UPDATE: The video has been removed from YouTube which is sad. I’ll try to track down another version.
What would happen if a large corporation had to design the stop sign? This video has a look at “The Process” with an alarming result!
Archive for the 'design' Category
30
Jul
Design in a Corporation
I’ve been pondering an interesting question today. In designing a new application which displays the status of an item in three states; ‘available’, ‘unavailable’ or ‘mine’, I’ve had to think of which colours to use to indicate the state.
The team here are divided. 1/2 think that as the application needs to convey a number of states to the user, the choice of colour needs help the user build a mental model. There people are leaning towards the green is available, yellow is mine and grey is unavailable. The other 1/2 are in favour of using the brand colours (pink and blue) to convey available/unavailable. All agree that grey is a good colour for unavailable.
My preference is for the yellow/green approach but I’m certainly no marketer.
What do you think? Is there a reason why you would favour one approach over the other?
10
Aug
When Users Matter
I recently attended a great course - Designing With Users - at Hiser. While the majority of the concepts covered in the course were not new to me, the way that Hiser work them into a process for bottom up requirements gathering was fantastic. From user interviews/site visits, through affinity diagramming, collaborative design and ultimately user testing, you could really get a sense that the process ensures the end product is in line with both business and user needs.
Having just completed a project with Hiser, I was very impressed with their process, methodology, professionalism and documentation. Although we haven’t yet developed the product they assisted us with, you get the feeling that it will be well received by users and will have a positive impact on the business. The research and collaborative design process has ironed out issues with the interface and further testing closer to launch should ensure that the product is fit for purpose and well received.
Contrasting this approach with Facebook’s mini-feed mini-disaster it is clear to me that there is a point in every business (especially a Web 2.0 startup) where what has always worked suddenly fails. It is not possible or necessary for a startup to invest as much in research and UCD as a larger business with established clients. The mantra of the 2.0 startup has been “Deploy, test, refine”. But, what is the catalyst that changes that? In Facebook’s case it was the revolting (as in up in arms, not disgusting) users who were very rapidly very many.
It’s not surprising at all that Facebook’s designers were out of touch with who their users were and what they wanted. In the incredibly rapid growth do you think anyone at Facebook had the time or inclination to slow things down by doing some formal user profiling or research. Facebook has been all about geting it out. Fast!
What this case highlights is that at some stage, the users suddenly matter a whole lot more than they previously did. I doubt that there will be any long term damage to the Facebook brand as a result of this, but I’ll bet that they have started to think a lot more deeply about the implications of their deployments and will be more rigorous in their research and testing with users.
Some great research on user scrolling behaviour breaks down the age old (well, since 1994) necessity to squeeze everyting important ‘above the fold’. The research makes sense but as I’ve learned, not everything that makes sense is accepted by business people when they demand their content appears ‘above the fold’.
Content and structure are still vitally important, but with well segmented (chunked) content and a design that supports scanning, I have finally found some research that will help reduce the need to “get it above the fold”.
08
Jun
London 2012. Crikey!
It’s bad, it’s really bad. The 2012 Olympics brand (it’s more than a logo according to the organisers) has arrived with a price tag of 400,000 GBP. So, what did they get for their million bucks? A hideousley gnarled, flourescent, epilepsy inducing abomination that is the laughing stock of the globe.
Anyone else think that the bit with the rings in it looks like a map of Australia? They even put the ‘TM’ where TasMania should be. How thoughtful!
If you want to work with a ‘brand’ for your olympic games, how about grabbing those rings, slapping 2012 and London on them. Can I have a million please?
Been a long time between posts. I suppose that’s what happens when you have 2 kids birthdays, renovation plans and project crunch time! But, I’m back - for now!
I attended a session run by Shane Morris at Microsoft on Wednesday titled “The Age of User Experience“.
The first half of the presentation was a good session by Shane and Stamford Interactive. Concise, to the point and engaging. Very well done.
