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Archive for the ‘design’ Category

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The rest of SxSW – Shirky!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Life has been treating kindly and keeping me busy. So after a busy period, here’s a little summary of how the rest of SxSWi worked out for me.

The most juicy, for lack of a better term, panel during the remainder of SxSW had to be the Clay Shirky chat on Sunday morning. It has been a long time since I felt so inspired by someone on a Sunday morning. It was something I had much been looking forward to and the experience did not disappoint. Here’s a short clip of Mr. Shirky speaking about education,

A couple of other panels really stand out. Josh Knowles gave an excellent presentation titled, Add Some XBox to your UX. He covered the basic design elements of gaming, namely earning points, achievements and unlockables. He provided one of the more succinct explanation of a concept all conference,

Just kicking a ball around can be fun. Kicking it hard. Kicking it at things. Running after it. But by wrapping this playful activity in the rules of soccer — put players on teams, give the field boundaries, set specific goal zones, and such — you get a complex and challenging game which billions of people find meaningful.

I also felt a kinship on account of both of us being 6′5″ former English majors with a distaste for Jakob Nielsen, never underestimate the value of a distaste for Jakob Nielsen.

Oh – here’s a really cool site with some new CSS working it’s way into our browsers (as long as it’s not IE), http://sxswcss3.com/. Go ahead and check out the source code on that cool puppy.

Tuesday, the last day, featured a couple of really good presentations. There was “Effective Dashboard Design, Why Your Baby is Ugly“ by Aaron Hursman. Then, there was the highly attended session “Interactive Infographics” which featured several good speakers, including Shan Carter from the NYTimes. From the latter, I found it interesting that the NYTimes pairs a designer with a reporter and nothing is represented which is not verified to be true. If something can not be verified, it is simply omitted from the final infographic.

SxSW was inspiring, exhausting and exhilarating all at once. New friendships were formed. Old friendships were revived and plenty of libations were enjoyed. I can’t wait until next year.

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Day 1 at SXSWi – UX panels + Mark Cuban rips.
Friday, March 12th, 2010

My first day back at SXSW Interactive is in the books. My day started with the UX of Mobile panel. It was okay. There were some good insights into new developments at Google and some observations regarding different user behavior when using Maps on mobile devices. Beyond that, there was little practical advice. I was hoping to get some good ideas and examples of existing and potential design patterns. Instead, we received little beyond the consensus that there is a bright future for mobile devices.

After that, I attended a panel with a couple of Google UX’s called Long Distance UX. Like many, I walked out early because there was little of value provided beyond the obvious. I’ve been doing remote UX work for a couple of years now and discovered no new insights. At times, the panel didn’t explain itself well or made statements that appeared to border on the ridiculous. With both the first panels, I thought the topics where covered with too broad a brush and some more practical examples might have been more useful.

My day ended at the Battle for Your TV panel where sparks flew. This was a blood bath that pitted Mark Cuban (HDNet / Dallas Mavs) versus Avner Ronen (Boxee). Here’s a hint, Cuban barely blinked, much less bleed.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/swnktstic/

I think Cuban stunned Ronen right out by attacking Boxee on the lack of a revenue model. In turn, Ronen attempted to attack Cuban on Broadcast.com. These efforts failed miserably. Questions about Broadcast.com were met with responses like,

(Broadcast.com) made more money in a quarter than any revenue ever made by Boxee.

(Broadcast.com) was going to go cash flow positive the quarter Yahoo decided to buy the company.

Ronen had no answers. This first rampage by Cuban was slowed only by the fire alarm that forced the evacuation of the convention center. When conversation reconvened, Cuban picked up where he left off. During a Q & A section, there was a long line of angry, rambling attendees ready to take on Cuban. He quickly dismissed all challenges, sometimes with funny responses. Mark Cuban is just plain whip smart.

