slides will be more useful, i think. but then this was a core conversation. we tried to seed it and then go with what the room wanted to talk about. that’s unstructured for a panel.

also, we could have walked through the handout all together. live and learn.

Thanks to Julie Choi who is producing this series and Ricky Montalvo who directed and filmed this five-minute talk. I really enjoyed it and I think they did a great job with it (and the whole series, actually):

In anticipation of the Pattern Library workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, Will Evans interviewed us for Boxes & Arrows, the premiere user experience magazine online.

Will asked great questions and I think he brought out some interesting discussion among us all. Here’s a taste:

Question: I have heard it argued that use of design patterns and pattern libraries removes creativity and innovation from the solution-finding process? Do these criticisms have merit?

xian: I don’t really think that argument holds water. I do understand the concern, and it’s totally possible to apply patterns mindlessly or to force their use inappropriately, but, to my mind, patterns focus innovation and creativity on the leading edge of the problem: the unsolved part.

Read the whole thing over at B&A!

As you may know, I am writing a book with Erin Malone called Designing Social Interfaces for O’Reilly Media.

Erin is the the founder of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and hired me to be its third curator. Today she is a partner at Tangible UX, a consulting firm, and I maintain the library as a YDN design evangelist on Micah Laaker’s Yahoo! Open Strategy (YOS) team, in collaboration with Luke Wroblewski’s Front Doors and Network Services (FDNS) team.

The top of my agenda in the past year has been to identify, gather, and document a family of social design patterns: observed practices that work well in resolving common design problems in social applications. I’ve been looking for and teasing out patterns that enable social environments to thrive and sustain themselves.

Fortunately, I had a leg up or two. While there were very few documented community or social media patterns in the library, there are a wealth of specs, papers, patterns, presentations, and guidelines scattered around the intranet, and there was Matt Leacock’s first take on a social media toolkit, shepherded together on an internal Yahoo! wiki.

More importantly, I looked out across the landscape of the web and drew on my own personal experience as a user, analyst and addict of online social experiences.

At BarCamp Block last year I facilitated a session on social media patterns (at least that’s what I was calling them then) and the net takeaway was an amazing mindmap of potential patterns. Quite a few of them turn out to be social moments, social behaviors, or social objects; or scenarios that illuminate patterns without being patterns themselves. But the outline and cloud diagrams we built from that brainstorm helped get me started sorting out some possible organizing structures beyond what we had internally a Yahoo.

This mindmap went through a series of iterations and refinements. Meanwhile, I started presenting on the topic of social patterns at BayCHI, at South By, at the IA Summit, at Ignite and more recently at TechPulse and soon PLoP and Interaction09.

Taking your half-baked ideas on the road and presenting them to a demanding crowd of payng customers is a great way of figuring out which ideas have resonance and which miss the mark. Presenting ongoing work in progress is tough: you make yourself vulnerable and open to criticism. But the criticism will come eventually anyway. Why not hear it now while you can still address it and incorporate the best ideas of others into your work?

For that matter, I feel it’s essential to be clear about one thing: almost none of this work on social design patterns is original. Yes, of course I am naming patterns and writing them and perhaps throwing in a nugget of experience here and there, but for the most part I am still curating these patterns. I’ve been stealing from everybody!

We hates plagiarism so we cite sources and point back to originators where applicable. I’ve proposed that the nascent PLPL (Pattern Language Markup Language) standard include an attribution element, with a common structure for reflecting sources, reuse, derived work, and licensing matters.

Furthermore, in our book we are inviting a wide range of leading practitioners, thinkers, and bloggers to contribute essays on one or more of the pattern families we’re developing for the book. Because, yes, the book is in many ways an offshoot of this ongoing social pattern collecting effort. And in that same spirit we’re both interested (Erin and me) in experimenting iwth methods of opening up the writing process and seeking feedback, correction, criticism, and contributions before the book’s ship date.

We’ll probably post patterns in progress on a wiki and in the meantime we will both be posting thoughts about the chapters we’re working on on our blogs. I’ll also post some draft patterns here at least until we have the wiki process figured out.

My next post in this series will be about a set of fundamental social design patterns I’m pulling together in Chapter 2.

These are the slides I worked from today in my talk at Yahoo! Open Hack Day 08, Design Hacks with Stencils & Patterns:

My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson. Here are my slides.

| View | Upload your own

UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):

At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)

I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.

In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.

For now, here are my summit talks:

| View | Upload your own

and

| View | Upload your own

Here are my slides from my talk at Xerox Parc (the BayCHI monthly program meeting) on April 8th:

| View | Upload your own

When I get the audio, I plan to put together a slidecast to synch the slides to the talk, which should be more valuable.

Oh, and consider viewing the slides in full-screen mode. They should be a lot more legible that way. I did my best to optimize the source files.

This made my day
Originally uploaded by xian.

When I saw someone was using twitter to send out quotations from Buckminister Fuller I was all over that. Getting this email message was just kind of an unexpected side treat.

Now, if Bucky Fuller really was following me on twitter I might feel a little more pressure to be brilliant and cosmic. Like a dweeby Merlin Mann.

Next Tuesday (April 8, 2008) I’ll be speaking at BayCHI on the topic of social patterns in a talk called Social Design and the Yahoo! Pattern Library:

Social networking sites are proliferating. New social media aggregrators appear every day. Venerable old sites are adding social features or trying to activate the social profiles of their users and members. A number of the interaction patterns that drive social relationships online are becoming clear (as well as a number of nasty “antipatterns”). Christian will talk about social patterns, previewing some that are in the works for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library as well as others that he has noted “in the wild.” The newly redesigned Yahoo! Developer Network site is the host of Yahoo’s open design pattern library. Over the next few months, Yahoo! will be rolling out a series of open and social APIs and the pattern library will be gathering and sharing best practices for social web design.

I’m still trying to figure out what I can share and what I can’t, so I may focus on social design patterns observed “in the wild,” as well as my current favorite topics of presence, identity, and attention.

BayCHI talks typically have two speakers back to back, and I’m really looking forward to hearing Amy Jo Kim from Shufflebrain, who is speaking before me on the topic “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Social Software”:

Over the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of interactive services that harness the collective efforts of users. On the web, services like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr, and Digg are providing hours of entertainment to millions of people. These game-like services are changing the face of networked entertainment, and rapidly displacing television as a leisure-time activity. They share three key elements: user-generated content, community infrastructure, and game mechanics. In this talk, I’ll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and explore how to use game mechanics to create interactive experiences that are fun, compelling and addictive.

I don’t want this blog to turn into just a litany of upcoming speaking appearances, but then again it would be foolish not to post these announcements, right?

If you’re interested in interaction design patterns or in the elements of social web design, then come on down to Miami in April for the IA Summit and either sign up for one of the two pre-conference workshops I’m helping teach or see my presentation or panel in the main program.

Here are the basic facts about the two workshops (more details in the title links):

• Design patterns: from interaction to design to build is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, colleagues of mine from the user experience design team of the Yahoo! Developer Network. Erin founded the pattern library and has captained it throughout its entire existence (going on four years) with the help of three curators, me being the third. Lucas is the lead designer on the YDN redesign project and works directly with the Yahoo! User Interface library team, so he’s intimately familiar with the development challenges and issues involved with implementing design patterns in the real world.

