#5 on the free review list is a site that has a purpose that’s hard to top: Freeing slaves.

This site was tricky to work with. The visuals are strong, but way too strong. And the site is trying way too hard to grab attention that it defeats it’s own purpose. With a cause this good the site doesn’t need to do very much: just explain the situation and then tell the viewer what they should do.

Problems

• Visual overkill. Every element is asking for extra attention. It’s visual a deathmatch, and the viewer is the loser. Compare freetheslaves.net with similiarly themed site, Darfur wall. Will messages this powerful, the cause can speak for itself.
• Confused message. There are so many stories presented, but only one or two are needed. Too many choices. What am I supposed to read first? Second? What is the most important action this organization wants me to take?
• Too much navigation. There are at least 3 layers of navigation for what should be a simple experience.
• Kill the movie. First, if you need a special caption saying “Click here for volume” you’re acknowledging the movie UI is confusing. Get rid of it. We all know what slaves are, and any of the great photos you have are more powerful than video anyway. Also, the site is slow and video ain’t helpin’.

What to do?

It’s hard to work with finished pages, so I made a reverse-wireframe. It helps visualize the elmements and see how they match up with a grid. A clean design respects some kind of visual grid, meaning there are a minimal number of left edges: every left edge should line up with another left edge.

A proper wireframe for the same website, should look something like this. The exercise for the reader, or the designer, is to eliminate elements and make stronger decisions to fit this kind of design. This will force more decisions to be made (e.g. we only have room for 3 things, but had 5. Which 2 should go?) but that’s good.

The other major issue is unnecessary visual flares. These elements make the layout a battlefield, where they’re fighting for attention. By simplifying the design and respecting the wireframe, the layout is cleaner, easier to read, and simpler to understand.

Here’s one before and after example, showing how to clean the visuals.

By sliding the freedom awards into the right column, the element no longer screams “Look at me!”. Instead it’s in its respectful place in the right column. If the freedom awards are really so important, than fit them elsewhere in the grid, but don’t violate your own design by breaking the grid.

Is this more boring? Perhaps, but the goal of this site isn’t visual excitement is it? It’s (I assume) to present a serious problem and compel people to donate time or money to the cause. The design has to get out of the way. The above cleanup can be repeated in dozens of places on the homepage alone and will make a big difference.

If any folks at freetheslaves.net are reading and find this useful, I’m happy to do more work for you. Just let me know.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | No Comments »

I’ve been attending or contributing to GEL (Good experience live) for several years now - sadly I can’t make it this year (it’s 4/24-4/25/08), but I have to say, it’s my favorite conference. The early registration deadline is tomorrow, so if you have the budget to attend a conference next year, I want to make my pitch to you to make it GEL.

Why GEL rocks:

• They pick great speakers. I’m a pro public speaker myself, and GEL has a high bar for the people they let on stage - they all understand experience, tell great stories, and earn their slot on the program. This year they have Bobby C. Martin Jr, Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Garrett Oliver, a Brooklyn bar owner, Phoebe Damrosch, author of the bestseller, Service Included, and Alex Lee, CEO of OXO (makers of good grips line of kitchen gadgets), not to mention the day one experiences. The full agenda is here.
• It’s a NYC conference run by new yorkers. All of the day one experiences, where you get to experience design first hand, are run by local designers, curators and other experience creators. No other conference I know of pays so much attention to locale and teaching experience through places and activities, instead of presentations. Many conferences move every year, like nomads, never taking full advantage of their locale - not GEL.
• It’s single track. Ok, like, no big deal. But when was the last time you went to a design conference that said “our speakers are so good, and so fun, you can stay in your seats, and we’ll bring the good stuff to you?”. Like a good UI design, a single track shows a high commitment to quality and faith in the program.

Until Dec. 12th, It’s $1000 to attend. Hey, why pay less for forgettable generic conferences, when you can pay a little more for a true experience you’ll remember? More info and registration here.

Posted in Design, Recommended | No Comments »

I started my career in usability, but switched within a year for a management role on the same project. Why? I realized that usability is not a verb. For all the data and advice I gave my smart team, I was dependent on them to make decisions. I realized my effectiveness in the cause of ease of use would improve dramatically by taking a management role on the development team, rather than an advisory one.

Around 1995 the usability field shifted and usability specialists became usability engineers. The idea was to both get a verb in the name, and to express that usability could be engineered if you followed the right method. It was successful and the field grew fast.

