Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom and CSS Mastery are standard reads here at the Lab. If you’re not yet aware, Cameron has a new book coming out in one week entitled Mobile Web Design, which we’re sure will be worth picking up.

Cameron says about it ...

This is the book that ... contains more than 40 full-color screens from several mobile devices (including iPhone).

This is the book that includes what I feel is only the most important and relevant information — roughly one-third the length of most tech books — but, I believe every bit as thorough and helpful as lengthier volumes.

It’s available for immediate download in PDF format on the 28th, and there are some fun giveaways for getting it early.

Cameron’s post
The official site with sneak peek

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Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to spend the day engaged in thought-provoking discussions with our industry leaders at Adaptive Path’s annual UX Week 2007. Although I was only able to attend for a single day, there was more informative and thought provoking discussions to keep my brain churning for the rest of the week.

While the topics varied from usability and prototyping techniques to agile process and accessibility, the theme was clear: we can join in finding solutions to the challenges we confront in the evolving web industry. Last weekend at BarCampDC, I spoke about some of the obstacles visual designers face. At UX Week, that sentiment was reinforced as we talked about the rise of technologies like JavaScript, AJAX, and RIA —and their impacts on usability, interfaces and documentation. I quickly realized that these challenges are felt across all disciplines (information architects, experience designers, visual designers, and developers) of our field. Throughout the day, we discussed how to adapt to these trends so we can be better user experience designers and, in the end, simply create better products.

Jared Spool’s “Making Smart Clients Usable” was among the most engaging and entertaining presentations. He talked about how the “cool features” of client-side technology can be abused and reminded us that audience research is essential to avoid this cluttered user experience. Always ask, “Is this useful for the user?” Good usability isn’t only about taking away frustrations and structuring the way your internal team thinks best; it’s about adding “delight” and intuitively leveraging what the end-user needs. He used Netflix as a prime example of a company that has successfully integrated user research and feedback in their processes.

Stephen P. Anderson’s presentation on Creating the Adaptive Interface was personally thought provoking. Stephen believes that established products can flourish if they evolve intuitively to provide a personalized experience to their users. Currently, most user interfaces are designed to fit a script that is “in a zone of safe mediocrity.” As designers, we are forced to make design decisions knowing that one approach is more desirable for one user group then another. Stephen argues that using an adaptive approach will allow designers to leverage various data and determine which approach the individual user needs. So, for example, under the adaptive solution, a beginning user might see more descriptive information about a product than a power user, who has already visited the site 100 times. Check out Stephen’s IA Summit presentation on Adaptive Interfaces for this and more examples.

Another fantastic discussion, “Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions” came from David Verba of Adaptive Path. He mentioned that traditional wireframes can no longer adequately communicate issues and solutions in an age of rich AJAX features because any particular page can have some 27+ states. Instead, he prefers making prototypes (be it low-fidelity or high fidelity), which can deliver more impact and allow designers to explore divergent ideas with more detail than paper wireframes. He suggests that prototypes would be more cost effective when developed with an agile approach, especially in the case of a high fidelity prototype where the end product is production-ready, front-end code.

Leisa’s Reichelt’s session on the Agile Process & User-Centered Design was particularly interesting. (Pat and I just pitched a proposal for a SXSW talk on a similar topic. Fingers crossed!) Leisa argued that the traditional waterfall method is obsolete,—especially with large and technically challenging projects – because it makes unrealistic assumptions too early and doesn’t consider how designers naturally solve problems. Her solution is called the washing machine method, which is a combination of agile and user-centered design that incorporates user testing and feedback throughout the process. That testing and feedback harkened back to Jared’s Netflix example and further emphasized its importance in today’s evolving web industry.

Two other noteworthy highlights of the day included an exciting keynote demonstration of the Design and UI Behind the One Laptop per Child project and the release of Adaptive Path’s Charmr – The Design Concept for Diabetes Management.

The day ended with a panel discussion led by DC’s own Dan Brown . Panelists shared their experiences, discussed challenges (aside from RIA) and ways the industry has changed, and even shared what they look for when evaluating resumes/portfolios. I never imagined a single day would leave me so inspired, motivated, and, quite frankly, excited about our industry and the challenges we work to overcome each day.

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Occasionally, the design team here stumbles across a site that merits a good “wow.” Levitated.net presents visually beautiful, technically advanced, open-source Flash experiments that explore some of the “outer limits” of Flash.

Two greater points that we’d like to make about this site are:

1) We love it when Flash is not only used appropriately, but when it’s utilized for some of its advanced capabilities.
In many of these examples, Flash is used to emulate realistic movement through code that supports and applies the laws of physics to mimic the way objects behave in nature. Through this approach, users are presented with a piece of art/interaction that is dynamically generated and behaves so. In other words, each time you explore one of these pieces, you likely will not get the same results. They’re dynamic and organic and, therefore, remain engaging and interesting for repeat visits and uses.

