“The world needs more UX. Without the knitting that UX performs for organizations and their customers, we’ll likely end up with continued wanton proliferation of technology rather than the thoughtful, iterative progress and leaps of innovation that good UX practice nurtures.”
This one hits home for me today. From Chris Baum in the latest Boxes and Arrows email newsletter. (I looked for a specific link on their site for a specific web page to cite, but couldn’t find one.)
Lying and simplifying aren’t the same. In fact, they’re not even friends-in-law. They’re archenemies. That’s right. Think Batman and The Joker, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Glenn Beck and Rahm Emanuel. As designers, it’s essential that we understand this, because our lives are spent shooting for simplification. But far too often in our quest for UI Zen, we fall into the bottomless pit of lies, lies, lies.
Ok, so it’s circa 2002 and I’m watching a new detective show on TV about a guy with OCD. As I ponder how a person can possibly function with so many issues, my mom calls.
“Hi, it’s your mom.”
“Hi Mom.”
“You busy?”
I glance earnestly toward the stream of electrons across the room. “Uh, I guess not.”
“Great, can you help me with a computer thing?”
“Oh, um, sure.”
“Well I just got ‘Word Perfect’ and used it to write a letter to your uncle Jim and now I can’t find it. I think my computer removed it.”
“Oh, well did you look in the recycle bin?”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s on your desktop.”
“On the computer?”
“Yeah. There’s an icon on the desktop called “Recycle Bin.”
“You mean the little picture of the trash can?”
“Yeah, the part of the computer that it sits on is called the ‘Desktop.’” Anyway, double click on the Recycle Bin.”
“Open it up?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok, it’s open.”
“Is anything in there?”
“Yeah, ‘The Internet’ and ‘Setup’ and two little pictures of paper.”
“Ok, does one of those pictures have the name that you gave the letter?”
“I don’t think my letter had a name. It was just a letter I was writing.”
“Mom, why aren’t you using the email I set up for you?”
“I don’t want to use it. It’s too complicated.”
“But I set up an ico… um, one of those little pictures on the desktop for you. All you have to do is open it and click ‘New Message like I showed you.’ I even set up all of your contacts for you. Uncle Jim is in there and everything.”
“I just want help finding the letter I wrote.”
Sigh “Ok, fine… Is ‘Word Perfect’ open now?”
“How do I know that?”
“Well, you know the bar at the bottom of the computer where the ‘Start’ button is?”
“Yeah.”
“Well to the right of it, is there another button on the bar with a picture of a blue circle with a pen in it?”
“No.”
“Is there a button there at all?”
“There’s a picture that looks like a speaker.”
“Huh? No, I mean on the left side of that bar, right next to the ‘Start’ button.”
“What about it?”
“Is there a big button there?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, what does it say?”
“Document one dash Microsoft dot dot dot.”
“Ok, try clicking on that.”
“Oh! There it is! Oh son, you’re so good at this stuff. Thank you!”
“You’re welcome.”
“Ok, goodb… Wait! One more thing. Could you tell me how to get a photo from my new camera into this letter?”
“Oh crap! Mom, I totally forgot I have to go pick up a friend of mine at the airport! Let’s talk later.”
“Ok, well thanks again.”
“Bye.”
Hostage Crisis
At the end of my last article, Erik commented “We’re all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.” I thought it was a perfect way to describe our relationship with computers.
Those us us who work in tech love our tools with all their complexity. We relish in the fact that we know all the keystrokes for doing every little task in our favorite apps. We are secure in our investment of so much time and energy and effort to learn all the tricks and nuances of our computers.
We fool ourselves by thinking traditional computing is easy.
It isn’t.
Those who malign the Apple iPad for not being more like the computers they’re used to are suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome.
*Disclaimer: My mother is a smart lady. She has a bachelors from a major university, she’s a leader in her community and now uses computers every day for her job. She’s pretty typical of most non-tech folks I know. And yes, she might read this at some point.
I was sitting in a meeting recently with several clients and we were discussing how to create a solution for a business need. You know the scenario. I was trying to extract understanding from the clients so I could design a solution. Have you ever started squirming when one of them goes up to the whiteboard and starts drawing little boxes and circles to create a user interface? Do you get that feeling in your gut that this person is trying to do your job and prescribe what you should create? We designers tend to get testy about that sort of thing. We want to ensure we maintain control of the design so that we can enforce quality. It’s a good desire, but the push and pull of client interaction can be distressing at times.
