Sketching in the Kickoff Meeting
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I recently had to deal with a frustrating (but relatively common) problem: A client had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted, but that idea wasn’t clearly communicated in the RFP. We went through a few iterations of wireframes, and finally found a design that felt comfortable to everyone. We plan our engagements with just this approach in mind. However, I couldn’t help but wonder if we could have gotten to that point sooner if we’d been able to take the picture the client already had in their head and use it as our starting point.
The Line Length Misconception
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Classically-trained designers, and really every professional designer, should know the old adage that long line lengths can have a counterproductive impact on readability. The trusty copy of Bringhurst's authoritative The Elements of Typographic Style makes this rule fairly cut-and-dry:
Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely-regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page set in a serifed text face in a text size. The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal.
So naturally, when designers work on the web, they're keeping this rule in mind. Consequently, it's become a best practice on the web to keep line lengths below 75 characters, and this best practice has been the source of dissent against movements for things like variable-width (fluid) layouts and the like.
But research doesn't support this claim, at least on the web. Instead, users are able to read significantly longer line lengths on the web, and it actually increases efficiency and comprehension.
Prototyping with Production Purposes in Mind
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(X)HTML Prototyping and Agile Development go hand in hand. When working in a faster, more iterative process, there are definite benefits to using (X)HTML in communicating an interface and the various flows users traverse through them. Along with those benefits come challenges that many UX professionals continue to wrestle with. Existing wrestling matches aside, another challenge presents itself once the prototyping phase has served its initial purpose. After that point, do you throw away that Front End Development work or re-cycle it into the foundation of the project to be visually designed and technically developed?
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An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders
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Dear Aspiring Twitter Speculators,
Congratulations on your new idea. You’ve come up with, and perhaps already built, a product that is genuinely useful to almost every Twitter user, filling one of the many feature canyons left open by the Twitter product team. Perhaps you’ve already gathered a respectable following on the interwebs, with a few thousand people using your service on a regular basis. All that, and it only took you a couple weeks to build on the side.
Now you’re waiting for the big moment to happen: the call from Ev or Biz or whomever. You’re sure they’re going to want to purchase your product for loads more money than it took you to build it. It fills a clear gap, after all, and there are already people using it. They bought Summize, right?
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IA Summit 2009
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It can be an odd experience attending a conference in a recession, and my trip to the 10th Anniversary IA Summit in Memphis, TN, didn’t disappoint in that regard. The event was smaller, tinged with uncertainty, and chock full of people trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves and for their profession. I left feeling both frustrated with the angst, and brimming with new ideas and a deep desire to return next year. It took me a while longer to get all of these thoughts down than I thought it would, about a month longer in fact, but I’ve enjoyed re-visiting my favorite talks in order to share them with others.
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