No Mod Required

Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design Another excellent book. The ideas outlined here would be of benefit to any web application. Small or large, the idea of paring down features to only those “necessary for the users to complete the activity the site is meant to support” is a noble one. I’ve, more often than I’m comfortable admitting, worked on projects where feature bloat ruled the day and I can tell you from bitter experience, giving in to “nice to have” features can be the absolute death of a project. The biggest disaster I’ve ever worked on was mostly sunk by feature bloat and lack of focus*.

There’s plenty to take away from this well written examination of what’s right and wrong with modern web application design. I read this on vacation and while I wouldn’t have traded the hammock I was on or the excellent wine I was drinking for anything, some small part of me thought “wow, I’d love to be able to put some of this stuff to work immediately.”

One thing I don’t fully agree with is Hoekman’s admonition, later on in the book, to throw away specifications and requirement documents. While that might work for the less complication applications he outlines in his book (excellent applications all), there’s no way to do, for example, a detailed financial services application without relying on solid documentation. When there are complicated business rules in place throwing a developer and a designer in a room with a white board and having them “work it out” just isn’t going to cut it.

Still, with a smaller scale, less structured application, the techniques and approaches in Designing the Obvious will be of benefit to anyone working in field of web application design and development. This is a recommended read.

*there was also a painful stab in the chest by a web application framework from hell to help that project into its grave.

In case you all haven’t noticed, I’m constantly working on this site. Week to week I’m always trying different things to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s cool for me because I get the benefit of a better site (and who doesn’t want that?) and it’s cool for my company and clients since they get the benefit of he lessons learned from all that tinkering without having to pay for it (or even identify that said tinkering should be done in the first place.)

All of which allows me to smoothly announce- I unveiled a new version of my home page today

Why? Why not? It is my home page after all, so there’s a lot to be said for making it perform more efficiently.

That and I was reading the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines published by the US Government and was struck by the clarity of guidelines 5:3 through 5:5. They deal with home page design and are all 4s and 5s (out of 5) on their importance scale, so it seemed like I ought to sit up and take notice. I especially grabbed onto 5:5:

5:5 Limit Prose Text on the Homepage
Guideline: Limit the amount of prose text on the homepage.
Comments: The first action of most users is to scan the homepage for link titles and major headings. Requiring users to read large amounts of prose text can slow them considerably, or they may avoid reading it altogether.

My research showed that no one was clicking on the links buried in the prose blocks on my home page, so the above seemed like it was speaking right to my site. Based on that convergence I figured losing all that prose wasn’t going to hurt anything, so we’ll see how the simplified links work out.

Want to see it in all its simplified glory?

Make with the clicking.

My people are all over this thing. Tom O’Keefe, Tak, the Dig, Future Classic… I think I’d get taken out back to some alley in Chinatown and beaten if I didn’t make it out to the event.

When:
Saturday, September 8th, 2007
Doors open at 6PM
Competition from 7 - 10PM
After party from 9:30PM - 2AM

Where
Roxy
279 Tremont St
617 338 7699
www.roxyplex.com

General Admission
$10 advanced tickets / $15 at the door
Must be 21

Date of Qualifying Test Rounds
July 21st, 2007 (location TBA)

Here in BOSTON we like to think there is more to our city than the Red Sox, The Big Dig and clam chowdah. From MIT to Mass Art to aerosol artists, Boston fuses innovators from all levels, backgrounds and experiences to form its close-knit artist community. The level of unique design work produced in Boston reflects the creative and diverse population that produces it.

Fun fact: Boston hosts numerous innovative and creative businesses and institutions such as The Boston Center For The Arts (BCA), Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Arnold Communications, Modernista!, Future Classic, New Balance and many others.

I went to the MFA on Sunday and was glad to see the return of the Paul Gauguin masterpiece Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (D’où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?) I superdoubleplus love that painting.

I was also excited to see Contemporary Outlook: Japan, which had this Takashi Murakami work on display:

Very cool. As the kids say, Murakami is the shit.

A segment of animated footage promoting the 2012 Olympic Games has been removed from the organisers’ website after fears it could trigger epileptic fits.

Damn. As if they hadn’t already had a couple of bad days with the negative reaction to the (butt-ugly) logo, now they’re giving people freakin’ seizures… That’s completely out of control.

Some very creative solutions to basic problems that millions of people around the world face every day:

Slide show: Socially reponsible design - style - International Herald Tribune

I just realized I hadn’t seen any mention of this out there on the Internet, so I figured I might as well play town crier for updates to this story.

As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before (and as has been mentioned in several other places) , in September, 2006 Thomas O’Keefe filed a lawsuit against American Express, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, and Digitas, Inc. claiming, among other things, copyright and trademark infringement.

