Meg Houston Maker

For the Love of Apple

 
This graphic, courtesy of EdibleApple.com, shows us how far we've come. It also makes me wonder where we're going. What of today's designs will look quaint in ten years? What will look timeless? I'm guessing the iPhone will always look cool. Time will tell.

whitehouse.gov

At noon on January 20, 2009, as Barack Obama sat on a dais listening to Yo Yo Ma and Itzak Perlman play Air and Simple Gifts, a White House IT staffer flipped a breaker on the web server, and the redesigned whitehouse.gov went live.

The people cheered, and not just for our new president. The new site put Obama's "by the people" communications style front and center. Here's a shot of the old site (hat tip: Rex Sorgatz's flickr photostream):

It's cool, sterile, formal, center-framed, and high power distance (to quote Geert Hofstede).  Here's the new site:

It's warm, direct, engaging, and cool in a different way. It has personality, like our president. It even has a blog. Partly what’s good about it is that it’s so much better than the old site. But more than that, it changes our perceptions of a government website, thereby changing our perceptions of government itself.

I was moved to express my admiration, using the "Contact Us" link in the upper right. I'd forgotten about writing that note. The gesture vaporized into the post-inaugural fizz. Today, though, this arrived in my inbox:

Dear Meg Maker:

    Thank you for your recent note, and for sharing your thoughts
with me. Your kind words echo the messages of millions of
Americans who have welcomed me and my family to the White
House with an outpouring of goodwill.

    On January 20th, Americans spoke with one voice, choosing
hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. Our
Nation faces serious challenges, but we will overcome them if
our imagination is joined to common purpose. 

    Now is our time to work together, reaffirm our enduring
spirit, and choose our better history. With your help, we will
renew our Nation's promise to carry forth the great gift of
freedom to future generations, as our forebears have delivered it
to us.


Sincerely,

Barack Obama

To be a part of our agenda for change, join us at www.WhiteHouse.gov

Recent note? I had to grope through the haze to figure out what triggered this email. Well, if you consider the last quarter "recent," then it must have been the web comment. I love my new president, but this communication doesn't win awards for timeliness or personalization.

Still, arriving as it did on tax day, I have to believe that someone out there is paying attention, and appreciates my participation on this most participatory of days.

What's the Story?

As director of fundraising web strategy for a large institution, I create monthly web analytics reports for my internal clients. The process requires me to wade through extensive data on site usage, e-commerce transactions, marketing campaign results, and any other activity that produces measurable output.

Although my clients have full access to this information at all times, they can't digest raw data. They need a condensed version that lets them see how their properties are working and what improvements could be made. It's my job, as their internal consultant, to explore the data for peaks and troughs, trends and correlations, and to turn the data into meaningful, actionable recommendations.

I like to think of this process as "finding the story" in the data, discovering what really happened last month, and why. Stories are easy to tell, easy to remember, and easy to make use of in future planning. I give each client a summary memo with that month's key story. This is far more useful to them than a grid of numbers could ever be.

Here's an example. Last month a client sent an email driving visitors to an online holiday slideshow. The show was a non-commercial, nostalgic, feel-good piece offering warm holiday greetings and, by extension, inviting a sense of connection to the institution. The site enjoyed a huge traffic spike to the slideshow page for a day or two, and this drove up overall traffic numbers for the month. So the slideshow seemed like a terrific success.

But looking further at the numbers, I noticed the site also experienced a much higher than average bounce rate that month. That meant that most visitors arrived at the site, saw only a single page, and left. Looking back at the slideshow—the largest contributor of visits by far—I noticed it provided no call to action at the end. In fact, nothing on its page was clickable—there was no navigation, no footer, not even an email address. There was nothing for a visitor to do next. The slideshow ended in a dark alley.

So what's the client's "story of the month?" That while the email/slideshow combination was wildly successful in driving visitors to the site, the client missed an opportunity to leverage its success by asking the audience to explore related content.

