October 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Jobs, Xerox PARC and the Creation Myth - Gladwell
Here’s a great long-form article about the role of Xerox PARC in the creation of the Macintosh by Malcolm Gladwell.
http://www.gladwell.com/2011/2011_05_16_a_creationmyth.html
What strikes me most is how it’s extremely rare for a company to be everything – a hotbed of research, a strong product commercializer, etc. And like the Everything’s a Remix videos say, well, everything’s a remix and we...
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Jeff Bezos & Presenting Jobs Style
It’s interesting to watch Jeff Bezos introducing the Kindle Fire (and other new Kindle models). It’s clearly very Steve Jobs / Apple Keynote inspired. The slide design in particular.
We’ve grown use to Steve Jobs’s style. He’s made it look easy. It’s actually useful to see someone else try it. And as media presentations go, it was quite good, but these subtle contrasts were interesting to me:
...
July 2011
72 posts
2 tags
Signs and the Wrong Type of Persuasion
Confessions of an Efficiency Nazi: I hate it when people want to try flavors in ice cream, gelati and yoghurt stores before they buy. Especially when there are a lot of people waiting. It’s a $5 purchase people. Wanna take a guess at what banana flavored ice cream tastes like?
My favorite gelato place decided to help this problem by explicitly stating that you could only try 2 flavors....
2 tags
Embrace the Constaints of Real World Influences
On the weekend I was fortunate enough to visit the National Museum in Canberra. Didn’t get to see any of the exhibits, I was too busy being bowled over by the building. It was a delight. Playful, imaginative, energetic. Downright funky. Melbourne’s ARM architects (the guys behind Storey Hall and the Shrine extension) have done us proud again. If you are in Canberra it’s well worth visiting.
One...
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Seth Godin: The game theory of discovery and the...
Digital makes free so much easier because it cuts out the distribution cost. But it also create an expectation that you shouldn’t have to pay for stuff, even stuff you value, like journalism.
In this article, Seth argues that digital is increasing the gap between free and paid, specific contrasting the old method where, say, free distribution of a song on the radio lead to sales.
“I’m certainly...
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Writing Naked - Seth's Tips for Writing Honestly...
Some simple things to focus on to write more effectively, based on Orwell:
Orwell: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word...
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Real Infographics: Ben Fry's TriTRACK Simplifies...
We’re in the days where the bar has been set very low on what an “infographic” is. Looking at the daily offerings, just stick some data in a table with a pretty font, make some of the numbers big, and bingo you have an “infographic”.
But really, our standard needs to be higher. For me, something’s an infographic when visual design is employed to make information easier to digest. The design push...
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Enforcing Advertiser Relevance
We’ve known for a while one of the keys to advertising effectiveness and acceptance is relevance. Users actually don’t mind ads as long as they help them with the task they are doing.
But how do you enforce relevance? Aren’t you at the mercy of what advertisers place (and what ad placement agencies sell)?
Not necessarily! Google recognised that serving up ads with low relevance actually...
2 tags
The Cost of Every Option
Every time we add a feature or an option to our designs there is a cost. The cognitive (plain-talk: thinking) load for the user goes up. Sometimes the benefits of that feature or option make it worth it. Often they don’t. And yes, as smart designers we know some of the best ways of representing those features so they have a minimal mental footprint, but it is still a trade-off we need to...
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User Experience Process for Excel 2007 Charts
Here’s a great post about the process a Microsoft user experience designer went through to come up with the Excel chart styling interface for Office 2007.
It tracks through these logical and sensible steps:
Understand the problem – what’s broken with chart styling in Excel at the moment (hint: they all come out looking boring)
Paper prototype – explore ideas quickly on paper – it’s cheap
...
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The Sociology of Online Communities ( Forums)
The question of forum moderation is an interesting one. For commercial ventures, we probably can’t leave it open slather. Joel Spolsky has done some interesting work on this for this www.joelonsoftware.com forum. It’s very smart. Basically, the poster can always see his/her post, but if it is moderated and removed, no-one else can. The poster think it is always there from the moment they submit....
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Avoiding Death by PowerPoint
Here are some links about great presentations and presentation styles that aren’t death by Powerpoint bullet point. Spare your audience. Present interesting. They’ll love you for it.