Here’s an illustration getting to the heart of the matter:

The update is this- the Defendants (aka Goliath x 3) moved to dismiss the claims and the Judge denied their motion. Which means the suit continues on to the discovery phase. Which is, I’m lead to believe, a good thing (if you’re Tom- it’s not so good if you’re the other guys.)

Someone whose legal expertise goes beyond Law and Order reruns might be able to shed some light on how significant that next step really is…

Another interesting note is that right around the same time the judge denied their motion, American Express announced they were phasing out “My Life, My Card” and were replacing it with “Are You a Cardmember?” Which is news, even if it has nothing at all to do with the lawsuit, because they basically had three campaigns (”Do you know me?”,”Membership has its privileges”, “Do more”) over thirty years and have now switched this one up after only three.

On a related note… Tom is now blogging pretty regularly.

Untitled Show

Some highlights:

Ghost

Claw Money

Old friend Jahmal Williams

MIKE GIANT

NOAH

IMOK represent:

CYCLE

SKETONE

(What a terribly “bloggy” thing to do. I’m down to do bloggy things from time to time, so there you have it.)

• People who think copying a design outright is cool. The Digg design category is full of Photoshop tutorials that fall into this category. They’re not as much about techniques as they are about recreating a specific look. I worked with someone once who literally told me to “look at Apple and Digg and see how they do it.” I took that to mean, do something like Apple or Digg. Not that that’s a lot of fun, but as it came out in the wasn’t what he meant. He literally meant “look at how they round the corners or do their gradients,etc.” and copy them exactly. That was one of those conversations that I just let die because following it through to its end would have been more trouble than it would have been worth. Needless to say I didn’t do the design stealing

  Not surprisingly he’s a big fan of those Photoshop tutorials. “Make a web2.0 badge?” Woopedeedoo!

  This same guy treated me like an intern, by the way. I have a web resume that trumps his five times over, and his idea of groundbreaking design was to copy fucking Apple, but I couldn’t be trusted to tie my own shoes. It was pretty funny.

• The idea that opening links in a new window “keeps people on your site.” I’ve heard this from clients for eight years now and it really shows no signs of slowing down. What’s interesting about it is that it’s invariably a request from less than web-savvy clients, so it’s not like they all studied up on best practices before building their site and just got bad info (possibly from the same source.) I guess it’s just “common sense.” Common sense is the devil.

  Interested in why this is a problem? Here’s a mighty fine article- Beware of Opening Links in a New Window

• Speaking of the Digg Design category… at one point it was really cool and filled with actual design articles. Nowadays it’s a lot of Photoshop tutorials, Flickr links and random noise (some of which is cool) with maybe one actual design article a day. I’m still subscribed, so it can’t be all that bad, but it just used to be a little more thought provoking.

  For an example of the sort of link I used to see more of, check out- 3 Reasons Why Snap Preview is Ruining Your Blog, and Hurting Your Readership. Perfect example of the sort of thing I want to see. A little bit of design, a little bit of usability and a code complaint that I can pat myself on the back about (the click capture issue he describes with the snap preview is something I solved* recently.)

• Perma-Beta. If there’s one thing about the whole web2.0 thing that bothers me (other than glassy buttons and reflected logos) it’s permanent beta. Just roll the dice and call it a release already.

• Places that live in the nasty tweener realm of understanding that IA and Usability are somehow important to successful design and development; but not understanding (a) what that really means and (b) that they’re professional disciplines that need to be handled by people with experience and expertise. Cases in point:

  • producers and sales people doing wireframes when there’s an IA on staff
  • acknowledging that “wireframes would be nice” before starting design on an interactive project but saying “we don’t have time” and then wasting time adjusting the work flow in fully rendered Photoshop comps

  The former is like handing off a Photoshop document to a Producer and saying “give me cut up graphics and compliant xHTML” and expecting it to turn out well and the latter is just ignorant of what “process” means.

• Could the Internet Explorer 7 adoption rate be any slower? I’m desperate to be rid of IE6 and I’m still only seeing 25-30% of IE users using IE7. At this rate I’ll be old and gray before I can put IE6 to bed.

I think that’ll do for tonight. I’ve typed enough.

*it’s actually a super hack, but it gets the job done. In my case at least, the problem is the div that contains the tool tip sits on top of the actual link text. Because of that there’s a shield of sorts between the mouse and the link text that prevents the user from normally interacting with the link. Here’s how I fixed it:

• I inserted an empty anchor tag into the tool tip
• I set its display to block
• I positioned it inside the tool tip where the link would be
• I gave it a decent height and width
• I then wrote the link’s href into that anchor tag to mimic the correct behavior.

I love English Russia and today’s Russian Contemporary Design post is a great one. Some really cool stuff there. I especially like the “Delete Key” eraser and the USB drive that expands in size as it fills up with data.