Experience precedes branding.

Continue Reading: The Chanel No. 5 Lesson

Designing for change is one of the new hurdles of designing for the network.

Back when print designers made up the majority of web designers, designs didn’t change after they were delivered. That’s because the practices of print design were carried over to the Web. Print designers are set on a project, they work through it, and deliver what becomes a final printed design. At this point, their work is done and they can go work for another client or on another project.

So some web sites created by print designers were set in stone, so to speak, and never touched again.

Time has shown, however, that the most successful web sites are the ones that constantly adapt to the needs of their audience. Today’s site is different than tomorrow’s. Chances are that the sites you use the most are ones that change on a regular basis. MySpace, Amazon, CNN, blogs, Boing Boing, etc. All of these sites are different every single day…or even every single hour!

It is still the case that interface designers (many of whom decended from print) are brought into a project, asked to create an interface, and then move on to something else.

I think that over time this will become less and less the norm. Designers will increasingly be part of the permanent design team, or perhaps hold an advisory role, simply because they need to be around to change their work over time. At the very least, they will have to create interfaces that can be easily modified by others who continue to work on the project after they leave.

That leaves designers with the problem of how to create interfaces that are adaptable to change, that can be modified when necessary, that don’t require another complete redesign to fix. That’s a big challenge going forward, and one that continues to creep into conversations I’m having with folks working on web apps.

Clay Shirky via Nat Torkington:

“We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.”

I hope he’s right. It sometimes feels like we should be, but aren’t.

Clay’s pattern library is interesting, too, following closely on the heels of the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.

The interesting difference between the pattern libraries is that Yahoo’s is a library of interface elements, while Clay and Co’s is made up of social elements modeled in an interface. Both really great tools for discussion/inspection.

Jon Udell thinks that XML formats will rule the day:

“There’s no doubt in my mind, however, that online forms will continue to transform our means of gathering information, that hypertextual XML will make page-oriented technologies such as PDF obsolete as a means of publishing it, and that blogs, wikis, and their successors will become our primary means of collaborating around shared information.”

Tim Bray agrees, but says that easy-to-use word processors are hard to make:

“I’ve used a lot of different programs over the years, and written some myself, and I’ve never seen software, designed for use by human authors, that has good usability and isn’t a great big honking monster. And usually, they’re not only big, but they take years and years to get working properly. So I really hope Jon’s right, but I’m not holding my breath.”

Jon responds by talking about user experience, but not in so many words:

“For a decade I’ve been pointing out the vast gulf between TEXTAREA and Word. Analysis of a representative corpus of business and web documents should enable us to define a target set of features, and scope the difficulty of the problem. In this case, the right thing to do with the long tail is chop it off. Most of us don’t need that stuff most of the time. We do quite desperately need a widget that does the five or six or eight things we all do all the time. And we need it to do those things in a way that’s standard across browsers and operating systems, produces valid XHTML, and is cleanly extensible. The W3C isn’t the right venue for this work, but something like the WHAT-WG might be.

Analyzing the right document corpus might also dispel some of the MSXML-vs.-OpenDocument fog. Goverments and citizens need technology that’s lightweight, ubiquitous, and good enough for everyday use. Defining what’s good enough for everyday use would be a great contribution to the debate.”

In the usability/user experience world this finding out what is good enough is known as field research. I think Jon’s right, we need some serious field research to see what people are actually doing, so we don’t smother them with features.

But we can’t get carried away and simply make Notepad on the Web (unless those features are what people actually use). Instead let’s shoot for the Einstein quip: “make things as simple as possible, but not simpler“.

The following bit emerged out of the Mash-ups 2.0: Where’s the Business Model? session at the Web 2.0 Conference. Despite it’s name, there was only one salient point about business models to emerge from this session, in my opinion. The point came from Paul Rademacher, the creator of the most interesting mash-up we’ve seen so […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Remixing/Mash-up Apps and Competitive Advantage

If any of you reading Bokardo tend to stay in your RSS reader, you wouldn’t have noticed my latest redesign of Bokardo.com. Not given to wholesale redesign much, I actually did the redesign over several weeks after finally getting a local copy of my blog running on my Powerbook (it wasn’t that hard, but I […]

Continue Reading: Notes on the Redesign

Jeremy Keith finds the new alistapart design utilizing a 1024 pixel fixed-width layout too wide. (I wrote up my initial thoughts a few days ago)

It seems that designers creating a 1024 pixel wide design are making a certain assumption …something like “screens are continually getting bigger, so our designs can get bigger, too”. But it’s also an assumption that most folks want to browse using a single window, and have that window take up the entirety (or close to it) of the available screen.

But I agree with Jeremy. I have 15 inches of screen to work with, which is plenty wide enough to handle a 1024 design, but I never make windows as big as I can. So there is a small horizontal scrollbar in the new redesign when I view it, but I just deal with it. The new two-finger scrolling feature of my Powerbook also alleviates a little frustration with this. Jeremy says he will deal with it by creating his own stylesheet.

In fact, in recent weeks I’ve been seriously considering buying a new Apple display, with 20 or more inches of viewing capacity, large enough for an even bigger design than the new Alistapart one. But the reason is not so that I can stretch one window and make it as big as possible, the reason is so I can have two windows at ~800 pixels wide.

So I wonder if, instead of seeing everyone adopting a wider fixed-width design, we’ll instead see a comfort level forming with slightly smaller, liquid windows. There is, after all, an upper limit to everything, except plasma TVs, of course. Perhaps we’ve seen the beginnings of it with this new design. And, perhaps other folks have the same opinion that I do: that two windows are better than one.

So, what’s your window habit?

Update: Jon Hicks has an interesting discussion: Is 1024 OK? about this with comments from the designer, Jason Santa Maria. He makes the same point that I make, that not everyone is going to maximize their window. Also, read this quick interview with the designer.

Just goes to show you that we’re all still trying to figure this thing out.

The word “interface” is one of those words that is thrown around a lot without much discussion. I say “interface”, you say “interface”, and we pretty much get where we need to go. Lately, though, when people ask me what I write about on my blog, I say “interface design” and I then have to define what I mean by that. So, to make my life easier as well as to make sure we are all on the same page, here are several definitions from around the Web.

Continue Reading…

Continue Reading: Just What Exactly Is an Interface? (definition)

Derek Powazek has written a nice article on Ajax. Notice that he doesn’t say XMLHTTPRequest even once. He’s focused on the user experience…cool.

Luke Wroblewski has written a nice, picture-filled post showing the evolution of Amazon’s tabbed interface. Boy, do they have scalability issues, or what?

This mention of Amazon dovetails nicely with our recent talk about popularity. I say popularity is mostly evidence of attention, and isn’t so bad. Others see it in a more negative light. What Amazon has shown us, I think, is that (at least on the product page) popularity as input to navigation can be very useful, as demonstrated in both user reviews and the “people who shopped for this also shopped for that” feature. I know I often search out what is popular before I make a decision about buying something. Do you?