Lawrence Lessig’s classic presentation that started it all.
Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation that borrows from Lessig, but is much funkier. I clapped spontaneously when I first saw it.
And the...
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Dance of People in Public Spaces
One of the great things about design is how diverse the field is. Yes, in our online design world, we think directly about interaction design and visual design, with bits of information architecture thrown in at times, but our influences can be so varied. Things like industrial design, architecture, fashion, set and lighting design. The stimulating common thread is there is creativity and...
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Death to Print-Friendly Version Links/Buttons
I’ve never been a big fan of the Print-Friendly version link or button. They clutter the page. You get another version in another window and guess what? You have to select your browser print function anyhow.
Better to cut out the middle step and just let users press the print button. Do the “hard” work for them. Have a print-specific style sheet for the page that does it all for them.
I’ve...
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Peta 404 – Making the Most of Every Opportunity
Peta – the animal rights organisation – like to make the most of every opportunity on their website. Even their 404 “File not found” error page. It’s cheeky, it’s fun, it’s great writing to support the voice of the site.
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The Business of Design
Here’s an article that starts a thoughtful exploration of something I’ve been pondering over the last few months: that great design and particularly providing design solutions to Sensis cannot be done without participating in a full discussion about business factors (eg. revenue and business models) that will play a big part of a site’s (and the design’s) success.
There is a tension between...
4 tags
"An Ive for Design" – Jonathan Ive Article
Here’s an article about my favourite designer, Jonathan Ive, Snr VP of Industrial Design at Apple.
What I like most, besides the perfectionist streaks, is the glimpses into their design team process and culture:
The man who, after Jobs, is most responsible for Apple’s amazing ability to dazzle and delight with its famous products, chose instead to talk about process—what he called “the craft...
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The Long Road to Simple
I liked this blow-by-blow about how to explain the different ways to enter a date and time in Backpack.
It may look like a long and laborious process. Expensive even. Sure, it is when you writing it out in full like this. But it doesn’t have to be if it is just part of how you think. If everything has some thought behind it and a reason for being, then it is just part of the design process. You...
2 tags
5 Years of iPod - Design Lessons
In an interview with Steve Job’s about the iPod’s approaching 5 year birthday:
What was the design lesson of the iPod?
Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop...
2 tags
Improving the Plug
A great quality for a designer is that way of looking at something that’s become totally accepted and assumed and being able to ask “but how could we make it better?”
If you think about an electrical plug, you could think “they work – what’s still to do?”.
Well, for a start: which plug is which, and how do I know if it is on?
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Medicare Identity Management - It's Seriously Sick
Here’s my vote for worst identity management (IdM) implementation: Medicare
I’ve recently moved house and have endeavoured to do as much of my change of address notification online as possible. Medicare offers some online services, but you have to register to do this. Registration isn’t too hard. You already have a unique username – your Medicare number, but to prove your identity they...
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Just How Much Do You Want Them Back?
This is a great bit of email marketing by lastminute.com.au to try to persuade former users back to their site. Nicely taps into why people use the site in the first place. But above all, it’s got personality.
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Hospitality
I love great food, and nothing tops off great food like great service. In fact, great food can easily go bland in the mouth if the people serving you treat you with contempt or disregard.
But it’s not just food, is it? Really it’s relevant to any service industry or team with an organisation. It’s actually relevant to us.
Which is why I was fascinate that someone has dissected hospitality and...
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Engaging Writing & Joel’s Review of "Dreaming in...
It’s always good to be reminded of the power of good writing, purely because it engages you and makes you want to read more, rather than shut off.
Here’s a review of a software development process book (“Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg, founder of that great webzine salon.com), written by the ever-engaging Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware.com).
The [Quick...
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Legal Information’s for People Too
Often sites that strive to be all user-centred trip over on the legal text. It’s as if all too hard, and hey, who reads all that stuff anyway. Which says to me that it is more for butt covering than being helpful.
But does it have to be that way?
OXO’s Ts&Cs were are great example of how it doesn’t have to be so.
And this recent example of Linux provider Red Hat cutting their Service...
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"Deal with it" & Other Ways of Assessing Interface...
“Just make it simple!” It’s what many of us do for a living. But what design rules are there to help direct the path to simple.