• Design and architecture of social web experiences is a full-day workshop I’m teaching with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter. Christina is a director of product management at LinkedIn, a co-founder of the IA Institute, founder of Boxes and Arrows (the leading online user experience design magazine), and founder of Cucina Media, the makers of PublicSquare, the publishing/community software B+A now runs on. Joshua Porter is a former associate of Jared Spool’s UIE and writes the popular Bokardo blog on social web design.

And here are the basic details about the presentation and the panel:

• Designing with Patterns in the Real World is a presentation I am giving with Austin Govella, a senior information architect at Comcast Media. We both have plenty of hands-on experience with the trials, tribulations, and occasional triumphs that stem from applying design patterns to real world interaction, information, and interface design problems and we plan to let it all hang out.

• Presence, Identity, and Attention in Social Web Architecture is a panel I’m moderating featuring a “murderer’s row” of some of the leading thinkers in user experience and social web design: Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn, Andrew Hinton of Vanguard, Gene Smith of nForm, and Brian Oberkirch of Small Good Thing. I’ve been talking to all of these folks for some time about my latest hobbyhorse (presence) and the rest of the “human OS” stack that social web applications are built on. I plan to run a tight ship and am expecting a great multi-perspective dialogue to ensue.

I’ll devote a whole blog post to each of these items as the Summit gets closer, but wanted to mention it now while there’s still time to sign up for the conference at early-bird prices.

See you in Miami?

As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I can’t really take credit for it, but when my ego needs a boost I just smile and nod.

When Erin Malone and Matt Leacock and others first launched the internal pattern library, they presented a talk at the IA Summit, called Implementing a Pattern Library in the Real World: A Case Study (and subsequently the linked article on the same topic at Boxes and Arrows). Then Erin and Bill Scott took the library to the public on the Yahoo! Developer Network website and Bill enriched the library with tons of Ajax-y goodness, closely tied to the YUI Library.

Since that time, I came on board and I’ve worked on reorganizing the library, updating the patterns, and shepherding a new generation of patterns through our internal refinement and review process, with an eye toward identifying useful social and openness patterns that we can share with the whole Web. So when people come up to me at conferences or find me on mailing lists for information architects and interaction designers frequently the are curious about how the library has evolved in the years since it was founded, what our internal process looks like these days for writing, reviewing, approving, and rating patterns, and how we decide which ones to publish in the open library.

Recently, I gave a talk at Yahoo! as part of our UED Brown bag series, called The Pattern Library Wants YOU!, intended to update oldtimers on changes and improvements to our process and infrastructure and to orient new designers about the library, and of course to encourage people to get involved. Ricky Montalvo, our ace videographer for YUI Theater and YDN Theater, recorded my talk and edited it together with my slides, and we just spent a week or so removing any too-sensitive information and getting our friendly legal folks to sign off on releasing the talk to the public.

So, without further ado, here is the public version of my talk, which should answer a lot of those questions I’m hearing these days.

(This post was adapted from the YUI blog by sticking it on a block of wood and banging a nail into it.)

At BarCamp Block earlier this year I led a discussion of social media design patterns. The slides I posted were really more just about patterns and how we deal with them at Yahoo! But the group exercise was to brainstorm a huge list of social media and social networking activities that could be described and documented as patterns.

These are not the patterns themselves, but at least one pattern could probably be written around each of these gestures. We found it easiest in the brainstorm to just rattle off a list of gerunds (“adding, blocking, friending,” etc.).

The list we came up is also not exhaustive or definitive. It’s one group’s idea of the various patterns that a social system could support. The initial list was posted at the BarCamp Block wiki. Then Kent Bye, one of the participants, took a stab at re-sorting it a bit and created a visualization. He also then hand-copied it into an outline format and sent me his “version two” of the list.

Since then I’ve made a few more tweaks and have produced a version 3 outline. I’ve been working on visualizing it myself, so I turned the OPML into an OmniOutliner file and then imported that into OmniGraffle. The map is so tangled that Graffle had a hard time displaying it without crossing lines, so I spent some more time dragging the various nodes and clusters around until they were each separate. The end result is that it’s huge of course, and still by no means final or exhaustive or authoritative.

In fact, it’s decidedly not the taxonomy of social media patterns we’re working on internally at Yahoo! Think of it as an open source, collaborative work in progress. The thumbnail image above links to a full-sized PDF you should feel free to grab to get a better look at the current state of play of this idea, and if you’d like the OPML file or any other format, just drop me a note and I’ll send it to you.

When I get a moment, I’ll drop by the BarCamp Block wiki and upload the file there in several formats too, at least until someone provides a better place for hosting this project.

Thanks, iTunes!
Originally uploaded by xian.

Not really sure how to respond to this.

Well, actually, I do know how to respond. I had to click Yes.

I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design.

IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea folks together to share their ideas about design, architecture, shared information spaces, visualization of dataa, and what it means to be human in an internetworked machine age. I expect this year’s conference program to be every bit as stimulating.

IDEA stands for Information, Design, Experience, Access, and its presented by the IA Institute, an organization on whose board I have the privilege of serving at this time. My involvement in the conference planning has been focused on getting the website up and recruiting volunteers for the technical tasks required (my portfolio, as it were, on the board of directors of the IAI is technical matters). Events director Sarah Rice, IDEA founder Peter Merholz, and volunteer event coordinator Greg Corrin deserve the credit for pulling this year’s conference together.

Technical volunteers Beck Tench, Chi-chi Oguekwe, Grace Lau, Susan Wong, and Gordon McLean have all chipped in to build and maintain the site, with very little supervision or input from me, so they deserve a great deal of credit as well.

For anyone attending (or thinking of attending) IDEA this year, consider signing up in addition at the Crowdvine social networking site. There’s still time to register (the conference runs on October 4th and 5th, with an optional pre-conference event on the 3rd), and if you do manage to come to New York, look me up at Parsons and say hi.

Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.

According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?

Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.

I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.

Here are my slides from my presentation, Mobile Information Architecture: Designing Experiences for the Mobile Web:

(I may update them with a 2.0 version based on some new learnings from subsequent conversations, and a different idea of how to pace the imagery.)

And here are my slides from the panel I moderated, Lessons From Failure: Or How IAs Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombs:

John Battelle’s Searchblog: The Blog Merchandising Problem, or, Blogs, V 2.0 (2.1? 3.0?)… (via Jay Fienberg)

The great power of blogs has always been simplicity, but are we ready to go to the next step?

A while back I wanted to comment on Elton’s entry, Information Architecture updated to 3.0, and draw on a post to the IxDA list by Jay Fienberg, talking about the Venn diagrams that might show how the various user experience roles and practices tend to overlap. It seems that each type of practitioner has a tendency to see their own specialty as central and the other practices as peripheral. This isn’t limited to UX folks. You can encounter this with developers and visual designers as well.

One thing I really love about Extractable is the collaborative nature of the people here. No one seems to exhibit the sort of hubris that says “my practice is central - the rest of you need to follow my lead.” Instead there’s a true recognition that a fine user experience (based on a sensitive information architecture, incorporating engaging and immersive visual and interactive design, driven by a stable and responsive application) can only emerge from a process that enables a multidisciplinary team to collaborate as equals.

So, back to Jay’s point. He was responding to a list post by David Fiorito (itself in response to a thread following about the IA 3.0 blog entry by Peter Morville linked in Elton’s piece), in which David said, “Imagine a Venn diagram - one circle is IxD, one IA, and one ID,” as well as, “usability is the means by which we validate IA, IxD, and ID.”

