Opinions/Reviews
Agile 2009
First, a sad fact:
- Trips I've made to Chicago: 2
- Trips I've made to Chiacgo where I eat Chicago-style pizza: 0
I’m hoping to make a third trip to rectify this injustice, but in the mean time, I wanted to share my experiences this past week at the Agile 2009 conference in Chicago. I had a good time, learned a lot, met some great people, and joined in with 1300 other geeks in cursing the lack of both cell coverage and wifi.
Designing for Politeness
“If we want users to like our software we should design it to behave like a likeable person: respectful, generous and helpful.” — Alan Cooper, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”
A few years ago a grad school friend asked me to come in and speak to his class about interaction design. The class was 50 minutes long, and I could take as little or as much time as I wanted. I prepared some brief notes, 30-40 minutes worth, and figured the rest would be taken up by discussion. I got up in front of the class, and promptly used up all of my material in under 10 minutes. I was mortified. In desperation I pulled up some wireframes for a project I was working on, and started listing off the changes we’d made and the rationale behind them. The class was bored to tears.
As I talked through the changes something clicked in my head, and told the class that “a UI is a conversation between the system and the user.” I started pointing out how the old UI was cold and aloof, full of empty form fields and imperious demands on the user. The new UI ditched the jargon, embraced a more conversational tone, tried to make the outcome of every action transparent, and gradually engaged the user over time.
The Shackles of Simplicity
Simplicity has been at the core of the web's philosophy of design for the last five years. Whether it's a major part of the visual approach, with large amounts of negative space, simple color palettes, and a focus on strong typography; the interface approach, with fewer things on a given page; or the product approach, with products that do "one thing well"; nearly everyone has carried the banner of simplicity at one point or another.
But while this approach has indeed helped us make products on the web that can appeal to a mass audience, it is starting to show its limitations. After a few months (weeks?) of using a simplicity-centric product like Basecamp, you start to run up against its limitations: it may facilitate the way that the creators work best, but you're not quite like the creators. Maybe you've outgrown the simple feature set and need more for your modestly-growing needs. Maybe you no longer have a few months' worth of content in the system, but now have years of content, and managing it all has become a bear. Simplicity is beginning to fail.
Part of the problem is that simplicity is the solution to a problem poorly-identified. Life is complex, and tools to conquer life's complexity need to instead embrace it, rather than ignore it.
An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders
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?
Continue reading "An Open Letter to Third-Party Twitter App Founders"
IA Summit 2009
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.