Aesthetics and Web Design
Patrick Lynch over at A list apart has just written a great article about the role of aesthetics in web design. In it, he specifically deals with the question of how much of a role visual aesthetic design should play in the design of web sites. To answer the question, he delves into the somewhat controversial notion of visual decision making--the idea that aesthetics can help users in their decision making and aid in general website usability.
The article is written in response to assertions made by one Jakob Nielsson, who, citing numerous eye tracking studies that his team has performed over the years, concludes that any images, or other elements on a web page that are not integral to the site's content or function are routinely ignored, and hence superfluous or even distracting.
But the author says no. Aesthetic elements on websites, while not recognized as helpful in eye tracking studies, do perform a vital role in website usability. Mr. Lynch cites the work of early 20th century Gestalt psychologists that have proven that the brain responds to images in milliseconds. And more recent studies of web sites suggest that users make visual impressions of pages in less than 1/20 of a second--before eye tracking movements begin--and that those impressions more or less stay through the length of the visit.
He goes on from there about why "attractive things work better", describing Don Norman's three levels of human psychological processing (Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective), and why they all work together to create an impression of a product like a website.
Read the full article over here.
Safari’s Tabs on Top and Usability
Apple recently released a beta version of its Safari 4. Naturally it has some really cool new features, including a helpful and slick start screen, and cover flow for your browsing history. It's also much faster than any other browser currently out there. However there is one substantial "new feature" to the Safari 4 user interface that's been generating lots of buzz (heat might be a better word). Namely, in this new version of Safari, the tabs (which you use to browse multiple web pages simultaneously in one window) are physically located at the very top of the browser window. The address bar, and all the other web page navigation controls are now situated underneath your tabs. Continue reading »
Prototyping with Keynote
I've been using Keynote--Apple's version of Power Point--for at least a year now. It provides multi slide functionality with an easy to use drag and drop interface for creating objects of pretty much any kind. It also works great at any level of fidelity. I can do quick sketches during the early phase of a project, and when the time comes I can also build complete full color, pixel perfect mockups of an interface. Apple gives me more creative control over my objects with Keynote than Microsoft does with Power Point, which frustrated me to no end every time I needed to place something with precision, or build a custom shape.
Pretty much all of my design projects will include some sort of user testing. It is at this point that I must transform the wireframes I've built into a clickable prototype. Now this step can and frequently does get messy, at least the way I used to do it. I used to create my wireframes, one slide for each screen, or state--which is much more common now as RIAs take over more and more of the landscape--and then export them to PDF. I would then take that PDF document into Adobe acrobat, which has a hyperlink tool, thus allowing me to add the interactivity to the wireframes. The problem is that the workflow is slow and inefficient because the tasks involved require two different programs. As long as the wireframes themselves are perfect, I have no problem. I'm done with Keynote. However, any time I want to make a change to a wireframe, I must go back into Keynote, make the change, re-export the entire document as a PDF, take the page or pages that I've changed and, one at a time, place them into my existing hyperlinked PDF. Also, Acrobat is not great at making the process of replacing pages very usable. I frequently have to double check whether a page replacement actually worked because it's not clear during the action.
Now, instead of using acrobat to add the interactivity, I simply use Keynote, which allows my to hyperlink any object to any slide number (or, for that matter any webpage, or even another Keynote slideshow). That way I can make changes to both the underlying objects in the wireframes as well as the click-flow in the same program. Keynote will automatically embed the hyperlinks into an exported PDF as well. That way, the end user of the test needn't actually have Keynote. The whole process is much more manageable as a result, especially since my prototypes typically involve dozens of individual wireframes.
Data Driven Design and the Culture at Google
A peek under the hood of google's design apparatus.
In an interview with Newsweek magazine, Irene Au, User Experience Director at Google discusses her responsibilities, and in the process, reveals some telling things about the way design decisions are made at the multi-billion dollar internet company. Perhaps not surprisingly, she makes it clear that Google takes a data driven approach to interface design just as it does to everything else. The subjective opinions of art directors or visual designers don't play a key role in the design of their products. As she states, "A lot of our design decisions are really driven by cognitive psychology research that shows that, say, people online read black text against a white background much faster than white against black, or that sans serif fonts are more easily read than serif fonts online." No argument here.