But for me, this meeting was a breeze. There was a tense discussion between the clients, and the complexity of the business rules they were discussing would make the IRS cower. The paint-like smell of whiteboard markers filled the room and there were scribbles of UI layouts strewn across six whiteboards. Me? I wanted to put my feet on the conference table. Everything was going quite well.
The designer-client interaction was working for me because our project team had established a strong UI framework for our app. As the clients were drawing visual constructs of functionality, they were using our widgets, patterns, and themes. They were comfortable enough with the UI framework that they could rely on it to represent their ideas—it made designing the solution much simpler. It was easier for me to decipher what they were attempting to explain because they were designing with the designers’ paintbrushes.
Trust me on this one. If your app is anything bigger than tiny, take the time to create a framework. Here are some pointers.
Create a separate page in your app that showcases constructs and patterns.
Here is part of ours that describes data table models (filled with dummy data, of course). Imagine that the title for each table was something like “Tables that Need X Functionality” and each would have example data to reinforce its intended use.
Hold your peeps to it.
If you’re collaborating with other designers, it’s critical for everyone to own and honor the frameworks. If you need to create an exception or an entirely new construct, run it by the team and do your best to reduce visual deviation. If you’re a small team, consider a weekly design review. If your team is larger, a daily design scrum may be necessary.
Share the framework with your client.
In time, the app you are building will help your clients recognize your design standards. But putting them all in one place gives them (and you) a library of possibilities. For us, our clients began to appreciate the consistency in the application, and became our allies in enforcing it. They began to crave uniformity in app-wide user interactions.
Just try it. Gosh.
This may just sound like more work and an extra chunk of code to manage, but rest assured that it will serve you well. The bigger your project gets, the more critical a framework is. This will reduce the subjectivity of your design discussions and give you something to hold to when a client wants to get crazy with a particular piece of functionality. This has served us well and I’ll continue to put my trust in UI frameworks.
“When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. If you do not meet your own deadline, you are a failure. And since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with scanty or no tests.”
This has to be one of the most bizarre and mesmerizing clock screen savers I’ve seen in all my days. I’d try to explain, but it’s something that you have to see to understand. Or not.
Listed amongst the nominees for Best Animated Film is this gem of a movie that I’m now dying to see: The Secret of Kells. Illuminated manuscripts and killer animation, I’m there!
My attempt at making a web site look like the logo-plastered walls of any corner store in Guatemala. Also my attempt at Latin Alternative Rock. Listen here.
You may look at the above screenshot and see a pretty messed up looking site. You might think “wow, that sure isn’t up to the standard of the NorthTemple crew.” But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
The screenshot is beautiful because it is the start of a new era for us. Look closely at which browser that is. That message is for users of IE6.
For the past year or so we have had the luxury of dropping IE6 for internal projects as our oganization finally made IE7 available. Yes, until December 2008 we were in one of those organizations that everybody hates, that perpetuated the evil that is IE6. We had many off the shelf systems that wouldn’t work with the newer browsers and so were kind of stuck.
But since that glorious day, you can well imagine how much pain, suffering, blood, sweat and tears not having to worry about IE6 has saved us (not to mention tithing dollars).
As of the soft launch of the Youth website pictured above, we are starting to phase out support for IE6 on our public sites as well. That beautiful screenshot above shows the message and site that IE6 users will see.
Alignment is messed up, transparent png files are not transparent, and several other things are broken. But truth be told, I can still navigate around the site and I can still read the content.
I wasn’t involved on this project or the decisions on how it was handled. But I like how they didn’t totally kill the site for IE6. Users get a much less pleasant experience, but they can still get to the content if they choose.
I’m glad that we are starting down the path to help make the internet a better place. I like that Chrome and Firefox are listed above IE7 as replacement browsers. I love that we are joiningothers in dropping support for IE6.
Interfaces are one of the principal sources from which a person learns about his or her work. That understanding gets turned into diagrams, charts, and maps that, whether accurate or not, come to define the work that person does each day.
The darndest thing happened in the last five days and I was fortunate to be privy to it. Apple has gotten people excited about computing.
But this time, it’s not nerds or geeks and certainly not IT industry analysts. It’s everyone else.