But the problem is this: usability is still not a verb - it’s an attribute of a well made thing. Sticking the word engineer in my job title did not change my training nor give me new skills. It might have helped get me hired, but at best usability engineers are expert advisers. They’re not executives, directors of product development, or even engineers in any practical sense of the word. It’s true that researching, report writing, and analyzing are verbs, but they’re not as potent as designing, programming or building. And more to my point, if that’s the core activity of their job, why isn’t that the primary verb in their title?

The real question

Who has the most control over how well a thing is made? That’s really what all of us want: well made things. The answer to the question is always either:

A) People who do the making, or
B) People in charge of the makers.

For all their progress, most usability/design folks are still neither A nor B. Instead most are

C) people who try to convince A or B to make things in a certain way.

No matter how talented you are, if you are a C, your talents will often be watered down by A and B. If you want more power, there’s only a limited amount A and B will be able to grant, no matter how much they need and respect you.

For years there’s been more toying with names and acronyms instead of actions. We now have User experience, Usability engineering, Information Architects, Interaction Designers, and on it goes. The name changes have meaning to insiders, but most of the people in the tech world care only about the actions we take, not what our business cards say.

How to get what you want

If you have a specialized skill and want more good things to be made using it, one of two things has to happen:

1. Persuasion, political acumen and advocacy must be core, not secondary, skills. I’ve yet to see a usability/design group at any major corporation make these primary hiring criteria. Can you win an argument with an engineer? With the director of marketing? Can you spot the decision maker in a meeting and earn their trust? In most of the world, a kick-ass advocate with mediocre research skills would do twice as much good over someone with the opposite skill set. Stop going to usability conferences or reading design blogs for a year: instead of learning a new HCI method, study advocacy, persuasion and team politics. The power you get from your existing skills will double.
2. Move from expert/adviser roles to general management. Many former engineers and testers went to night school, got an MBA, and moved into management roles - I bet some of you work for them. They transcended their specialty to take on a larger role in the making of things. It’s the general managers that make progress, by enabling budget, headcount and political capital for UX folks. If you don’t see anyone doing this for you, then stop waiting around - go pave the way yourself. If you have true love for making great things it’s the only way it’s likely to happen in your world. With someone like you in a general management role, the usability/design person you work with will be empowered to do great things.

I advise people who want change to stay with the good verbs. Find the people who are doing and moving, or are able to persuade others to do so. The talkers, the report writers, the complainers, the finger pointers, those are the people to avoid: they’ll be doing those things forever. It’s people comfortable with the positive verbs, doing, asking, learning, risking, reaching, who make change, if it’s going to happen at all, possible.

Anyone who understands design or usability understands problem solving, and should be able to apply those methods to their own situations. The above attitude, or something like it, should be a natural path of thought for anyone who wants more influence and power. As Don Norman once advised (applicable to any kind of expert):

“Designers uniformly complain that they are ignored, that they are called in too late, that people complain that when they make suggestions because it costs too much money or slows down the product. It seems that designers are not applying their own methods to their own problems – that when you find a problem, you need to step back to see what the root causes are. If for years, designers are complaining that they are ignored, well, maybe there’s a reason why. ”

Related:

• Why ease of use doesn’t happen
• Why usability is a path to failure (Read the comments)

Posted in Design, Software/Web development, usability | 14 Comments »

#2 on the free review list comes from Geneva Switzerland, at parking-friend.com, a site for valet parking at the airport and other places.

Summary:

• Designed like a poster. The visual elements are strong and dominate the page. This would great for a poster where you need to draw attention, but if someone is on the web page you already have their attention. The large P element on the left and the price star on the right overpower the rest of the design. The P alone consumes 100+ pixels of width, purely for cosmetics. If the site were high style (shoes, clothes, etc.) maybe you could argue for the style value, but this is a parking site - a utility experience.
• Choices are hidden and links unclear. The page works by showing/hiding one of three choices: airport, event or other. Airport is chosen by default, but to see the option options you have to click on the right question. With only 3 choices there’s no reason to hide UI: radio buttons work very well for handling this kind of decision making.
• Colors and sizes are too strong . Trebuchet is known to be a good web design font, but if you split sentences into two colors and default to 20pt text, it gets hard to read (See the Terms page). Whitespace is increasingly important with difficult fonts or large sizes, but the text heavy pages on this site have few paragraph or line breaks. The purple/orange theme is good and works well, but it doesn’t need to be followed through within sentences - two color phrases are hard to read.