But is a completely empirical approach to interface design desirable, or even realistic? Isn’t it more likely that the left brain culture at google puts greater weight on the opinions of engineers, even if they are being just as subjective? One blog commenter put it this way, regarding Au’s interview with newsweek:
A New President, A New Whitehouse.gov
Change has come to America, and so, too has it come to whitehouse.gov, the official website of the President of the United States.
One minute into the 44th Presidency, the website sports a radically new look (I'd love to hear how that was handled), and all the neccesary updates as a new administration moves in have already been made. But the changes promise to be much more than cosmetic. According to a statement on the White House Blog, Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media for the White House, "Millions of Americans have powered President Obama's journey to the White House, many taking advantage of the internet to play a role in shaping our country's future. WhiteHouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement."
Efforts will be made so that whitehouse.gov "puts citizens first" through three main priorities. Again, from the same statement:
"Communication -- Americans are eager for information about the state of the economy, national security and a host of other issues. This site will feature timely and in-depth content meant to keep everyone up-to-date and educated. Check out the briefing room, keep tabs on the blog (RSS feed) and take a moment to sign up for e-mail updates from the President and his administration so you can be sure to know about major announcements and decisions.
Transparency -- President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.
Participation -- President Obama started his career as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, where he saw firsthand what people can do when they come together for a common cause. Citizen participation will be a priority for the Administration, and the internet will play an important role in that. One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it."
Read the full statement
I may have visited whitehouse.gov three or four times in my life, but I'll be back quite a bit after reading this, excited and hopeful about the ways that the new administration will use technology to connect to the people.
Topics: Design, government, Web 2.0
Drupal.org redesign - An Experiment in Design by Community
Drupal, the popular open source Web Content Management System, has got a massive and passionate community of developers, designers and webmasters. Drupal.org, their official website was faltering under the weight of this growing community of diverse users, so this past summer the powers that be at Drupal decided to hire an outside agency to do a complete redesign of the site. The firm they hired decided to take a "design by community" approach to the project. They wanted to get as many Drupal users as they could to participate in the redesign. So, through a number of collaboration mechanisms--setting up a Twitter account to follow mentions of Drupal, opening a Flickr account where the community could post pictures, and actively engaging the existing Drupal forums--they opened the design process up so that anyone in the Drupal community could share in the process.
Conventional wisdom says that design doesn't work as a democracy. It takes the genius and inspiration of a small team or one person to understand what the customer needs, and design the right solution. As Henry Ford said it best, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse." So I'm not surprised that according to Mark Boulton, the lead Designer on the project, many people though that this type of open process would fall flat on it's face. I'm not convinced that it won't, but from what I've seen, the site is looking good.
It's still in prototype phase, so it remains to be seen if the redesign, once implemented, will be a success. but you can get a look at the evolution of the design here, and of course follow the links to the discussions. It's a fascinating look at one designers experiment in design by community.
Topics: CMS, Design, drupal, opensource
Web Video Players - The Good the Bad and the Ugly
As I'm sure most of you do, I am spending more and more time online watching video. So I thought I would take some time and rate the various video players I use on a frequent basis.
I'm using a 10 point scale, and I'm rating based on a both functionality and visual look and feel.
ESPN.com 7 out of 10
Fairly simple, two color, semi transparent control bar, appears only when moused over--a design pattern I'm seeing more and more lately. It's there when you need it, it shows you what you want and it gets out of the way quickly. It's got a single play/pause button, a timer, a playback countdown, a volume control which displays only on mouseover, reducing clutter, and a menu which when clicked brings up some additional options for embedding sharing and the like. A nice touch: Mouse over any point on the timer and you get a little tooltip that displays the time at that point. Another nice touch: the small (no morethan 10 pixels vertical) bar at the bottom which displays how much has already played as a portion of the total.