Jay responded (and now I’m going to quote him in full because, well because I don’t think he’ll mind):

I’d add to that Venn diagram:

• content strategy / management
• visual design / graphic arts
• taxonomy

I’m thinking of a Venn diagram that represents possible approaches to dealing with “information challenges” (starting at a level or two up from requirements and objectives / needs*). The areas of overlap in the diagram represent approaches shared by many or all of the disciplines. These common approaches tend to be sufficient for smaller challenges, e.g., there are zillions of web designers who design simple sites, and whose design encompasses IA, IxD, ID, and graphic art. But, each discipline has special approaches that are unique to itself. These unique approaches are either important or essential for dealing with bigger information challenges. I recently worked on a project that had at least one person doing each role of: IA, taxonomy, IxD, visual design, and usability. We also could have used a dedicated content strategist and a dedicated content manager. And, some time from a dedicated ID would have been nice too. We needed each person to do things that the others could not do - or, would not ever get to do, given the range and priority of issues. * Jesse James Garrett’s “The Elements of User Experience” diagram still stands as a pretty good model for of all of this stuff. We might imagine this Venn diagram we’re talking about as a flattened version of Jesse’s diagram. Note that Jesse is probably smarter than all of us for looking at this in two dimensions rather than one - the IA / IxD dichotomy seems like a very minor division in the total scope of factors accounted for in Jesse diagram!

I’ll follow up by noting that Morville has his own honeycomb diagram that places findability in among usability, accessibility and other -bilities. Another famous IA Peter, Peter Boersma, has also popularized the concept of T-shaped people to help explain the sort of well rounded people who often end up architecting information, designing interactions, making interfaces easier to use and so on. They may tend to have a specialty (the “leg” of the T) but they are also broad and have some familiarity with and interest in a series of other “pillar” disciplines (the crossbar of the T - it’s easier to visualize with Peter’s diagrams).

I expect to see these conceptual discussions continue, perhaps at one degree of abstraction (we are all diagram people after all), where instead of practices competing for centrality we’ll see models of how the practices relate to each other competing for supremacy. Good times.

A while back Erik Guttman posted an item to IxDA list discussing the role user research plays in product design:

I have repeatedly attempted to explain how user research can serve to identify, prioritize and clarify product requirements. I have difficulty for a variety of reasons.

• people confuse or fail to see the distinction between inbound marketing research activities with user research
• people fail to distinguish between customers and users
• people do not understand the qualitative methods used to perform user research
• people often confuse user research with usability studies

To clarify these relationships, he created this user research context map, and he’s interested in getting feedback on the subject.

Information Architects Japan has put together and posted an intriguing diagram in the style of a subway map showing many of the key “Web 2.0” players and how they’re related to each other, with subway lines connecting them labeled Main Sites, Hype, Advertisements, Social Networks, Marketing, Blogs, Technology, Content, Usability, Design Openness, Acquisitions, Democracy, and Humor.

Read this, Experience prototyping, a PDF of a paper from the Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems in 2000 (sponsored by SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction):

In this paper, we describe “Experience Prototyping” as a form of prototyping that enables design team members, users and clients to gain first-hand appreciation of existing or future conditions through active engagement with prototypes. We use examples from commercial design projects to illustrate the value of such prototypes in three critical design activities: understanding existing experiences, exploring design ideas and in communicating design concepts.

At long last, just in time for the holidays, I received a review copy of Dan M. Brown’s Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning and the book has more than lived up to my high expectations of it. I tore open the envelope and nearly devoured the book in one sitting. If you design or develop websites, if you do information architecture, interaction design, or content strategy, if you care about making online and digital experiences more engaging and easier to use, then this book is for you.

This is not a theoretical book. It is incredibly hands-on, walking the you through some of the most useful user-experience design “deliverables” you’ll need to create for nearly every project you work on. Brown discusses three broad categories of deliverables: user needs documents, strategy documents, and design documents. In this scheme user needs docs include personas, usability test plans, and usability reports; strategy docs include competitive analyses, concept models, and content inventories; and design documents include sitemaps, flow charts, wireframes, and screen designs.

For each deliverable, Brown introduces them with a layer metaphor, first talking about the most impotant elements in each doc, then looking at how to enhance the document, and finally addressing how to fine-tune each document for the project at hand. This layered approach helps the reader see what is essential about each type of document and how to fit the work to the scope of the project.

Brown also recognizes that these deliverables do not operate in a vacuum but rather need to complement and support each other and for each one he explains how they can best work together.

The book includes many real-world examples gathered from Brown’s own work as well as solicited from his vast and deep network of IA’s and other UX professionals. (I submitted a few sitemaps and content inventories to Brown when he was finishing up the book but none made the final cut.)

I probably learned the most from his discussion of concept models, because I have the least amount of experience preparing these types of documents and I’ve always found them to be somewhat intimidating. He explains how to build them up from granular bits and also helps clarify a number of different approaches to connecting the nodes in such documents. He also includes as an illustration a version of Bryce Glass’s after-the-fact Flickr user model, an instant classic of the form.

When talking about wireframes and sitemaps Brown tackles some of the thorniest issues, such as whether and how much to show layout and design elements in wireframes and how best to communicate site flows in an age of increasingly dynamic, application-like websites often built on user-contributed content.

Brown also conveys the complexity and challenges inherent in developing a good content inventory better than I’ve ever seen it discussed before anywhere. He doesn’t gloss over the aspect of drudgery involved in this type of work, and he makes it clear that there is no single cookie-cutter template that is appopriate for every site (nor any useful tool out there to help automate the process), but he equips the reader with the right questions to ask and the right tradeoffs to consider in assembling what is in some ways the most crucial document an IA or content strategist will deliver for any large complex site.

Just to prove I’m not gushing just because I like Brown personally and admire his tremendous contributions to the field, I will say that the weakest chapter is the last one, in which he addresses screen designs (what our visual design colleages typically call “comps”). It may be that because comps are not typically created and delivered by information architects that they perhaps don’t belong in this book. Although the title of the book speaks only of design in general, there are entire realms of visual design that are out of scope here and it may have been better to leave comps out as well. The comp examples are reasonable and inoffensive but uninspiring. The best part of this chapter covers context surrounding these deliverables.

In fact, it is another strength of the book that for each deliverable, Brown describes how best to present the documents: How to run a meeting, how to manage expectations, and - as the book’s title implies - how to communicate the value and meaning of the design documents to your clients. This advice alone justifies the inclusion of this book in any user experience professional’s library. I expect I will continue to refer to this book regularly as long as I’m involved in the planning and design of websites and web-enabled applications.

Kimmy Paluch at Paradyme Solutions has a good article up that helps clarify the meaning of User Experience Design in regard to those other buzzword disciplines such as interaction design, information architecture, usability, and so on.

Scott McDowell has written an article for Boxes and Arrows called Visio Replacement? You Be the Judge about tools for prototyping rich interaction designs. We recently adopted Axure here at Extractable and we’re very jazzed about the way it’s enabling us to do IA work and interaction design and tie together wireframes with sitemaps and process flows and then export them all as a clickable HTML prototype (even if the HTML is still spaghetti).