The squint test: One visual design trick is to squint your eyes and see how the page balances. The two dominant elements stand out like this (see below). The problem is that neither one earns it’s prominence, and they demand this first order attention on every single page.

Simplified redesign:

Taking into account the above, this design simplifies the grid. The visual elements now fit the page, instead of demanding an unwarranted amount of pixels and attention. All text is one color, the hide/show UI is replaced by a simple radio button scheme. I also cleaned up the navbar, moving the language choices and log-in into a tighter layout.

Before and After:

A few things I missed:

• The price should be restated in the text, or before the book now button. Messages in graphics are often missed, as they’re offered parsed as secondary information, and the star on the right is the only place the fee is currently mentioned.
• Credibility should be emphasized. Why should people trust their cars to this company? The pitch for credibility should be stronger. There should be photos of the lot, of the service crew, statistics on how many satisfied customers there have been or how many years it’s been in operation, etc. on the front page (even if put behind a prominent “Why trust us” link).
• Radio button layout is dull. With more time I’d play with the text and radio button layout. Leading with a form is never sexy, but it gets straight to the primary task of this website: make a reservation. Looking at other parking websites shows similar form centric designs.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | 4 Comments »

I got hit with a case of the lazies, and didn’t get to my promised free usability reviews until now. These will be high speed reviews: 10 minutes of analysis, and the rest of my time (30-45 minutes per site) spent explaining the issues and offering alternatives.

Drew Kime submitted this homemade forum software, used by iwethey.org, which is cool since my own forums are still locked in search of a forums package that doesn’t suck.

Summary:

• The core design is *ok*. The basic threaded forum UI is familiar to many, and most of the problems this site has are ignorable, not fatal. However there is a general lack of basic UI knowledge here, as layout and prioritization are mostly ignored, wasting everyone’s time.
• Basic layout issues. The top 10% of the screen is what people will see first, and on every page. But this design is a scramble: there are no easy columns for eyes to follow, important links wrap around lines, and the logo itself forces people’s eyes to do much too much work (never cover part of a letter with an image). Basic layout should always follow a grid: all left edges align, and any new columns align (See Before and After below).
• Lack of prioritization. There are nearly 25 links in the top area of the screen, and no attempt is made to prioritize them. What percentage of users will need the source code for the forum? I’d say less than 2%. How about a list of changes to the source? I’d say less than 1%. Then why have these two links as the first ones on *every* page? The most frequently used links should be the easiest and fastest to find. Move info about the software to the footer.

Posted in Design, ui review, usability | No Comments »

Amy Tieneman at CNET wrote about a school project, where kids design, and play with, their own paper based laptops. Some of their UI designs are hilarious, if not fascinating. One of my favorites has separate buttons for weird games and really weird games.

Here’s an interview with Amy, the kids, and a slideshow of various kid’s designs.

(via metafilter)

Posted in Design, Innovation, creative thinking, humor | No Comments »

Next thursday Nov 8th is World usability day, and there are events all over the world.

For you folks online, just like year’s past I’m offering the first 10 people who leave a comment a free expert usability review of the website they post (it doesn’t have to be their own website).

How to get a free expert usability review:

1. Leave a comment, include your e-mail address and a URL.
2. If you’ve got a specific problem or user scenario you’re worried about, mention it.
3. If you’re in the top 10, I’ll post your review online.
4. If you’re after #10, be creative. If you make me laugh you might get yours too.

Bonus: If you work on stuff for cell phones or mobile devices, Sender11, a mobile design expert, is offering free usability reviews for you.

Posted in Design | 24 Comments »

I’m speaking on innovation at the upcoming adaptive path conference MX-EAST, on October 21-23 near Philadelphia, PA. It’s a small, single track conference for people who lead designers or work at intersection of business and design. Here’s a summary:

As the business value of design becomes clearer, creative managers building the next generation of products and services are confronted with an increasingly demanding set of challenges. MX East brings thought leaders from IDEO, Google, The New York Times, The Mayo Clinic, and many others, to show you what it takes to get great experiences out into the world.

As an experiment, I’ve been given my own personal promotion code (MXSB). If you use it when you register you’ll get the following bonuses:

• 15% off the registration price, including lodging (~$250 value).
• Personal gift - I will either: buy you dinner at the event, send you a signed copy of one of my books, or write a blog post on the topic of your choice.

Other speakers include Irene Au, Director of UX for Google, Khoi Vinh, Design Director for the New York Times, Mark Jones, Director at IDEO, and more.

Interested? Take this link to see the agenda and details.