Youtube 7 out of 10
Gets the job done. Period. Simple consistent interface. Youtube also allows publishers to add annotations and captions to their videos, and naturally allows viewers to turn either on or off, with a simple hover menu at the very right side of the control bar. Youtube is actually doing some really cool stuff to allow publishers to make their videos more interactive, including adding hyperlinks within a movie. The evolution of online video will be interesting to watch (and maybe take part in) but that discussion is beyond the scope of this post.
NYtimes.com 6 out of 10
Elegant interface, but could be better. The control bar stays present throughout the video playback, and occupies a significant portion of the total video player. However its muted style--3 shades of grey--makes it easily ignored when not needed. The playback control is done superbly. When moused over, a small draggable button smoothly and elegantly appears, it's affordance as a scroll mechanism to move to any point in the video is crystal clear. The volume control is nice and large, with the same measure of affordance, however it looks like it was designed separately, as it doesn't conform to the rest
of the control bar's aesthetic. Also, I may be nit-picky, and I'm sure this won't bother 99% of nytimes.com viewers, but there's a large empty space in between the play button on the left, and the full screen button
on the right, creating an odd asymmetry which, the more I look at it, the more it bothers me.
MTV.com 6 out of 10
Nice minimalist design. Allows you to change the video quality during playback. Also nice, allows you to choose from 3 sizes; standard, large and full screen.
Viddler.com 6 out of 10
Lets the video publisher skin the player interface. This great tools allows users to comment on and tag the video in the timeline. The interface is ugly, though, and some of the buttons aren't self explanatory, nor do any of the buttons have tooltips. At the end of the current video it automatically plays the next video, whereas most other players present a menu of videos to choose from.
MSNBC.com 5 out of 10
Slick looking. I like the fact that the playback bar is given the entire width of the video, allowing the viewer to be more precise in navigating to a specific point in the video. The other controls are slightly confusing. It looks like the interface was over designed.
Virb.com 5 out of 10
Beautifully minimalist design. No full screen mode, but it does have a cool feature that "turns off the lights" on the rest of the page.
Facebook 5 out of 10
Fairly simple interface. Standard controls, done adequately. Its got none of the useful social media features of Youtube. No ability to tag or comment in the timeline. Pretty basic for such an important part of such an important website.
Metacafe 3 out of 10
Poorly designed. It's distracting when trying to watch video, and ugly to look at when interacting with. The big blue shiny play and stop buttons look unprofessional, and why is there even a stop button. The draggable playback scroll mechanism moves from left to right as the video plays, but it could have been made much more subtle. There's no need to see it unless you want to move navigate the video. And why does the entire playback bar glow when I mouse over it? Also not cool is the visually loud menu underneath the control bar.
As with any list, much o this is subjective. I'm looking forward to hearing your opinions. Also, there are so many web video players out there, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Let me know which ones you find especially appealing, or truly horrible.
Topics: Video
A New Workflow for Web Designers
It was Tim Berners Lee's original vision of the web that online documents be both readable and writable. He notes in his book "Weaving the Web" that that he was disappointed with the way the browser was initially developed as a read only technology, making it expensive and onerous for the asses to publish online content, and essentially creating a top down system, with lots and lots of readers but few writers.
Only recently has the technology that allows anyone to easily publish and edit online documents, in the form of Wiki's and Blogs, been developed. These tools have become so popular, so ubiquitous precisely because they cater to what users really want, fulfilling the potential that the web's founding father had envisioned for it almost 20 years ago.
Continue reading »
Topics: CMS, Web Design, workflow
Pixel by Pixel…Or how I spent my last 2 weeks designing a few icons
"Our product is shipping globally, and we're not going to customize each device to the language of it's destination country. So we need you to design a set of icons that will be used in place of textual messages."
Challenging, but simple enough, right? Immerse yourself in the product, do some user research, brainstorm designs that are meaningful, descriptive and culture neutral, and there you go. Oh, and one more thing...the device's display is 128 x 64 pixels with 1 bit color depth.