In this article Scott compares Axure with a number of other products, all of which he calls simulation tools (comparing them to aerospace simulations):

User experience professionals who leverage simulation technology are able to visualize projects much earlier within the development lifecycle, while producing requirements that are much clearer than those generated through traditional requirements gathering processes. In fact, two of these packages, iRise and Serena, were actually created to help business analysts visualize requirements when they didnÕt have access to user experience professionals for that part of a project! One key feature that static wireframes lack is the ability to interact with the interface; by using a simulation tool, this limitation is removed. Software interactivity and ease-of-use, in addition to the portability and reusability of the simulation, are key points to consider in choosing the right simulation software for your company. The next several years should be quite interesting as each of these products continues to improve, adding new features and offering tighter integration with third-party products.

This one, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design is new from Peachpit:

In this unique book, Dawes invites readers inside a series of his personal projects to get a view of his process—his creative seeing, making, and playing. He encourages designers to look beyond the normal tools of their trade to find inspiration in the most unlikely of places: tubs of childrenÕs clay, anonymous notes, household plumbing fixtures, jazz music, snow globes, fast-food take-out bags, airport departure gates, and more. Brilliant, original, and always grounded in the needs of users, Dawes shares both the techniques he has created and the key lessons he has learned in design: why comfort is the enemy of creativity; how mistakes can be celebrated instead of feared, and how to strip design to its purest and most powerful forms.

The legendary Lance Arthur, missing in action from the web scene for half a decade now (he was spending much of that time with some complicated email service scheme I don’t understand and more recently has been helping to launch Squarespace, the magazine/community CMS Christina Wodtke and company have productized via the revamped Box and Arrows ‘zine), is back and in his inimitably way he makes it clear that he’s not happy with the current state of web design:

Ugly may be too strong a word, actually. MySpace is ugly. Butt ugly. Bufugly. Google is simple. YouTube is somewhere in-between. And you may want to point at them — Google in particular — and argue that it is designed, and designed perfectly. Otherwise it wouldn’t be the success that it is, and I wouldn’t necessarily argue the point, other than to say that if I were a competitor, I wouldn’t do it the same way because if you’re trying to differentiate yourself from someone else, you don’t do it by looking exactly like them. There are definite differences between the sites on the attainment of their goal, but they all have the exact same goal in mind and it is the same goal as any other public web site, and that’s to get and keep the attention of as many people as possible. Perhaps death is too strong a word, maybe it’s merely in a coma. Maybe the pastelization and rounded-corner floaty bits signals a tidal change that there’s no recovering from, maybe that look that’s becoming so damned prevalent everyone one looks is merely how the web is going to loo because people like it and it lends a sameness to everything that accompanies a kind of comfort factor that everyone, seemingly, has been wanting all along but never managed to find.

Mark noticed this Businessweek article on how Yahoo! mined their user-click data to inform the redesign of their home page (How Yahoo! Gave Itself A Face-Lift):

To avoid design by committee, Yahoo deferred almost every decision to an impartial judge: data generated by users’ clicks. “We have this culture of data,” Bhat explains. “It is the biggest enforcer of honesty.” If sales wanted an ad smack dab in the front page’s prime real estate, the company would whip up a page to those specifications, serve it to actual users, and record their clicks. If traffic increased, great. If not, it was back to the drawing board. The refreshed home page went live in September. Now, with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to promote the redesign under way, the company is keen to see whether it has truly created a page based on what users like rather than what Yahoo wants. … Yahoo made a commitment to harnessing its trove of user clicks in 2004 when it acquired DMX Group, a data mining consultancy founded by former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT ) researchers. Now called Strategic Data Solutions (SDS), the department has a daunting task: combing through the 10 terabytes of data that Yahoo users generate daily by clicking links (the equivalent of all the text in the Library of Congress), plucking out the relevant bits, compressing it, and storing it. So far, Yahoo has enough user data to fill more than 1,000 Libraries of Congress. Of course, all that information would be useless without a way to make sense of them. Before Yahoo bought DMX Group, a simple test of how users interact with a page required help from technologists and a month of preparation. Now nearly all employees have access to easy-to-use software tools that can run tests over a few hours or days. Along with providing the tools, the SDS department has worked to spread the gospel of data. “We say: Use data to make decisions. Don’t make decisions based on a fad or what your competitors are doing,’” says Bassel Ojjeh, vice-president for SDS.

To be clear, Yahoo! didn’t rely entirely on data alone to make all of their crucial design decisions:

What Yahoo learned often belied initial impressions. Throughout the redesign, the company used a blend of focus groups, one-on-one interviews, test pages, and data mining. “What people say they want isn’t always what they actually click on,” Bhat says. In focus groups, users consistently said they wanted serious world news. “I don’t want Britney Spears anywhere on my page,” Bhat recalls one user saying. “What if my boss came by and saw?” But when Bhat’s team studied users’ clicks, world news got little attention, while Britney Spears stories ranked among the most heavily trafficked. The mixed messages led to important insights. In the end, Yahoo kept world news prominent on the front page because users feel secure knowing that it’s easily accessible, even if they don’t often click it. Conspicuous placement also went to entertainment, which draws heavy traffic from people seeking a diversion at work. By contrast, seemingly work-related content such as finance gets ample use in the evening when people pay bills and manage personal portfolios. Another gem unearthed through data mining: Small changes can make a big difference. The redesign team was excited about a new feature called Personal Assistant, which lets users hover their pointers over icons to see preview boxes of content such as e-mail. “We knew this was going to be the wow’ element of the page,” Bhat says. But the data showed that users were less than wowed. Turns out the preview boxes opened too quickly, an unusual peeve in this caffeinated, wired world. So the team began fiddling with the speed at which the preview boxes appeared and introduced a slight delay. Bingo. Although Yahoo’s front-page redesign is finished, the testing is not. “There’s always some test running,” Bhat says. “It’s part of our DNA.” Now if only Yahoo could collect as much data about its advertisers’ spending habits.

Over at Juxtaprose (just added to our blogroll), Jay Fienberg recently wrote about the danger of making a fetish of any one particular tool in your toolkit:

But, no matter how magical a saw, it’s not so great for the people who need to drive nails. And, it’s not like hammers work and saws don’t - theyÕre just different tools that do different things. Working from the strategic, information architecture-informed approach, we aren’t tied to one information tool over another. We get to see firsthand (and, otherwise, we study secondhand) all kinds of different tools in different environments, used by different people for different tasks. And, we get to use this approach to find and design the right tools for specific people to get good information (where “good information” is, in itself, often something specific to those specific individuals).

On the IxDA list, LukeW asked which metrics or criteria can be used to judge “good” interaction design. Kim Goodwin wrote an excellent reply, saying “A few of us at Cooper were kicking this question around with Hugh Dubberly several years ago. We came up with 4 criteria we felt applied to all sorts of design, not just interaction.”

Here four criteria boil down to some excellent ideals to shoot for:

• Ethical: Do no harm
• Purposeful: Help users accomplish their goals
• Pragmatic: Meet constraints and accomplish business goals
• Elegant: A good design is the simplest complete solution

The first rang a bell with me. I’ve been telling clients for years that I like to follow a sort of Hippocratic oath with web strategy. First of all, do no harm. Do not take away features the customer likes because you have something “better” coming. To quote Dave Winer, “don’t break users.”