I had a curious set of three conversations this week. One with a grandma, one with a technophobe and the third with a self-proclaimed luddite.
Grandma
My mother-in-law walked in the door the day of the keynote and the first thing out of her mouth was “Did you see that new Apple iPad? That looks like it would work for me. Would that work for me?”
I was utterly flabbergasted. She NEVER talks about computers or technology. She tolerates them at best. Her attitude is typical of most baby boomers I’ve talked to regarding computers. She wants to benefit from them but is frustrated by the wall she must climb in order to do so. She’s learned how to use email and a couple of other things on the Internet and that’s about it.
Her bringing up the iPad was amazing for two reasons. First, someone in her office (she works with other ‘boomers) found out about it within hours of the keynote and shared it with her. That Apple news warranted attention from baby boomers at all is significant. That she then held her interest long enough to tell me at the end of the day is equally significant.
After learning a little more information about it, she has decided that she wants an iPad. It actually borders on technolust.
Technophobe
A good friend of mine is an attorney and reluctantly uses technology for his work. In age, he’s somewhere between my generation and the baby boomers. He recently lost his phone in the snow and then found out his company was moving to AT&T. He replaced his lost phone with a blackberry and when our group of friends caught wind of that, we informed him he could have gotten an iPhone. So on our recommendation, he decided to take the Blackberry back and give the iPhone a try.
I had never once seen him exhibit any excitement over technology but the next time I saw him, he could barely contain his enthusiasm for his new phone.
Fast forward to last Wednesday evening. I told him about the new iPad and his eyes grew wide. He blurted out “Wait, are you talking about an iPhone but with a bigger screen? A regular sized computer THIS easy to use? $15 a month for internet anywhere? When can I buy one?”
He had been won over completely by the user experience of the iPhone. It was amazing to watch and fascinating to see him project his good experience and excitement to the iPad.
Luddite
The third conversation came from a completely unexpected source. I have a good friend and neighbor who works remodeling houses and who reluctantly agreed to have me design a website for his company after being pressured by his family. I don’t know anyone else who hates computers more. He has refused to get an email address. He doesn’t use his mobile phone to do anything other than make a call. And he often mocks me anytime I even mention computers. I want to make it perfectly clear that I’m not exaggerating his attitude. At all.
He stopped by my house the day of the keynote to talk about his new website and when he walked in I happened to have some iPad photos open on my laptop. He asked me what they were about and I casually described the new Apple “tablet” that had just been released. I didn’t spend a lot of time on it considering his historical lack of interest in computers. He asked me a couple of questions and then we discussed his site.
Three days later, he called me and the following exchange ensued. “Dude, I think I want to get one of those Apple tablets for my business.” “Really?” I said. “Yeah, I went and looked at them and they seem really easy to use. I think it would work great for showing potential customers my work and for doing bids on.” I was completely speechless.
The Point
After Apple released the iPhone and when the serious rumors started about the “tablet” a year or so ago I had hoped that this was where Apple was going. I’ve long felt that computers were too hard to use, that the filesystem should NEVER be seen by the user. That human-computer interaction should favor the “human” side.
As the Apple guys stood on stage and described the iPad, I knew I was seeing computer history being made. This new approach to computing and experience is as much a game changer as the ORIGINAL Mac. Heck, it may even be more so.
But honestly, before having these three conversations, I figured Apple’s vision would be realized in ten to fifteen years. Now I’m thinking five or less.
One More Thing
When the date for the announcement was set, I started hoping that Apple would release something like iWork for the “tablet.” I doubted they would so soon but the hope was there. As I figured, if they did, they’d be sending a clear message that this was the future of computing, not just for gaming, watching videos and reading books.
Somehow that message has been lost on people (so many iWork comments end with “meh”), but I consider the release of mobile iWork to be the biggest sign of things to come and the strongest message Apple sent regarding their vision for the future.
Check out this post from UX Magazine about keeping the realism out of UI elements (icons, buttons, etc.). Most user interfaces are not meant to be realistic and should never be, as their primary purpose is to help the end-user complete tasks with as little thinking as possible. Anything more requires additional work for the designer and the user, so why bother?
As I was perusing through my RSS feeds this morning over a bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch – I found the NorthTemple design featured over on Nettuts as one of 35 Wonderful Website Headers.