Such was the nature of the project I recently worked on, and it was a challenge of a very different kind then I had faced in a while. With either greater resolution or more color depth, It's relatively easy to depict pretty much anything with a high degree of recognizability. Shading, perspective, non-linear surfaces are all time consuming but doable with one or the other. Yet with only 2 colors and not many more pixels at your disposal, your so much more limited in what you can do. Take a look at some early GUI icons to see what I mean...
Since I couldn't use more than 2 colors, I couldn't anti-alias, so I was basically confined to horizontal, vertical and 45 degree diagonal lines. Forget about perspective. Since true perspective doesn't involve straight lines, depicting a product from an angle on such a small scale is out of the question. And shading--which is essential in illustrating that a surface displayed head on is curved--is just a matter of starting on the darker side with a high frequency of black, and then lessening the frequency as you move to the 'lit' side of the surface (Take a magnifying glass to a newspaper add to see what I mean). Again, not an option here due to the small screen size, there just want enough room to do that. I felt a lot like a writer being asked to weigh in on a complicated subject using 50 words or less. They say brevity is the soul of wit. I had to be clear and concise if I had any chance of success.
At 128 x 64, every pixel matters. And at 1 bit color depth, rotating, scaling or otherwise transforming anything in Photoshop is useless because the software automatically anti-aliases, creating shades of grey that were forbidden. So I had to design pixel by pixel--make a 1 x 1 selection, put my hands on the keyboard cursors and get to work. See Wikipedia's entry on Pixel Art for a good reference.
As it turns out, I was more at home on this project than i though I would be when found out the requirements. You see back when I was a kid, the first computer graphics program I ever used was on my father's DOS machine. The program itself wouldn't fit on the computer's hard drive, so it had to be loaded via floppy disk--the old 5 1/4" ones. The computer didn't have a mouse, so almost everything I created had to be tediously drawn pixel by pixel using the cursor keys. It took me months working 2-3 hours a night, but I created some pretty good stuff. In particular, I remember drawing a hockey rink, with players, stands and all, which I'm pretty proud of. Using Photoshop/Illustrator now, with the capabilities so far advanced over what I had to work with at that time, It's hard to see how I did what I did, or for that matter why I spent months doing it. But there's something about taking time to do something right, struggling through the frustration that comes with the absence of 'Undo', picking yourself back up after making a mistake that renders 10 hours of work useless. Creating art is a sprint. Back then it was a marathon.
So I forgot about my mouse, left the color picker behind, and zoomed in at 1600%. I soon found the hang of it again, and I got in the groove I remembered from way back. After a lot more time than I though it would take, I had a set of icons that worked...and that's the key. And in the end, I feel a little more satisfaction than I would have if I was allowed to let Photoshop do it's magic.
Topics: Design
Stock ticker entry fields and usability
Interface design is about balance and accommodation. One of the most important balancing acts an interface must play is in accommodating the diverging expectations of the novice and the expert user. The expert knows what he wants to do, and he expects the interface to let him do it quickly. Just about all the knowledge pertaining to his task is in his head, and he would only be slowed down by guides tutorials, aids or other such helpers. However the novice is looking for exactly what the expert must ignore. These activities are new and unfamiliar to him, and he needs a helping hand. Most of the information he needs to accomplish a particular task is not in his head yet, and the interface must accommodate that.
Yahoo Finance recently added a new feature that caters to both the expert and the novice user. It's a stock ticker entry field, and in this case, I'll define the expert as the one that knows the company's stock ticker symbol, whereas the novice only knows the company name. Until recently the field catered to only expert users. Novices beware. Although it was only a harmless input box, it separated the men from the boys so to speak, by acting like a bouncer beyond who's doors only those in-the-know could venture. If you didn't know the stock ticker symbol of a particular company and you made the mistake of typing the company's name into the box, you were shoved back and rudely warned that that symbol doesn't exist-- as if too say, you don't belong here with the big boys; learn your ticker symbols and then come back.
All that changed, and the hegemony of the expert stock ticker symbol know it all is over. The field now accepts both symbols and company names. Better yet, as you type, the matching results--both ticker symbols and company names--get displayed below the text field, with the company name on the right column and it's stock symbol on the left. So for instance, if you type 'ge', among the results will be General Electric, because its stock ticker is GE. But you'll also see General Motors, and Genetech, because their company names match your input. You can select any one of these using the cursor, but you can also just hit enter or click the submit button and the company who's ticker matches your input will result.