Kim Goodwin elaborates this way:

Ideally, a designer’s first rule is the same as a physician’s: do no harm. In the case of surgery tools, car dashboards, and airplane cockpits, this is obvious: don’t kill people. However, even business software can do harm by wasting a user’s time, leading to errors, contributing to repetitive stress injuries, or just making people feel dumb. Of course, there are likely a few situations where this principle is challenging, such as a missile guidance system - if you had to design something of that sort, the principle might have to be interpreted as “minimize harm by making darn sure you hit the intended target.”

I’ve often said that game interfaces tend to more forward-looking than those of productivity applications and that younger people are having their expectations set by the experiences they have playing games on their computers, on their TVs, on their playstations and mobile devices, and online in general.

Usually I haven’t pushed this idea too much further, though. How can we best capture these innovations coming from the game space and apply them to the nongaming part of the Web?

This blog post suggests a few ideas about what the online multiplayer fantasy game World of Warcraft can teach people developing “Web 2.0” sites. I’m not sure all of the suggestions are particularly compelling, but I fully agree with the last two:

• User Feedback: The WoW Community is both strong and vocal and its good to see when a lot of people agree on changes that should be made, many times Blizzard (the creators of the game) implement those changes in one of their weekly patches. Which brings us to…
• Frequent Updates: Updates don’t necessarily mean features, but even small tweaks allow your users to know that you still care about your site and are working on things. However, don’t tweak just because you want to look fresh, tweak for improvement.

Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).

I’ve been hearing rumblings about a bunch of books in the pipeline of various publishers on designing for the mobile interface, including one to be called Designing the Mobile User Experience and another called Mobile Web Design. There are others too, but I don’t have links handy (yet).

Update: Scott Weiss just posted about a few more to the IxDA list, including his own Handheld Usability, Mobile Interaction Design by Matt “Blackbelt” Jones amd Gary Marsden, and a book by Nokia called Mobile Usability that Weiss says “is more an inside look into Nokia than a design tutorial.”

One more that was mentioned in the same list thread was Designing for Small Screens by Carola Zwick and Burkhard Schmitz.

Any others?

We’re not the only shop working on mobile user interfaces these days and we’re learning quickly as we go and absorbing advice and insight from multiple sources and directions. Here’s an article published last week in UX Matters called Designing the Mobile User Experience with some good food for thought.

Nice article (well part 1, at least) on the sudden rise and total domination of Flash video over the last year or so: The Rise of Flash Video, Part 1

John Kolko, a teacher at Savannah College of Art & Design, is writing and self-publishing a book called Thoughts on Interaction Design. He’s also blogging the process as he goes along. (It’s his first book, his first attempt at publishing, and his first business, so he’s treating the entire experience as an experiment.)

His book will join Dan Saffer’s recent Designing for Interaction (Wiley, 2006),

Bill Moggridge’s recent Designing Interactions (MIT Press, 2006), Jenifer Tidwell’s Designing Interfaces (O’Reilly, 2005), and Future Interaction Design (Springer, 2005); as well as older tomes including Barbara Mirel’s Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Developing Useful and Usable Software (Morgan-Kaufmann, 2003); Jenny Preece’s, Yvonne Rogers’, and Helen Sharp’s Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (Wiley, 2002); Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann’s About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design (Wiley, 2003), which was the second edition of a book originally published with a slightly different subtitle seven years earlier; and Designing Interaction: Psychology at the Human-Computer Interface (Cambridge, 1991).

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.

File under useful: CSS 2.1 Reference : Cultured Code

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).

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.

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

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.

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%).

Steve Mulder recently announced to the IA Institute and IxDA mailing list that his book on user research and personas, The User Is Always Right, is now available:

If you attended the IA Summit in Vancouver, you might have heard me give a preview of some of the book’s content on adding more science to persona creation. The book is a hands-on guide to creating personas (with advice on getting the most out of a variety of user research methodologies, generating persona segmentation, and making personas real) and using personas for everything from overall business strategy to IA, content, and design.

Mulder also blogs at PracticalPersonas.com, where recent posts question whether quantitative methods are required for creating personas (he says “not always”), and whether it’s wise to include a grump among your personas.

CNET’s news.com surveys the evolving mobile web development field (The mobile Internet: Are we there yet?), hitting on the major question we all wrestle with: develop a distinct unique site for mobile users (at example.mobi, possibly) or somehow dynamically optimize a single site for multiple types of user agents.

Our sense is that we are still in a transitional time so, at least on one major project, we are taking a hybrid approach. In fact, we are still working out the details: We may redirect mobile users to a version of the primary site optimized for their converged devices, or we may simply encourage them to use the mobile-optimized version of the site while still enabling them to satisfy their curiosity by visiting the web-basic version of the site.

In the latter case, we’ll use a smart enough stylesheet and user-agent sniffing regime so that they can have a satisfactory experience even if not visiting the mobile-specific site. Either way, we want to build both “flavors” of the site from the same content and image database, flagging some content as web-only and optimizing versions of the images for the mobile interface.

A key thing to remember is that even though a single site can be carefully crafted to be adequate in both interfaces, the use cases are not necessarily the same. We don’t expect people to read reams of paragraphs on their phones. More likely they will seek answers, help with problems, contact information, shortcuts. They will save their research and studying time for the full computer / laptop experience.

Of course in time this may change and things continue to converge, but it’s important to build for today with an eye on tomorrow and not get too far ahead of ourselves.

Dan, I’m still waiting for the review copy of your book, Brown, published an excerpt from his just released Communicating Design in Digital Web Magazine, called Competitive Analysis, discussing different ways to compare competing sites and present your findings. Some interesting visual thinking there.

Can’t wait for the book, hint, hint.

Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting post about quick and intense usability iterations:

I definitely see the strong advantages of the intense sessions mixed with the usual longer term development. Finally it seems a broad section of the development world is finally learning that the best way to build out stuff is to sit with the people that use it, see their pain and frustration. But, even better is fixing that pain overnight. These intense iterations build positive feedback for the developers and designers on the projects, the business owners seeing quick improvements, and the people who want and need to use the products. The people using the tools will most likely go away and become evangelists for the products as the developers and designers not only listened to their needs, but fixed it so it worked better for them right before their eyes.

Luke Wroblewski has some interesting thoughts about two orthogonal roles in the user-experience design process: Product Leads & Strategic Designers.

I’m not sure whether I’d classify myself as one or the other, though. As director of strategy here at Extractable I’m clearly a strategic designer in this scheme, but I think I’d be equally interested in seeing a specific (software application) product through its entire lifecycle.

I wonder if there is actually a temperament or skill-based distinction here?

It’s interesting to see the slightly stylized map of continental US emerge from this data-driven map of Flight Patterns.

Liz Danzico of Boxes and Arrows interviews Dan Saffer about his Interaction Design book in Newsweek. Pretty mainstream, huh?

Digital Web Magazine has a brief article with tips on designing for the mobile interface.

We talk about what screen resolution to design for a lot of the time, and the compatability cops are always trying to keep us mired in the past, man, but now usability (and hairstyle) guru Jakob Nielsen gives us permission to optimize for 1024 x 768 (Screen Resolution and Page Layout (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)).

Of course his own site, with its lack of margins or gutters, is hellacious on the eyes at high resolutions. The scanning length of his lines of copy alone is enough to try the patience of a saint.