There are some crude ones. “Everything on a site should be just 3 clicks away” has been around for a while, and has recently been given a Telstra make-over as “One Click”.
Steve Krug, in his wonderful book...
3 tags
Apple & Design
We’ve seen it again and again. Every company wants to be an innovator. They’ll stick an Apple logo up as an exemplar organisation. Everyone wants to have the iPod of their product category.
But of course you have to do the things that Apple does to get their results. And that is often very hard, and involves change. Hell, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. But just like eating well and...
2 tags
Great Design is Incremental Until Boom!
Think about that piece of great design that you love. It works so smoothly. There are no rough edges. It has such coherence and every piece seems so logical and obvious.
But of course we know that the process to get to that point is never the easy road. Blood, sweat and tears pave that particular track. Sometimes the steps along that road are big ones. That’s often how you start out as you set...
3 tags
Bill Sees Technology, Steve Sees People
In the recent joint Steve Jobs and Bill Gates interview they were asked about that they most admire of the other. I think the answer is a good summary of the differences of the two companies and their products, and what you get if you’re frame of reference and driving point is ultimately about people and the products that will make sense and be needed by them.
Bill of Steve:
“Oh, I’d give a...
2 tags
It’s that Special Extra Bit that Produces Word of...
In some environments, there’s such a focus on justifying/prioritising every feature and only building the bare essentials that you end up with something that is perfectly functional, but nothing special. Certainly nothing to talk to your friends about – nothing that would generate word of mouth adoption.
Call it the 105% Rule. From a word-of-mouth perspective, it’s virtually impossible to...
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Search – The Forgotten "Wow!" in the Recent...
Sites redesign and launch. We go “oh! ah!” at the pretty bits. File the really clever bits away for future designs of our own. But sometimes we miss the really impressive stuff.
apple.com has resisted the Jakob approved convention of having search in the top right of each page for years, so when a search box appeared there in their new global navigation header, I thought they were just playing...
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Adaptive Path’s Charmr Project
Why should your iPod and (some) other entertainment electronics have great design, but not essential medical devices also used everyday by people?
That was the challenge (US user experience consultants) Adaptive Path took up with the design of a type 1 diabetes medication device.
You can read the full story of their design process at their project blog.
Or if you want to cut straight to the...
3 tags
The Difference Between Being Dogmatic & Being...
As designers there is a careful line to walk between taking over a design, disempowering our stakeholders and often losing our voice at the table, and being limp lettuce – merely executing the instructions of others.
But how do you find that sweet-spot?
Here’s an insightful quote from Jonathan Ive, (VP Industrial Design at Apple) from AIXS magazine. And it starts with one of my favourite...
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TED Talk: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill...
Here’s a wonderful (and witty) 20min video from TED by Sir Ken Robinson about encouraging creativity in the young (and the not so young).
Children aren’t frightened about being wrong. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. We stigmatise mistakes. We are educating people out of their creativity capacities.
Creativity is defined as original ideas...
2 tags
Corporate Culture Lessons from Amazon
Here’s a nice list of qualities and approaches from early ex-Amazon staff – things to ponder and wonder how we can do more of.
The full list is on 37signals.
But some of my favourites are:
Work from the customer backward. Focus on value you want to deliver for the customer.
Start with a press release of what features the user will see and work backwards to check that you are building...
1 tag
How to Get Good Comments – Make it Hard?
Here’s an interesting article about design factors the mean digg.com is more susceptible to “gaming” – artificially inflating the popularity of an item.
When you think “comments on sites”, the first thought that often comes to mind is: “how to we make it easy for people to comment? – we have to encourage that behaviour”.
But as this article notes:
Derek Powazek in his book Design for...
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Buzzwords – First Web-based Word Processor with...
Web-based office apps have been growing in momentum. People are starting to respond to their ubiquitous access and built-in collaboration and sharing.
But they have always looked underwhelming and seemed like sad Office cutdowns.
Buzzwords (acquired by Adobe this week) is the first to raise my pulse. It’s Flash-based and quite beautiful to look at. But it goes beyond that. They have started to...
2 tags
Logo as Home Page Link on Amazon
It’s been a common (and growing) convention for several years now that the site logo (typically in the top left corner) also acts as a link back to the site’s home page. But you’d be surprised how many people don’t know this. I always find one or two each time I do user evaluations.