So now you can easily find financial information of any--publicly traded--company you want even if you don't know its stock ticker symbol. And if you do, well just keep typing away, there ain't nothing gonna slow you down.
The Curse of Knowledge
You can never know too much about something, right? Wrong, at least according to a December 30th article in the New York Times. As we become experts in a particular domain, our ability to innovate diminishes.
"Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself."
Reading the article, I couldn't help but think back to my own experiences with this same sort of issue. I blogged recently about two related ideas: how interface designers are sometimes guilty of thinking as designers--when they should be thinking as users, and about the mixed bag that is competitive research, which can limit the designers creative thinking by boxing them into predefined solutions.
Now I see that it's part of a larger problem of expertise and creativity. The more expertise one exhibits in a particular field, the harder it is to think creatively--to so called think 'outside the box', and the harder it is to imagine not knowing what you do. The problem affects whole companies, as a certain way of thinking becomes entrenched, and it gets harder for it to adapt to a changing landscape. The article cites the example of Eveready, the flashlight maker, who's powers-that-be couldn't imagine that their product could be effectively marketed to anyone other than men shopping at hardware stores.
According to Cynthia Barton Rabe, author of “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” the solution for Eveready, as for any organization bogged down in its own expertise, is an infusion of outside thinking. Bringing the so called novices--the non expert users--into the discussion at the early stages of design, weather it be product or strategy design, opens the door for new ways of thinking that experts have long been insulated from.
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Topics: Best Practices, Design, Design Patterns, Domain Knowledge, Ideation, Story Telling
Design can be Used for Good and Bad
Every so often I'm rudely reminded that much of the information I get comes from a source who's goal is to sell rather than inform. It is those times that I'm also reminded of the critical role that design plays in supporting the goals of the organization (wether they be to inform or to sell) by shaping user behavior.
Case in point. I use Yahoo Finance to track my stock portfolio and stay financially abreast of the day. I choose Yahoo over the many others out there because I'm used to it. It has a simple interface and I know where everything is located. It also has great tools, and it aggregates information from many many other sources in one place, which I find invaluable. However I just recently noticed that Yahoo Finance is serving some text ads on the site now. I wouldn't otherwise be too bothered by them, but they've been designed for the express purpose of looking like real (un-sponsored) content. They're right up there on the right hand side of the page, occupying the top of one column in a three column layout. The ad titles are just about the same color as the headlines and links on the rest of the site. And while the other section titles are all orange and bold--designed to give structure to the page and let you know what section your in-- the only way you can tell that your reading ads is from the truly inconspicuous (light-grey on light blue, thin, all caps) 'Advertisement' header.
This really infuriates me, especially because it's a finance site, and I can't help but notice the content of the ads. For instance, right now I'm looking at the front page, from left to right I see a snapshot of the Dow's performance today, a headline saying 'Stocks mixed ahead of jobs report' and a couple of blurbs on 'Hottest China Stock' and '16 Hot Dividend Stocks'. Now I'm sure you can guess which ones are ads. And yet I can't help but see the ads and incorporate them into my understanding of the days financial news. They were designed to be scanned, and that's exactly the kind of information I need to be able to filter out when I'm scanning a page like this.
The fact that these ads persist is a clear indication that Yahoo is concerned less about an informed public and more about using its real estate to extract as much equity as possible.
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Dasher - A new way to write
I simply love finding these little gems on my weekly web excursions. This time it's a fascinating new piece of software out there called Dasher, and it allows you to write without typing or scripting. What's that you say? How else can you write? Well...The basic idea is that current methods of typing are inefficient, because they don't learn. Let me explain. Although there are x number of letters in the alphabet, every pressed key reduces the number of available choices for the next key press, and increases the odds that other specific keys are pressed next. For instance, 'E' is much more likely to be pressed after 'H' than 'B' is, and 'O' more likely after 'G' than 'C'. On current writing technologies it's up to the user to learn to be more efficient at writing He than Hb or Go than Gc. But that doesn't need to be the case. By taking advantage of the learning and memorization power of the computer, it's possible to create writing interfaces that guide you through the process rather than just recording what you type. If you'll indulge me in some metaphor, imagine rowing down a river. Dasher is the river with a strong current to wherever your going, and existing typewriting technology is the river with no current whatsoever.