Like others, I came into the room leaning towards Boxee. I wanted to believe. I came out totally convinced by Mark Cuban. He spoke intelligently about revenue models and why distribution systems other than the Internet made more financial sense. He also made it abundantly clear that he was platform agnostic in that he simply looked for good return on his investment. If distribution via web video providers would provide adequate guarantees, he would be happy to work deals. Cuban demonstrated great knowledge of the domain while Ronen, sadly, looked lost. It saddens me to say this, but I think Ronen may have hurt Boxee more than he helped here. I have a hard time seeing the long term viability of the company after listening to their chief executive. I also came out with a whole new level of respect for Mark Cuban.

Overall, my first day was positive. The Mark Cuban panel was as exciting as any i’ve seen at any conference. I also had a great time chatting with very interesting, intelligent people about topics on which I am passionate. I can’t wait until tomorrow.

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Urban Air Trees
Monday, July 6th, 2009

I was blown away by the short clip below. These eco-environments were created by ecositema urbano architects. They are made from commercially available products. They are portable and assembled using only screws. These “trees” are also revenue generating; excess energy from solar panels is sold back utility companies for a healthy profit. Who says money doesn’t grow on trees?

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Messaging: Wordpress iPhone App
Saturday, May 16th, 2009

I installed the Wordpress iPhone app in order to obtain a little more flexibility on how I publish content … and also because the experience designer inside me foams at the mouth at the prospect of performing a task in a new way. The app is great. It empowers users to publish to blogs hosted by Wordpress or on their own servers.

In attempting to connect to this blog, I encountered an error. One of my pet peeves is poor error messaging. If an application is going to stop me from accomplishing a task, i’d like a little guidance as to how I may help myself to overcome the nuisance without having to resort to some knowledge base or Google, the great knowledge base of the internets. I’m looking at you and your cryptic, code bearing, 0×1278365 messages – Microsoft.

To my most pleasant surprise, the message provided by the Wordpress App allowed me to fix the problem with relative ease. Here it is:
 iphone_wp_error
The message clearly states the problem and how to fix it. However, things can usually be improved or done differently. So, how might one improve on this message?

Part of the challenge here is that this message was presented on my iPhone, meaning I can’t easily copy and paste the URL to get to the desired location. The lazy person in me rather not attempt to type the URL … missed a letter, doh! A more useful message might be one directing me to the correct location within the application, namely Settings > Writing. 

Messaging is critical to more usable applications. It’s not uncommon for users to encounter errors. Use those opportunities to efficiently communicate with users and walk them through a potentially stressful experience. It will only make the experience stronger and everyone can quickly get back to accomplishing their tasks – usually something other than dealing with errors.

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Experience review: WSJ online survey
Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

I was reading an article at the online version of Wall Street Journal. A survey window descended asking if I would take a couple of minutes to answer some questions. Unless I am really pressed for time, I usually take a few moments to provide feedback to companies that request feedback via the web. The problem was that it was a survey about banks, not a survey about WSJ. It was a standard “how do I feel about brand X” type questionnaire. I quickly abandoned the survey, as I was willing to provide the WSJ feedback, not some marketer gathering feedback on another company.

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Experience Review: US Postal Service Self Serve Kiosks (Automated Postal Centers – APC)
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

Kudos to the US Postal Service on their Automated Postal Centers (APC). These self service kiosks have been installed at some office locations. My experiences with the ever growing amount of self service kiosks have often been less than ideal, but this was shinning example of an efficient and simple process. The USPS has done a great job. The interface was simple and clear. The steps were clearly communicated and lacking any of the trappings of complexity that one might associate with a process requiring a similar breadth of options (to insure or not to insure, postage, weight, etc.). The machine has a scale built into it, so you can ship virtually any size package. It accepts either debit or credit cards as payment and will easily guide you through the process of printing stamps for several packages. 

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Experience Review: The New NYTimes Video Section
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

The new video section of the NYTimes online is yet another example of exemplary design by the news organization. The updated design leverages a gray background to more clearly focus the user’s attention to the video.

This new design works much better than the previous one which employed a white background. While the white background is fine for reading text, the gray does a much better with the video. The Times has long used the gray background for picture galleries, but it’s nice to finally see them extend this to the video page.