Postdated edition:

• 10 Foot World, Inc. (all about applications for Media Center’s ‘10 foot interface’
• 10 foot interface showdown
• A microstudy of tagging (Gene Smith discusses the physical tagging of nametags at this year’s IA Summit - includes an inset picture of my own tag cloud)
• SEO page ‘strength’ gauge (via atomiq)
• Writing vs. rewriting (applied to software)
• Tenets for usable, rich interfaces
• The seven flaws of the semantic web (just seven?)
• BlogHer 2006 live blogging wiki

The Iconfactory (via Digg, or reddit, or something)

Seattle edition:

• User Interface Design - Taking the Good with the Bad (good Digital Web article about the inherent tradeoffs in UI design and why you can never please everyone
• Part one of jjg’s conversation with Steven Johnson
• Part one of Dan Saffer’s conversation with Dan Brown (they both have web design books out or coming out soon)
• A reexamination of information seeking theory (the title of this academic paper was longer but I truncated it, via Information Design)
• Jeff Bezos, my most famous college classmate, invests in 37 Signals
• Humanized Newsreader (instead of offering “more…” links or a string of numerals for next pages, it loads new content when you scroll near the bottom of the page, via SvN)

In response to a recent post by Thomas Vander Wal, in which he said, “One approach, which seems to be growing in popularity is [to build] sites that work and Ajax and scripting to augment and improve simplicity,” Austin Govella replied, writing

The term of art for this is “progressive enhancement”. Often in contrast to the idea of graceful degradation:

• Progressive Enhancement: Paving the Way for Future Web Design
• SXSW presentation with Nick Finck and Steve Champeon
• Article in Wikipedia
• The view from css-discuss
• Yahoo’s graded-browser support shows it in context

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Dan Klyn assembled a set of guided navigation UI widgets at his Wildly Appropriate blog back in January, introducing them by writing, “For a good long while now I’ve been meaning to create a spreadsheet or Flickr set or something which could serve as a systematic and comprehensive roundup of the UI widgets that folks have designed for use with systems where users can perform asynchronous browse refinement un-selecting.” It’s a useful overview of the various ways different interface designs solve these similar problems.

Shiv Singh, who writes AARF’s Workplace Blog, points to a report on intranet best practices his enterprise solutions group just published. Downloading the full report requires registration, or you can listen to a three-part podcast summarizing the findings. Details can be found in Singh’s Corporate Intranets Best Practices post on his blog.

Adrian Chong posted to iaslash a set of links to writings by Christopher Fahey about the “Smoke & Mirrors” of user research: Design vs. Science, Research as a Design Tool, Research as a Political Tool.

Chong says:

As designers look towards user research for the objective truth, Christopher questions the motives behind the research. He follows with a series of articles, the first of which discuss user research as a pseudo science pointing to absolutes that do not exist. He continues the discussion stating that tools such as eye tracking provide results that are already apparent to good UI designers. His latest article explains that a value of user research is often to cut through the politics and convince stakeholders to make good design decisions.

His next article promises to be good too. (I’ll bowdlerize the title to “Research as b.s.”)

A client asked my opinion of the best b2b sites out there. I’m not good at answering questions like that, especially not on the spot. Perhaps I’m too much of a relativist. So I checked some old notes and polled my colleagues and here are some that stood out:

1. Salesforce.com for its marketing front-end
2. CDW for their b2b portal site
3. English360 stands out from a design perspective
4. Retargeting for this demo illustrating the service it provides to e-commerce enterprises
5. Vurv - a recruiting and performance-management company with a compelling web presence

I’d love to hear more suggestions.

Brief I’m-on-the-road edition:

• Digital Web Magazine - Code Reviews: Write Better Code Overnight
• At the New JetBlue Terminal, Passengers May Pirouette to Gate 3 - New York Times
• The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation? (“Designers, welcome to the brave new world of spec work.”)
• People and the Public (“throws an especially harsh light on the ink spilled over [Stamen client] Digg”)

So maybe this will become a tradition:

• Thomas Vander Wal discusses the concept of being a Technosocial Architect (“To many people technology gets in the way of their desired ease of use of information. Those of us who design and build in the digital space spend much of our time looking at how to make our sites and applications easier for people to use. Do you see the gap? The gap is huge!”)
• History of the Button (“Up until the 1980s, all buttons were physical…”)
• Definition of User Experience Revisited (“Make it easy to be happy”)
• The Power of the Marginal (“If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together.”)
• Ross Mayfield posts a link to an update of a case study on enterprise wiki and blog use (“Specific use cases such as managing meetings, brainstorming and publishing and creating presentations collaboratively…”)

Happy Fourth of July weekend!

In other realms, they say when it makes Newsweek or Time (especially the cover), a phenomenon is over. Let’s hope that’s not the case for the hipster design-y sites picked in this Newsweek Design Dozen article (forward by Chris).

• Dan Brown’s “quick and dirty Visio callout”, an elegant solution to a common document-design problem
• Digital Web Magazine reviews Caphyon Advanced Web Ranking (“does a great job of tracking and reporting search engine rankings across websites”)
• Digital Web tutorial on ‘The Pinball Effect’ (example)
• UX Matters on ‘Deconstructing the Mobile Web (“The mobile Web is largely overplayed hypeÑthe clumsy extrapolation of the behavior and use of a basic set of interfaces from one environment to another incompatible one.”)
• Luke Wrobleski on ‘Developing the Invisible’ (“the need to consider what’s not there”)
• Zooming User Interface (wikipedia link via peterme)

a new tradition? we’ll see…

A week or so back I was reading another one of those “Top 10 mistakes of website design” articles. All the usual stuff was in there like skip intro, splash pages, popup windows, and intrusive animation but what really got me was the mention of “right-side blindness”.

Most of these top 10 lists just regurgitate the same obvious design mistakes that really don’t bear mentioning further. If it’s not obvious that you shouldn’t have a flashing animation or intrusive popup windows then you’re in the wrong business.

But let’s get back to this issue of right-side blindness. Right-side blindness is the notion that people have become so accustomed to seeing advertisement on the right side of their screen they tend to ignore everything else in that region as well. Since reading this article I’ve really thought hard about the issue and started to monitor my eye movements as I navigate through the various websites I peruse.

Where do I expect common elements to be - search, login, home, logout?

How quickly do I hit a website and then leave - what was I looking for, how long did it take me to find it, what frustrated me in the process?

I’ve found the most usable websites either make things very obvious through a “web 2.0” style layout - SIMPLE HUGE BRIGHT BOLD everything, tons of spacing and a general adherence to treating users like silly putty - making things very simple and very obvious.

This style of design is hardly applicable to the corporate B2B world however. For designers in that realm I recommend perusing the business sites you use most. Give usability a thought and ask yourself the following question:

Which came first - the form or the function?

Update: 2:24pm - I tracked down the original article that prompted this post and found that while I may have stretched the point a bit, the right-side blindness issue is still valid. Either way, the article made for my first Ironic Site of the Day Award.

Still working my way through interesting links I saved from the IA Institute members mailing list. Livia Labate posted this link to the “Value of Design” factfinder, a site that communicates the value of design to business.

The site includes an interesting “Your Report” tool that enables you to cut and paste interesting tidbits and research findings into a custom report you can then use in your own materials (as long as you credit the Design Council).

The “headline facts” section of the site, for example, presents research findings (“Rapidly growing business are three times more likely than the rest to consider design crucial to success”) in a visually compelling fashion.