What Dasher does is use language patterns to present likely letters and words to the user based on the letters or words they have already written. The goal is to make writing more efficient by reducing work. There are no keys to press using dasher. In fact the mouse is never clicked. The interface allows one to write by simply navigating the mouse down a path--or tree--through the alphabet. The start screen displays all 26 letters of the English alphabet. You select a letter by moving your mouse next to it. As letters are selected, Dasher displays all available letters again, but this time those more likely to be chosen are larger and therefore easier to select. As you write, you move forward through the tree, and entire words and phrases are displayed in order of likeliness.
Dasher needs some work before I start using it instead of my keypad, but the idea has real merit, and it deserves to be explored more. As an interface designer I see at this tool as a great example of how simple interactions, when thought about creatively, with nothing held sacred, can have potentially revolutionary effects on the way we interact with technology.
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Topics: Design, Flow, Interaction Design, Rich Interactions, User Experience
On the Benefits and Pitfalls of Competitive Research
Competitive research is part of the design process at Pathfinder. By competitive research, I mean spending time getting to know how others have solved the problems you are confronted with. We do this type of research separately to start both the Information Architecture and the Visual Design phases of our process.
Recently, though, I’ve been thinking about the net effect of the importance that it plays in the Visual Design process. Specifically, to what extent does it help, and when does it hinder.
One the one hand, it can be really dumb to start designing something without knowing what has already been done in that space. Starting from scratch can be a real time waster. It pays to take advantage of other’s successful design thinking as it relates to the problems you have to solve, because they might have been solved already.
However the more immersed one becomes in a particular domain--the more exposure one has to the state of the art--the more boxed in one can get. You become accustomed to seeing problems not as challenges in need of creative thinking, but as patterns that conform to some already defined problem/solution set. Then all you have to do as a designer is simply find that matching set. It may sometimes be easy, even more often than not, and there may be projects when doing this is the best you can hope for under the current constraints, but eventually it’ll hurt you as a designer, because you can get to used to searching for patterns. Cliché as it may be, your creativity is like a muscle. You have to exercise it daily for it to grow. And not all problems have a matching solution yet. There will always be unique problems that will require you to solve them on your own, and you’ll be caught off guard if you haven’t practiced using your own design skills.
I would say that for competitive research to be an effective, and positive experience in the long run, it has to be balanced with a healthy dose of skepticism. As a designer you should open yourself up to what others have done, and in fact realize that it’s very important not to design in a vacuum. But as you explore those designs that came before you, keep in mind that it’s up to you to use your creative skills to come up with a solution. You can’t let your skills sit in the dark, while you let others do the hard work. Eventually it’ll come back to bit you. Take what works. There’s no reason not to. But even then, don’t just consume it, deconstruct it. Take a designers critical eye to it, so you can learn from it and grow as a designer.
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Topics: Information Architecture, User Experience
Writemaps: A web based site map generating tool
Came across an interesting web tool today...Writemaps: A site map generating tool that allows you to build, edit and share site maps.
It's got limited features, but it has two big things going for it:
1 - It's web based, and you can share your files via url. So anyone with a web connection can view and edit what you've created.
2 - It creates presentable sitemaps. The page representations (nodes in the site map tree) have subtle gradients and drop shadows, and the tree diagram contains only right angles, giving your sitemap a polished professional touch.
A few other notes about this tool:
Can't print or save as image, but you can save as XML.
It's got an undo button! (how many web apps do that?)
You can zoom in/out on your map views.
It's dead easy to get started.
In summary, there's a lot of potential here, and I think I might give it a try on my next project.
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Topics: Information Architecture, Task Flows, Web 2.0
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