The second half was a shameless plug of the Expression Suite and a demonstration of Expression Web and Blend. From what I gathered, Microsoft are trying to convince the interface/interaction designers that they can use products like Expression Web and Blend as a replacement from traditional documentation. I like the thinking but can’t get past the fact that designers generally don’t know or care about XML, (X)HTML, CSS, Data Binding or scripting. Further, although Expression Web apparently produces standards based code, the demonstration I saw showed me that without knowledge of CSS we will end up replacing tag soup with class soup. Every style was applied as a class, there was no mention of semantics or document structure.
I won’t go into details as I don’t want to flame anyone but the Expression Web demonstration was terrible. Shane did pull it together for the Blend demo and while I liked and understood it all , I think I was in the minority as most of the attendees didn’t have the development background that I have.
Although I won a copy of Expression Web for asking the best question (along the lines of my points above), I think the best point was made by another attendee who worried that giving designers the power to become ‘micro coders’ is very dangerous. If you know a little bit about a subject, you are likely to do a bad job. Designers hat the fact that everyone thinks they are a design expert. Imagine the effect of making everyone an HTML/CSS expert. I can picture the IT team taking over the files created by the designers and throwing their arms up at the state of the code produced by the WYSIWYG Expression Web interface.
Communication between designers and developers is the key to success here, not trying to make designers developers and vice versa. I’d love to see Microsoft tackling the documentation issue and building innovative tools that supported stronger inter-team communication, rather than trying to play catch up with Adobe. How about some sort of tool that would allow us to provide better design documentation. Could it plug into VSTS? Have tabs for screenshot, interactions, exceptions/errors, etc etc… The key is supporting people’s current methods and providing tools to enhance the experience, rather than trying to make people do things they are not trained to do.
Shane drilled the point “Same data, differentiated experience”. I’d like to see “Same methods, differentiated development experience” come out of Microsoft.
A great little post on the Information Architects Japan site highlighting some basic but necessary typographic rules of thumb. Many of which I have not implemented on this blog (yet).
What do you do when you look at your competitors solution and say “yep, they nailed that one”?
As a designer, you are fighting hard to try to come up with a better way but you keep coming back to your competitors solution, the one that has nailed it.
At what point do you stop pulling your hair out and admit that you are unable to come up with a better way of doing something? Further, what do you do at that point? Do you:
- Reapply with pride - effectively copy what your competition has done
- Deliver a weaker offering - effectively conceed defeat to your competitor in order to ensure you won’t be accused of copying?
The answer is often controversial, as evidenced by the Yahoo! vs. Digg debate from a few weeks ago, but I maintain that there is nothing wrong with accepting the fact that someone else got something right before you did - as long as it doesn’t happen all the time.
Sometimes it is difficult to know whether you are suffering a creative block or whether there really is not a better way. Ask your peers to help, more often than not, they will help spark some creativity but sometimes, all you can do is say “well done Competitor X, the best I can do is mimic”.
While still reeling from the MyHome debacle (read previous post) I happened to stumble upon Dark Roasted Blend, a really interesting blog. In fact there is so much interesting content that I’ll have to go back and spend some more time there.
Anyway, my link into the blog was to the page on Incomprehensible Intersections and Spaghetti Junctions which is a collection of aerial photographs of ridiculously planned intersections. Some of the maps are also quite amusing.
What these photos highlight is the fact that without effective planning, design is difficult at best.
I like to think that software application design and development are analogous with civil design and construction. The following are examples of software design roles and their civil equivalents:
- usability practitioner = engineer
- producer = architect
- graphic/visual designer = interior decorator
In a living, growing web application, like many of the ones that I work with, the design has generally evolved over time and the initial blueprint is very different to what the code is today. Spaghetti code replaces the spaghetti junctions but for all intents and purposes, the code is as difficult for a developer to navigate as the junctions are for a driver.
Every application I have worked on is full of spaghetti code. Is software doomed to be built as poorly as these highway intersections? Are software architects failing in the same way that these town planners failed?
I shudder to think what the off ramp at line 3225 of the MyHome website looks like!