Amazon’s recent redesign helped make this convention more findable, by “buttoning-up” the their logo on mouse...
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Duarte New Site & Great Staff Profiles
Duarte Design a communication company I’d admired for a while. They work with a presenter to uncover what their key messages are and what the experience should be, then craft a presentation to match. Most famously they did Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth presentation that became the movie.
I love their staff profiles. Staff profiles are the perfect place to really nail and project the tone and...
2 tags
Catalog Choice – Good Idea, Great Design
Catalog Choice is a US site that contacts US catalog merchants on your behalf and gets them to stop sending you catalogs. For free.
It’s a really nice example of a simple online product design, which good use of AJAX transitions for smoothness and a simple registration process.
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Changing Relationship Between Advertisers &...
Times are a changin’. This is a great video, humorously depicting the changing relationship between advertisers and consumers. Arrogant advertisers beware. Yeah, coupons, of course ;-)
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Amazon Sharing the Good, Bad & Ugly of...
Yet again Amazon leads the way in presenting user-generate content in ways that work for consumers, even if on the surface it presents its products (and their makers) in a bad light.
As the volume of consumer reviews grows on their site, it was becoming a challenge for people to make sense of it all. To solve this, Amazon now highlights the most useful positive and negative review, allowing you...
2 tags
What Would a Person Do? (Using Human Behaviour to...
Ever noticed how rude and dumb some of the machines around us are?
There are 2 cases in point:
Recently on my trip to Auckland, I was using a vending machine to get a ticket to go up the big tower there. Using the machine I had to navigate through a series of inane questions, along the lines of: Do you want to buy a ticket? Yes. How do you want to pay for that? Cash. Do you want to use notes...
2 tags
Site Surveys that don’t get in your way
Here’s a nice little piece of design by Apple. If you are browsing their site, you can be asked to complete a site satisfaction survey – pretty standard stuff.
But instead of popping up the survey and interrupting what you are doing, this one displays a message on your page firstly inviting you to complete the survey and then, if you accept, letting you know that “The survey is available under...
2 tags
Design Principles – Comparing Apple & Braun’s...
Here’s an interesting article comparing Braun’s product design in the 60s with Apple’s design now. There’s a follow-up article along similar lines.
Whilst I’m sure there’s been some direct “inspiration” happening (see the calculator in the second link), I think it also highlights working to a common set of principles for what good design is – something just as relevant to us today as it...
2 tags
Conceptual Simplicity – Where are the Edges?
For the last few months I’ve been enjoying getting to know my iPhone. It’s been a joy. Actually, the getting to know you process happened pretty quickly. And that’s one of the great benefits of simplicity – you quickly understand the scope of the thing you are getting used to.
My experience with my iPhone contrasts nicely with my previous smartphone – the Palm Treo 750 running Windows Mobile....
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Brand Personality – Virgin’s Signs
It’s one thing to define your brand personality and voice, it’s another to have the discipline and process (and creativity) to execute it in all the little places – to make the most of every opportunity.
Virgin Blue’s brand personality gives them lots of scope to have fun, and I loved this sign in their Melbourne terminals.
And what’s great about their brand personality is that it speaks of...
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WordPress’s Personality for Login & Sign-up
Website log-in and sign-up have become so standard for so many people that WordPress have some fun with theirs – admittedly targeted at quite a web-savvy audience.
2 screenshots:
Their login box on their homepage is titled “Already Hip?”
Their legal acceptable checkbox is labelled tongue-in-check “Legal flotsam: I have read and agree to the fascinating terms of service.”
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Old and New Search – Food Service Analogy
I’ve been thinking about the advances in search technology. Some of the capability that’s now possible with FAST is very inspiring, particularly in vertical domain search. It conjured up this food service analogy in my mind to understand the way we experience search now compared to what is possible either now or very soon…
OLD SEARCH = Fast Food Operator
You go to McDonalds. A good experience...
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Cordell Ratzlaff on UX Professionals & Breadth
Great quote from Cordell Ratzlaff, Director of User Experience at Cisco (ex-Apple and frog design, and speaking at the upcoming MX conference in San Francisco):
“One of my pet peeves is with the specialized labels that have evolved within our profession. We have user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience specialists, visual designers, interaction designers, etc. The...