2) We learn from and appreciate seeing the code.
Flash, by its nature, outputs files (.swf’s) that are not explorable from a code standpoint. While this protects the integrity of the code, it leaves everyone except the creator in the dark about how and why it works. We applaud the efforts of the contributors at Levitated to share their source code (.fla’s) and let us salivate at their brilliance. As we often say here at Viget, “The code behind the creation is often as beautiful as the creation itself.”

Perhaps, though, they say it best in their own (and fewer) words:

Levitated.net contains visual poetry and science fun narrated in an object oriented graphic environment.

The sketches and applications generated as a byproduct of research are provided online as open source Flash modules.

These pages are attempting to fasten a usable structure around a continually evolving computational ecology, so that it may be observed and enjoyed by participants of the network.

Visual, experimental, intelligent, and community/knowledge-friendly. A good recipe in our book.

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The design team here at Viget Labs has been using Adobe Labs’ kuler since shortly after its release as a technology preview/beta in 2006, and we frequently reference it for color inspiration. Two features that distinguish it from other color tools are:

1.) It’s web-hosted and available through a free stand-alone app or Adobe’s CS3 software. According to the Adobe Labs Web site, “kuler is the first web-hosted application from Adobe Labs designed both to stand alone and to complement Adobe® Creative Suite® software. Built using Adobe® Flash® and ActionScript 3.0, kuler is all about color: color for exploration, inspiration, experimentation, and sharing.”

2.) The kuler community. Having a great tool doesn’t guarantee you’ll create that perfect combo with it. It’s satisfying and extremely useful to see what other users are creating, plug in to what’s most popular, and save your own custom library of color combinations.

Designers and non-designers alike will find kuler to be helpful, inspiring, and engaging. If you haven’t already, be sure to check it out.

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The post Digg Needs a Picture Section on Digg.com recently gathered over 5,500 diggs and topped the site’s most popular list. The purpose of the post was to incite conversation among users about whether or not Digg should add a Pictures tab to the main nav menu to go along with News, Videos, and Podcasts.  As I’m sure many people are thinking, design by democracy can lead to disastrous results. While many posters jumped on quickly and approved of the idea, there were also a good number of people who pointed out that the feature would unneccessarily complicate the site’s design. In the end, the most popular idea seems to be to combine the existing video section (which many are not happy with anyway) with the proposed picture section into a general visual media category.

Many sites request user feedback and use it to improve. However, it’s much more uncommon to see an unsolicited user base take it upon themselves to discuss a site’s design with genuine interest and insight. I’ll be watching to see what, if anything, Digg does with these suggestions.

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It’s about this time each year that I spend a little bit of down-time reflecting on the year at Viget Labs, our clients, our projects, and the design team. I peruse the web for reflections on 2006 and predictions for 2007 as they relate to the web, web design, and more. I think about company goals as well as personal goals. It’s overwhelming, inspiring, exciting, and laughable in some cases. So to put it simply, I’ve given up on a more lengthy, more insightful, and mostly regurgitated post on the state of web design and beyond.

Instead, I’ll simply offer this:  links to several lists, each with 50 items. 3 of the lists speak to some interesting and successful sites that have made an impact this year. The other lists, well, perhaps you’re still looking for some New Year’s resolutions.  Here’s to a successful 2006, and a happy and rewarding 2007.

• 50 Coolest Websites in 2006


• 50 CSS Web Designs in 2006


• 50 Loudest Websites in 2006

• 50 Ways to Save Our Children


• 50 Ways to Help Save the Planet


• 50 Ways to Improve Your Life

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More and more, the Viget design team is taking on the arduous task of “customizing” the look of a MySpace page for a client or project. These aren’t new attempts—MySpace users have been trying for a long time to make their pages more their own from a design standpoint.  And, it makes total sense ... I mean, isn’t it a nice tie-in for Terrence Wallace’s or Ziggy Marley’s MySpace page to reflect the look of his official site? Sure, no question.

So, where’s the rub?

The problem lies with the fact that MySpace is terribly formatted/coded (nested table after nested table, limited ids and classes) and, therefore, doesn’t lend itself well to design customization. Granted, the original creators would probably argue that they never intended for design customization when they built MySpace; but, hopefully, its new owner (Rupert Murdoch/News Corp) and team already have “clean, customizable design and layout” at the top of their enhancements list.

Thanks to the efforts of fellow MySpace “explorers” like Mike Davidson, workarounds enable users to at least change background colors, header images, content box colors, and fonts, but little else is available in the way of significant enhancement. Sure, you’ll find lots of so-called MySpace templates available out there; but, upon closer inspection, you’ll see that they are all based off of a core group of limited design/code tweaks.

With clients having minimal budgets to put toward customized MySpace pages and the extreme limitations within which design changes can be made, this will continue to remain a “less-than-thrilling” (but still necessary) task that clients and designers undertake together. And, with each newly-customized MySpace page, we’ll chuckle together and say, “It’ll do.”

Let’s look forward to the time when clean formatting becomes a MySpace priority and when “My Space” also truly means “My Design.”

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