Strategy Blog: Viget Labs

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

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.

Continue reading "The Shackles of Simplicity"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

The W3C has been working on a specification for a geolocation API, and has reached the point where it's starting to firm up and come together. That's good news, as it allows browsers to tell websites, through a JavaScript interface, where the browser is located.

The better news is that we're going to be able to use these new APIs sooner than you might have thought, given the relatively new nature of the API draft spec. Opera has implemented the spec in builds for several months, and it will be implemented in the release of Firefox 3.5. More recently, it's become evident that Mobile Safari in the new iPhone 3.0 software provides a geolocation API, and it appears (outside of the NDA realm, at least) that it is indeed compatible with the W3C API.

What does this mean?

Continue reading "Geo: Soon to be Legit"

Brian Talbot - User Experience Designer :

(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?

Continue reading "Prototyping with Production Purposes in Mind"

M. Jackson Wilkinson - Strategist :

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"

Jackson Fox - User Experience Designer :

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.

Continue reading "IA Summit 2009"