The reason this approach works so well is because of how computer screens work. “Paper white” is a pigment, meaning it absorbs light. Monitors actually emit light making the color white much brighter than that of paper. You wouldn’t want to read in a dark room, but watching movies works well.

By removing all that white from it’s page, the NYTimes has made the experience of watching their videos all the more enjoyable

Another nice touch is how the text in the area in which you hover changes to a brighter color to facilitate making a choice.


Kudos once again to the excellent design team at the NYTimes.

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Experience Review: Jet Blue Survey
Monday, October 13th, 2008

After a recent flight, Jet Blue sent me a survey. There were several problems with the survey. For one, it was poorly written. It asked me a series of questions and asked me to provide responses on the old sliding scale, from “less than expected” to “better than expected.”

Given that I am a relatively active traveler who flies Jet Blue extensively, most of my answers are naturally of the middle of the road, “as expected,” variety. I have come to expect a quality experience from them, as compared to say Spirit Air.

The final straw in the proverbial hat was the overall length of the survey. While I am often willing to provide my feedback to a vendor (understanding how important it is to my own business), there is only so much time I will dedicate to this task. The survey was extremely long. It dynamically updated the questions based on my responses, and the page continued to grow in what felt like an exponential manner. This was the survey that felt like it just kept growing and growing and growing.

While I clicked on the link in the email with the best of intentions of providing feedback to what I feel is a superior airline company, the experience was so horrendous that the survey began to be more of an intrusion than was worth my time. In addition to all this, there was not even an offer for some basic, menial coupon, with some insane restrictions, that I would never use to help lube the process.

Lessons to consider: Be conscious of who you target for surveys. Ask relevant questions that demonstrate some basic consideration of the usage patterns of the sample population. Be brief and respectful of that participants time. Provide some incentive to reward the participants for their time and feedback.

Oh yeah, crazy amount of javascript code in surveys to enable the dynamic display of questions … provably a bad idea. The company fueling the survey, Market Metrix.

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Experience Review: Cuil: Missed Opportunity
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Like many people yesterday, I was excited to check out the well funded, new search engine from the former Googlers. Cuil was supposed to be the challenger to Google’s search throne. Their launch yesterday was more about a company missing an opportunity. They received a fair amount of press, which not only got me to visit their site but also a fair amount of my less technically inclined friends. 

While they claim to have a largest index, the results are anything but good. Cuil … it’s not the size of your index, but the quality of the results. Cuil fails miserably exactly where it was most likely to engage new users. They seem to have failed to ask themselves a most basic question,

What are user’s likely to search for when using a new search engine?

People search for themselves or for something they know. The whole idea of Google-ing yourself is obviously not a new one. Whether to satisfy a curiosity or for privacy purposes, few have not broken down and indulged in this bit of quasi-ego-maniacal activity. It’s an exciting activity that is often revealing and usually in an unexpected way. Cuil totally misses the boat. 

Searches performed for the names of a couple of people I know provided absolutely no results. These same names in Google and Yahoo provide a hearty amount of results, as these are people who regularly blog. In addition, a search for my company’s name provided results that we were anything but focused. Google and Yahoo provide much more focused, quality results.

If Cuil is to really make a challenge, they sure got off to a really bad start. They totally missed on a wonderful opportunity to make a great impression on the most significant amount of traffic they were likely to receive for free. In addition, they garnered a whole bunch of bad reviews, which will make their goal of overtaking Google all the more difficult. 

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Bill Gates, “What an absolute mess.”
Saturday, June 28th, 2008

“An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant” is an interesting post at seattlepi.com. It contains an email sent by Gates in January  of 2003 after attempting to locate and install Movie Maker. It’s interesting read; Gates go on about the quality, more specifically the lack thereof, of the user experience. Given my recent disappointment with trying to install the WorldWide Telescope, I find it interesting even Bill Gates himself has problems using the products his company produces.

New Rule: Never deliver something I can’t use.

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