ColorBlender is a cool Ajax-y service that suggests an entire palette of colors for you based on a dominant color that you enter (using RGB sliders). I’d still prefer a great visual designer come up with color ideas, but if you were on a budget and if you didn’t know the first thing about how colors complement each other, push forward, recede back, are cool or warm, etc., you could do worse than consulting this tool to put together a pleasing palette for a website.

And if you are doing “traditional”* Visio wireframes for a rich web application, this article at Boxes and Arrows has some suggestions about how to narrate the interactive sequence in a slide presentation to your client.

• Yes, I realize it’s ridiculous to talk about traditions for a medium that is only 15 years old.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which published continually - on the web only at times - throughout the Katrina and Rita hurricanes last year, has posted a Flash animation showing how New Orleans flooded.

UX Magazine - The User Experience Magazine writes about getting Dugg after their launch and having to locate a new webhost to deal with the influx of traffic. Not bad for a fledgling webzine.

Fundamentally, the magazine is a blog. The articles are short and the site is powered by TextPattern. But the homepage presents more of a magazine look and feel, with featured articles, departments, and a pretty layout offering multiple links to past entries. I’ve added it to my aggregator.

I thought it might be interesting to listen to the panel on how large enterprises ought to choose their design partners. The lineup had changed a bit from what was listed in the SXSW directory.

The moderator was now Maddie Coover of Alamo Design and formely of Omnicom (the owner of Agency.com). The panelists were Jeff Williams of Frog Design in Austin; Christian Barnard, AT&T’s executive director for online experience and user strategy (he oversees the relationship with their design partner, Razorfish, and used to be a director and client partner at Sapient, and before that worked at Scient); and Mike Appel, VP and general manager for the south-central region of of AvenueA/Razorfish, which he says is the “largest independent interactive agency in the world today” and formerly Anderson Consulting in Dallas.

Williams went first and he was excellent. Here are my raw notes from his talk (accompanied by a slide deck):

Frog started as a product company, is strategic/creative. Model is “identify, transform, implement.” Some of their partners (clients):

• Tmobile - strategic partnership, worked on extranets and flash apps and not just a tactical website redesign
• Sun.com… home page used to be 150 times as long, 1000s of links (when?), also extending web design to brandingpackaging and software
• Disney: digital, product, embedded ui, packaging, etc.
• HP is our largest partnership now. We are their master vendor. HP knows the value of design, doesn’t second-guess a lot of decisions.

Clients sometimes ask you to copy something else out there. Copying the competition gives parity but not innovation. To clients: don’t ask for work on spec, if necessary for a design competition.

Christian Barnard explained how SBC (not AT&T) ultimately chose AARF to redeisgn their website:

Identified need in June 2004, not until April 1, 2005 for first delivery (from Razorfish). Sent an RFP to 16 agencies, received responses from 9 agencies, narrowed the field to 5 finalists, brought them in for oral presentations, chose top two finalists, got internal approvals, started vendor negotiations, started with an initial trial quick-hit project with chosen vendor, then jointly developed the plan to redesign SBC.com. Our decision criteria:

• experience (UE, web tech): 25%
• partnership (plans for organizing the partnership): 15%
• reliability (proven ability to execute against commitments): 15%
• cost: 13%
• capacity for handling overflow UI/IA work: 11%
• financial stability: 10%
• communication / decision making (ability to comm., methods to ensure decisions made in a timely manner): 6%
• logistics (extent to which vendor locations / resources align with SBC): 5%

We developed their online visions and a strategy roadmap with the vendor and internal stakeholders. Goals were to increase sales by 10%, reduce costs, get calls out of call center, and enable self-help online. The roadmap plotted out a five-year strategy, and broke up the redeisgn into meaningful phases (home page/public site, account management, product ordering). AT&T does their own backend work but the vendor has to know the constraints. Baptism by fire: the home page redesign was phase one. The old SBC page had 100+ calls to action, lots of content, not very useful. The business objectives: purchasing and account management. We used an “advanced optimization” tool The home page had to be done over because of the merger with AT&T, the new brand (worked with InterBrand) Phase two was MySBC, account mgmt. For this they did rigorous user research, ethnographic research, contextual inquiry to inform the design process. Our partner had to understand the business aspects and how to develop user insight. We went into customer’s homes, to see beyond how they interacted with the existing site: how they work with paper bills, feel about them, interact with them, file them afterward, to meet their needs online. The current initative: redesigning the shopping & ordering process. Held an offsite lessons-learned retreat: Works Well: Program Communications (master list of milestones, deliverables; overall creative brief stating the goals, objectives, and overall direction of the resdesign), Collaboration (strat and tactical, building consensus with stakeholders) Needs Improvement: Focus on vendor morale (recognition, celebration, empathy, career growth) Project Guiding Principles: face-to-face meetings, work-life balance (treat vendor like employees.

I found Appel’s presentation disappointing. To be fair, he was probably a late addition to the panel, but instead of general principles or advice or case studies we got a capabilities presentation.

Also, he repeated the AARF is the largest independent agency in the world, but I’m not sure what he means by independent. Independent of what?

Criteria companies should consider: Customer lifecycle (attract, convert, service, extend). Why choose AARF? Thought leaders in digital channel, proven track record helping major brands improve performance (increased Adidas online sales 500%), deep technology experience, data-driven business optimization (tools to measure performance).

My only other note was “this feels like an ad for the ‘fish.”

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

I’ve been posting raw notes from panels all morning. I blogged about Beyond Folksonomies over at the blog for my book, The Power of Many and I blogged a presentation by a Harvard psychology professor about why people make poor decisions, How to Do Precisely the Right Thing… on my personal blog.

I’ve just been taking notes at the keynote conversation and it’s the first topic of the day that I thought was appropriate for Extra! Extra!

Both Coudal and Fried were witty speakers. Coudal led off and made excellent points about the importance of curiosity and a willingness to learn with each new project and then Jason took over with his familiar rants about not overengineering things and how functional specs are the devil.

Here are my raw notes from the discussion, printed as is in the spirit of launching a 1.0 version with limited time and effort and then revisting later (maybe) to improve it:

Jim Coudal

Imagine “Chris” - your friend who’s hipper to you than everything, used to have a band, then was making indie films, now building a tagging web 2.0 social web app

Noticed a trend in SXSW panels: used to be about making tools, now about making real businesses with those tools

37 signals (Jason’s company) used to do client work, now they do: ruby on rails, econferences, books, backpack / basecamp / campfire / ta-da lists

Coudal partners still does some partner work, mostly naming and identity work but also has some business: jewelboxing, the show (on tour with bands , record / mix / master / design / manufacture / fulfill limited edition concert dvds), the deck - targeted ad network (includes only signal vs. noise, the mighty, a list apart, waxy.org, and coudal.com).

When someone says they work in-house as a creative at product company, Jim smiles nad nods, thinking: awful newsletters, Comic Sans, sales videos based on the reality show of the moment, cubicles full of toys.

Running the whole show is better than being an employee. It’s better to be the boSs than to work for the boss. But there are always problems. Example, with products: fulfillment, for example, a minefield, though: international shipping / customers regulations, etc. Part of craft is to be able to learn quickly

Questions Coudal asks before taking work:

1. Will we be able to do good work?
2. Will we be able to make money?
3. Will we be able to learn a little something new along the way?

These criteria are not equal. Sometimes we take a project to do good work but get mediocre pay. Sometime the reverse (not proud of this). We won’t do mediocre work for mediocre pay. We won’t do a project where we can’t learn something new along the way

In work-for-hire world you must be flexible, curious, learn quickly. It’s always a new industry with a new problem. You need to be able jump right into the deep end of the school and start swimming, and we’ve got to like doing it.

