Tag: design

  • Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

    “Creative thinking requires a relaxed state, the ability to think through options at a slow pace and the openness to explore different alternatives without fear.”

    Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email
  • Design Supremacy

    The Cult of Design Dictatorship is bad because it so easily appeals to every human’s ego, and it gives bad designers an excuse to always be right.

  • The Law of Conservation of Complexity

    When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

    In our defense, we often did this because how users “used to use the product” was very different from “how they were going to use the product.” So we’d design things so that they would work one way for “old” users who migrated into the new product, but a different way for new users who just started using it. This worked well until we wanted to update one (or both) versions of the feature, and then had to find a way to manage the dependency. More often than not, we would end up migrating “old” users to the “new” setting, removing the setting, and then moving people forward. So rather than avoid pissing off the “old” users, we just deferred annoying them to a later date. It would have been better to just place a bet on the “new” approach, and be ready to modify it if the benefit to the business (gaining new users) didn’t outweigh the cost (pissing off old users).

    The Law of Conservation of Complexity

  • Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops – Wired

    A great article from Wired explaining what feedback loops are and how they work.

    Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops – Wired

  • web2expo – A/B testing and user research

    Just finished with web 2.0 expo (SF). The conference was not well attended, probably the result of bad timing (right after SXSW) and a name that was AWESOME in 2007. That said, here are two of my favorite presentations. There were others, but the presenters haven’t posted the slides.

    1. Cindy Alvarez, “But How Am I Doing Compared to Other Companies?

    If you do any A/B testing, conversion optimization, or direct-response online advertising then you will find this useful. Cindy includes lots of information on what eCommerce, SaaS, Ad Supported and Daily Deal sites typically see for CTR and Conversion rates.

    2. Laura Klein, “Who do I talk to now?

    A very useful presentation that introduces you to the tools, techniques, and tricks for quick, easy, and cheap user testing. This was a great way for me to learn about the myriad of cheap online tools available for qualitative user research. A great way to get feedback on an idea or online product.

    I also really enjoyed Di-Ann Eisnor’s talk on Real-Time’s Impact on Place, but she hasn’t posted the slides. Here’s a video of a similar talk she gave at SXSW.

  • Does the world need product managers anymore?

    Programmers write code, QA specialists (really just a specialized kind of programmer) make sure that it works, designers create flows, layouts, copy and graphics, and sales people sell. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on costs and revenues, and manage the business – but that’s not what most product managers do.

    So do we really need product managers? Or do we just need someone to make sure that someone is leading the team and taking accountability for delivering something that consumers want and customers pay for? This seems to be the approach that Facebook takes.

    Does the world need product managers anymore?

  • But will they keep playing Gershwin?

    From my perspective, United Airlines had two things going for it: membership in Star Alliance, and that lovely arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue that they play as you board. Things got better when they aligned themselves with US Airways (America West, re-branded). I had received consistently good service from America West, and that seems to have carried over through the various mergers and bankruptcies. Plus, it’s nice to be able to add a long connection in Vegas, so you can play a few hands on the way out of California.
    So when United merged with Continental – another airline that I’ve had limited, but positive experiences with – I had hoped that the good guys were winning, and that I would finally be able to fly to all fifty states with a crew that had showered in the past 24 hours, on airplanes that had been built after the Reagan administration, and with lounges and cabins that didn’t look like a south Florida day care after a Hurricane.
    My faint hope began to fade this morning when I saw the new (yes, again!) United Airlines livery.
    Armin, in his fun post on Brand New, sums it up this way:
    To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with the dull extended, bold sans serif that has been introduced but it represents a kind of corporate stubbornness to not admit that a perfectly decent extended, bold sans serif already exists that works perfectly with the word UNITED. Why create a poor man’s version of that is somewhat incomprehensible and then to tout it as “Ooh la la, it’s custom, baby” is gratuitously sans merit.
    Yep. Someone at the client got what they paid for. It’ll look even worse on a plane.
    Oh well, there’s always next time.
    Updated —

    Shanan reminded me of the old Saul Bass United logo ca. 1973. It looks so much better – even with the purple and orange. Put the white-on-black version on a 777 and you’d expect it to blast off and take you to the moon. (Image removed but still available here).
  • economist.com redesign

    The Economist launched a new version of their homepage a couple weeks ago. Their designers had an interesting challenge – taking a premium, text heavy weekly and making it work on a web obsessed with the visual, social, and real-time.