Posted in Design | 2 Comments »

I don’t write about it often but I’m a huge film fan. For awhile now I’ve known about the works at Overcast Media, but they’ve been in stealth mode, under the radar.

Finally, with this coverage by the Seattle Times, I’m free to tell you: If you’ve ever wanted to create your own DVD commentary, or make commentaries for TV shows or other media, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

Roger Ebert and others have talked about this idea for years, and finally it looks like someone is making it happen.

Their new beta release is invite only - but you can sign up for an invitation right now.

(Disclosure: Richard Stoakley, Overcast Media’s CEO, is an old friend. He had the office across the hall from mine at Microsoft on the Internet Explorer team, circa 1997)

Posted in Innovation, Web 2.0 / social software | 1 Comment »

FOO Camp saw the power combo of two different social software technologies: Crowdvine, a linked-in type system for pre & post conference connection making, and pathable (which I first saw at Bizjam) for guiding people in finding folks to meet.

Here’s a short review:

It works and its fun. Bravo! The premise is simple: weeks before the event log in, list some tags, and ping people you might know attending the event. It’s easy to find people who share your interests (via tags), read their bios, and ping them if you so desire. There’s a comment system so you can leave notes which was surprisingly active, and public: going to the home page for the site shows all activity, from blog posts made by an individual, to comments sent or received. Anyone can jump in on the threads which was interesting (and I wondered if it’d work for a 500 or 1000 person conference).

At a minimum crowdvine helped me match faces to names before the event which is a big deal for networking or meeting specific people. And it was voluntary - had I been annoyed or less social, I didn’t have to participate at all.

Pathable provided the event badges, fueled by their social matching system - based on tags and other magic they grouped individuals by interest (represented by the color of each badge and the color of the crowdvine profile, see photo above) and created the surprisingly popular matches/opposites lists for every person.

Much like at bizjam, the badges got people talking. It made introducing people to each other much easier as being someone’s opposite or match was an easy way to start a conversation.

Gripes:

Only problems were mild integration issues. There was a wiki for FOO that didn’t integrate with anything else, a photo wall, with tagish Q&A, at FOO that had different photos for people than crowdvine, little things like that that I’m not sure need to be fixed. Someone needs to do a user experience analysis on how many different places and systems ask for personal/social info and check that any redundancies are useful or fun in some way.

After the event I noticed it was possible for me to track what sessions I’d been to in Crowdvine, but wasn’t sure why it was worth the time - perhaps to follow up with people I’d met but didn’t grab their contact info? Not sure.

Summary:

Not sure how much these folks charge, but smart conference organizers should be hiring these folks. Conferences talk the talk about connecting people and building networks, but rarely do anything to facilitate it. Crowdvine and pathable are real tools to help make that stuff happen.

Posted in Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 6 Comments »

I experienced an innovation doubleheader last week. First, the inaugural Bizjam event in Seattle, where several hundred independents got together to learn and network, jam and mingle. First conference I’d ever seen aimed at this crowd and it went really well - Kudos to Dan, Lara and all the biznik folks.

But one particular bit of cleverness was their hiring of WaggleLabs to create custom conference badges using their Pathable system.

Now mind you, I hate conference badges. They make me feel like a 12 year old in a self-help group, and they’re often so big, ugly and annoying to wear that I often hide them in my pocket - Really, I can introduce myself and meet people without them. But this was new, fun, easy and it worked. Here’s the rundown:

1. Fill out a short form. Could do this online before or at the event. Took about 3 minutes.
2. Pick up the badge. This took another minute or so.
3. Talk to people about their badges. Each badge lists tags, and two groupings: people you have high affinity (Most similar), and low affinity with (Most opposite), based on your answers.

The effect was obvious: it gave everyone something easy to talk about, even if just to compare colors, or to ask people if they knew any of the people on your list.

They had a projector up in one hall listing all of the groupings the colors represented, and I had several conversations with people about that alone.

Posted in Innovation, Teaching/Training, Web 2.0 / social software | 4 Comments »

For ages I’ve been working on merging the site with the blog - since the site was ancient, evil, hacky HTML code, and my programming skills are long since forgotten, I needed help.

Jennifer Zelazny at Sandbox development helped me out. With her hard work the site is now, except for the (evil) phpbb forums, running 100% wordpress.

There are various UI bugs and nits I’ll be cleaning up over the next two weeks - so stay tuned. If you have any gripes, here’s the place to list ‘em.

Posted in Design | 2 Comments »