The meek won’t inherit the earth; the curious will.

Jason Fried

on “the how”

How to take skills and turn them into a business. Now we all know css, blogs, semantic web, web standards. Starting something new is intimidating.

One way to start is to quit your day job, business plan, predict the future, get vc, hire, get office, aluminum sign with neon backing on your web page. That way is expensive and stressful, doesn’t put the product and customer first, puts the investor first.

Fried’s advice:

• don’t quit your day job
• don’t get money, hire
• start something on the side

Examples: delicious, basecamp (launched on 10 hrs. a week - “we were a consulting company”), jewelboxing, blinksale (josh williams)

advantages:

1. obscurity
2. less

Obscurity: You learn more by failing in obscurity without the ego-hits, public criticism - removes fear of failure.

Less: Less comes for free, is a plus not a minus, underdo: simplicity, clarity, work well, not too clever (one-down, not one-up) - less time is good, avoid overwork (functional specs, abstract things, wasted time, procrastinate… then rush), don’t try to be big, less red tape; less money is also good… you don’t need a lot of the stuff you think you need — 6 yrs. ago companies were spend millions on oracle, windows servers they didn’t need, insane scaleability (“ridiculous bullshit”).

Now, infrastructure software is fee, hardware is cheap (basecamp had one app server for one year, $150/month - don’t need all this redundancy, terabytes of tape backup), you need money for salaries, but if it’s on the side it’s just you or your partners also donating time

Seeing the 90s mentality again: Get $2 million bucks…. let’s get some nice desks, aluminum sign, etc.

Polish 10 features instead of 50 mediocre features. Get a few things right. There’s an endless amount of time to add stuff later. You can’t take things away.

If you make a big huge thing, tech support will kick your ass.

Build simple software that does a few things very well, not clever (like software we all hate: the kind that capitalizes for you). Software is not the solution to everything. Don’t build software that gets in people’s way. Build less software. That clever stuff takes a lot of time.

One “more” thing: more constraints

Bootstrapping model. Jason is anti functional spec. Just use it as you build it and you’ll learn what it needs to do.

Question and Answers

Coudal on web design: Use a subtractive process, take away what you don’t need (like Hemingway’s comment about writing).

Fried on venture capital: With vc money, you keep needing more of it, series a, b, c; those who don’t take it always seem to have enough.

Fried on hiring: Don’t hire with a long bullet list of expertise requirements. you want passionate, curious people who can learn what you need to do. are you good at what you do, motivated, passionate, curious

Fried on making money: How do make money? charge for your work. Charge a monthly fee. Everything doesn’t have to be free. It’s hard to make money from advertising. Also, lower-paying customers complain more. When you make a change for the better, people still bitch. Resist the urge to change it back just to please them. Wait them out.

Fried on functional specs: Why do I hate functional specs? They are political documents. They are about covering your ass. “We all signed off on it and we all agreed on it.” Mostly they’re illusions of agreement. (It’s usualy a matter of interpretation.) We build the interface first… we build it in HTML… you can all touch it, agree on real stuff.

Very little cost is involved in adding in a new feature to a functional spec…. In the real world there are real costs involved

Coudal on RFPs: “The RFP” rule. If the RFP is more than two pages, we won’t do it. If they spent all that time, imagine what a pain they’re going to be on the project.

Coudal on a possible motto: we’re making it up as we go along

Question: I work for Yahoo and we write functional specs. Eliminate them and a few people will lose their jobs. How to migrate to a better way? Isn’t it utopian to eliminate specs?

Fried’s reply: What’s utopian is thinking you know everything about how the app should work. We don’t know anything. What we do is write stories… we keep them to one paragraph. The story is a scenario, not technical or confusing. If necessary, we’ll mock it up to show how it works

Fried on specialization: When you’re small, you want to be generalists… don’t be just an information architect.

Fried on scope creep: We fix budget and time frame… whatever fits is version 1… adding more time and money will add scope.

Update: Scot Hacker took notes on this panel too.

tags: sxsw2006, sxsw

Mark sent around a link to a collection of articles of web design and development, saying, “Scan down the page past the HTML tools and there are some great articles on this page.”

Max Design recommends using the max-length attribute (no relation) to achieve the ideal line length for content. Svend Tofte shows how to accomplish the same result (max-width) in Internet Explorer.

Well, I should have posted this when Todd first sent it around because now it’s all over the net, so let me be the one millionth person to add this link to a blog: YouTube - microsoft ipod packaging parody

Google Analytics has posted a few white-paper type articles to its Conversion University section, grouped under Drive Traffic and Convert Visitors)

(Link via Terry.)

AIGA, a designers’ professional association is relaunching its web journal, GAIN:

The Gain journal is dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business. Through rigorous case studies and thoughtful interviews, the journal demonstrates how the process of design can be used to solve business problems, foster innovation, build meaningful customer relationships and differentiate products from competitors.

Gain has a new team: managing editor, Karen McGrane, and mailing list moderator, Jeff Lash….

[R]eaders are invited to join a discussion through a new mailing list, AIGA-Gain —an informal, open discussion on topics at the intersection of design and business. The mailing list will focus on one topic per week.

Since leading sites such as Yahoo and Google set expectations for users across the web, I’m glad to see that Yahoo is sharing their user-experience philosophy in the form of their new User Interface Blog.

Todd sent around this post from the IE team’s blog regarding the changes they made to CSS in IE7 Beta Preview, and this MSDN article that describes the changes in more depth, adding:

I think the important thing to remember is that this isnÕt final, this isnÕt even a full beta version. It will change, but I think the progress theyÕve shown is good for all.

In Home Page Goals Derek Powazek explains why he designs the deepest pages of a site first before working his way back to the home page:

Before I get into those goals, hereÕs a grain of salt. Every site IÕve ever worked on has had strikingly similar traffic trends, and one stands out. Remember that smallest, deepest element…? This is the atomic element - for a news site, it’s the story page; for a search engine, it’s the search result; for a store, it’s a product page. This page accounts for 60 to 75 percent of all page views on the site. The rest belong to the home page.

He goes on to stay that a home page has four main goals (and I think, for the most part, he’s correct in his analysis):

1. Answer the question, “What is this place?”
2. Don’t slow down repeat visitors
3. Show what’s new
4. Provide consistent, reliable global navigation

He goes on to recommend making part of the home page dynamic to address the first three priorities: “That area can show an explanation to newbies. But once the user is logged in, replace the explanation with some information specific to that user (which also meets goal three).”

Works for me.

I don’t design type, but I wish I did. I’m posting this iStockphoto.com article, Know Your Type, here as a reminder to read it later when I’m not as slammed.

Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman examines the “Web 2.0” hype that threatens to overwhelm some of the legitimate advances in rich application development for the web in his article Web 3.0 at A List Apart, noting that it’s hard to map out AJAX interactions and putting the bubblicious flavor of the hype in context with this parable:

Steven, a young web wiz, has just celebrated his bar mitzvah. He received a dozen gifts and must write a dozen thank-you notes. Being webbish, he creates an on-line ÒThank-You Note Generator.Ó Steven shows the site to his friends, who show it to their friends, and soon the site is getting traffic from recipients of all sorts of gifts, not just bar mitzvah stuff. If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.