    They loosened the paywall, added more daily content updates, and moved the site away from being simply an online reflection of their print publication. You can read a description of the new design on their site. Here’s my view.

    What Works
    Navigation The top menu bar is clear, logical, and maps to the magazine sections with which I am familiar. The old design had a redundant left rail which has been removed, leaving room to showcase charts, breaking news, and video. Organization The centre column contains bundles of stories, each relevant to an important topic in the current week’s issue. This makes is very simple for me to scan the page, identify topics or sections of interest, and click through. This layout is maintained on the sub pages underneath (although the left most column disappears).

    Fresher Content The old website felt like a nearly static snapshot of the current print issue. The new design feels grounded in the print issue, but also feels more up to the minute. The content does evolve throughout the week. The current week’s issue identifies what’s important – the European banking system, for example – and then the website tracks new developments on each topic throughout the week. What Doesn’t
    Top Stories The image and three headlines near the top left of the page gives the Economist a large space to showcase it’s most current or important stories in a very visual way. It could benefit from some visual refinement; for example, the odd size of the image, and relatively large headline typeface, means that the space is often programmed with images that are badly cropped and headlines that seem too short.

    Blogs The content of these blogs is good and getting better. Lexington, Banyan, Charlemagne et. al. are incredibly smart and well informed, and it’s fascinating to read their views as the week progresses. The site would benefit by better promoting the most relevant posts, and adding the links to the center column as individual articles. Their current position – in the narrow left rail, well below the fold – makes them feel like an afterthought. I can understand why they didn’t do this, since it would make the site feel less connected to the weekly issue – but they need to find a way to better integrate this

    Typography and Clutter
    The Economist websites have always made odd use of typeface and borders. The end result is a lot of odd whitespace shapes, and a general feeling that the repeated bits of the page – the header, promotional areas in the top right, and charts on the left rail – are just a collection of boxes. The home page needs “a day at the spa” to smooth out some of these wrinkles, and make these recurring elements feel more like part of a continuous whole.

    All in all… The redesign is a big step in the right direction. The execution is a bit rough in spots, but you can see that the team understands that they need to build on the excellent analytical writing to create a site that is a rational, well-thought out (if opinionated) interpretation of current events. evolve over time. It’s nice to see a publication that you love get so many things right.

  • Pivot. Communicate.

    It’s been a long week. Starbucks finally announced my main project. I’ve been juggling calls with both India and California, taking care of the dog-in-law, and not sleeping much.

    We’re building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It’s a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences. We’re working with great design teams – both external and in house – and are building something very, very pretty. Given where we are in the project, a few posts seemed really relevant.

    On Tuesday Chris Dixon wrote a great post on Pivoting. He talks about the “Bridge over the River Kwai” problem, where entrepreneurs fall so in love with their engineering project that they lose site of the bigger mission. I’ve seen the same thing with engineering managers, product managers, and designers. Frequently. The only solution is to keep asking why and to listen to the answers. When you inevitably screw up because the product guys misheard the engineering manager, or the engineers misunderstood the designers, remember to solve the problem with better communication – not longer specifications! Overly-detailed specifications are usually a sign that something is very, very wrong with your approach to building software.

    That’s all. Time to crank through the rest of Friday before retiring to my deck with a book and a pillow.

  • Design by Objective

    I’m a big fan of managing by objective. Wherever possible, I believe that PMs, engineers, testers and designers should begin their work by first agreeing to (or at least accepting) a list of user and business objectives that a feature or product should fulfill. This will be useful in framing the many discussions that will follow.

    This week in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz discusses how Microsoft made some tough decisions in the design of Word 2007. He specifically talks about how Microsoft and Tivo set out “design tenets” or “design mantras” which then governed the design and implementation of key features. Worth a read.