Chance Bliss

I know it’s difficult with client work, but I wish more people could share their IA/design work. I really enjoy learning from real -life examples. Here are some samples from Whitney Hess, who designed the Boxee interface.

Great article on prototyping with a comparison of different methods and tools. I’ve always been a strong proponent of hand-coded HTML/CSS. People instantly get it and can provide meaningful feedback once they have a functional wireframe to review. It’s still amazes me that ‘prototyping’ is not just a given within web/software development.

I’ve always consistently tried to use either top or right alignment, but it really goes deeper than just staying consistent. When design a form, the context of the input need to be taken into consideration first. Here are some questions I ask myself (in no particular order) while designing a form:

• What task is the user trying to complete?
• Is the form long or short?
• Are there default values for any of the fields?
• What data is essential to completing the form? What is not essential?
• How will headers and sub headers be treated?
• Will entry formatting or completion tips need to be incorporated?
• How will error messages be handled?
• How will required vs. optional fields be indicated?
• How will primary and second action buttons be treated?
• How much time do I have before the user bails?
• What happens after the form is submitted?

While designing a form doesn’t sound exciting, it is one of the most important aspect of web design. Designers usually want to focus attention on making the home page sexy. But as explained in this article, The $300 million Button, the placement of a button can literally cost or make you hundreds of millions of dollars.

Amazingly, there is not much written about web form design. The best resource I’ve found is Luke Wroblewski’s book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. He gives some very thoughtful insights on forms and users.

For the past three years, I’ve been the chief architect and de facto user interface designer for my company’s search engine marketing application. This application is meant to be fast and efficient because it must return and analyze large amounts of data. As a result, the interface is pretty bare bones. Nothing fancy just straight HTML/CSS and some AJAX components here and there. Much of the data and interaction by the user is represented in a table format. You can pretty much sum up the entire application as a Excel spreadsheet with tabs on the top (as opposed to on the bottom which everyone misses in Excel). And there in lies my angst. There’s has got to be a better way than just a bunch of screen with interactive spreadsheets.

I’ve been looking around for some inspiration, but have come up empty-handed. Everyone is using either tables, grids,  lists or tiles to display large numbers of records. In some cases, I’ve seen these views combined with some success, but these are just hybrids of the same old tired methods. Maybe there isn’t another way? Maybe these are the only ways humans can comprehend data. Or could there be a smell-o-vision spreadsheet in our future? There are 5 senses damn it. Let’s use them all.

I will pray to any God(s) who will release me from my table hell!

If you are looking for inspiration, this is an excellent source for all web designers and developers.

I always wanted to create a functioning Rube Goldberg web page. Here a sketch I created while waiting for a CD to burn.

I think I’ve figured out (if only partially) why there has been a huge backlash against Facebook’s new user interface. There is no anchor. In previous versions, the UI was centered around you. When you logged in, there was a large picture of yourself, serving as a visual confirmation that “Yes, you have logged into your account and this is your information”. In the new interface, everything is been flipped around. When you log in, the focus is not on you, but on what everyone else in doing (aka the news feed).

Case in point. This morning I went to Facebook and started posting comments on photos of a friend’s nice baby. I wrote something like “Are you sure you want to do this baby thing? Maybe adoption is the answer”. Not very nice, but she would expect that from me. After laughing to myself,  I started surfing around and noticed a few strangers amongst by friends. Then came the “You stupid idiot! You are logged into your wife’s account.” I should have noticed the tiny 110× 200px image of myself sandwiched between the left navigation and “what on your mind?” box or by my name in 8pt font in the upper right hand corner. Thanks a lot Facebook.

I get why Facebook did this. They want individuals to easily see and interact with their other. However, by removing individual from the center, the user is without an anchor, lost in a crowd of friends.

I’ve written my fair share of user manuals, help sections and FAQs. Very few people actually read them, but maybe that’s because they’re not sexy enough. Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users explains how creating beautiful manuals will create passionate customers. Here’s an example I mocked up. Enjoy.

Why Amazon sells used diapers (and Diapers.com doesn’t)
This is an great article from Mark Hurst of Good Experience on how small details can create buyer confusion with hilarious results. I’ve always noticed how Amazon tries to shoe horn every product into the same template. Consistency in layout and function is a nice virtue, but it must be applied with common sense. What works for selling a lawn mowers might not work for diapers.

The Rock sounds like Barack
Someone in the office pointed this out to me. They really do sound the same. Too bad Huckabee doesn’t sound like Chuck Norris. He could roundhouse kick McCain in the head.