And the recommendation? Keep the seasonal slideshow, because it clearly works to drive traffic. But next time, embed it on a page with site-wide navigation elements. Add a call to action at the end, and on the footer of the page, suggesting links to related content—seasonal events, other multimedia shows, or news articles that seem topical. This will keep some portion of the audience engaged, and continue to foster the sense of connection. Which is, after all, what the slideshow campaign is all about.

MySQL Poetry

There's just something incredibly ironic and wonderful about this:

Lost connections, lost sessions. What can you do with this poem? How does your perception of these warning statements alter when you view them as art, not life?

Take its advice: "work with this poem."

Projects

Today I completed a tiling job. I had started it in the fall, during a weeklong vacation from work. I set the underlayment and stone tile in a matter of a few days, but the thinset adhesive I used to bed the tile needed longer than expected to harden, and it was several weeks before it was possible to advance to the final stages: sealing the tile and applying grout. I managed to apply two coats of the quick-drying, volatile sealant over the course of three November days warm enough to keep the windows open. But the project languished as work, school, and the holidays took over my time and motivation.

My husband and I tried not to use the floor in its ungrouted state, but it is difficult to avoid using a floor, even one in a less-used area of the house. This is our mudroom. It is not our main entry, but is one we use for stomping in and out with dirty boots, firewood, tools, and trash. I resigned myself to using the room, knowing the crevices would need a good vacuuming prior to the final grouting, and reminding myself that extra steps are not unusual when one is simultaneously creating a home and living in it.

Finally, today, home on another vacation, I blocked the half-day required to grout the floor. Grouting is messy, tedious, demanding. One applies the sticky sludge to the cracks between the tiles, pressing it in with a rubber float and swiping off the excess before switching to a wet sponge to clear the surface of residue. The grout starts to harden in thirty minutes, so it’s important to work in sections to keep a dried haze from forming on the tile surface. The grout lines must be tooled evenly, smoothed while still damp. And the whole surface needs a final wipe and scrub before it hardens for good.

As with most creative endeavors, this one provided me moments of deep despair, when success seemed elusive, even impossible. The thinset was wrong for my application. The Indian slate tiles proved maddening to work with, being crumbly, brittle, and uneven. Grouting required innumerable buckets of fresh water, sponge wringing, and paper towels.

I’m not an accomplished tiler, having previously tiled only three small floors and a shower stall. But I am a determined tiler, someone who has undertaken, since a young age, many complicated projects I wanted done but wasn’t sure, exactly, how to do. In such projects, there is an almost inevitable moment when I say (or swear) to myself: This is a mess, a catastrophe. This will never come together. But as I continue to work, to test options and make progress, I learn how to solve the problems the project presents. The result is almost never what I had anticipated, planned, and expected. But the result is achievable, and inevitable. The only way to do a project is to do it, to make it happen.

Google Flu Trends

From the Wisdom of Crowds department: Google Flu Trends shows that search queries for flu-related terms are predictive of flu activity in the United States. Although not everyone who searches for flu information is sick, patterns emerging from regional queries are indicative of infection rates and distribution.

These predictors can estimate how much flu is circulating up to two weeks faster than the models provided by the Centers for Disease Control.

Google's results have been published in Nature.

Search Suggestions Work

Yesterday on the commute home I heard Alan Cheuse's review on NPR of the new book by Paul Auster. When I got to my computer a few hours later, I couldn't recall the book's title, but remembered something about a man in the dark, alone in his room, ruminating. Firing up Amazon, I typed a few likely words into the search box, "man in..." Instantly, down popped a list of suggestions:

I arrowed down to "man in the dark," since that rang a bell, hit return, and got a list that displayed Auster's book at the top:

I hadn't previously noticed this search suggestion feature at Amazon. It might be new to them, but it's not new to mainstream search engines. Ever since Ajax made it possible to send the user a list of possible query completions, search engines have been offering it to help users find their way. Here's Ask.com's search suggestion UI:

And here's Google's, from the browser toolbar:

If search suggestions make the user's work easy, it's only because the taxonomists behind the scenes have done their jobs well. Note that Amazon primarily suggests book or film titles, while Ask.com and Google suggest terms from the broader web. This points to a key element of search suggestion design: it's critical to tune the suggested results to the domain, using real searches done by real people. Avi Rappoport, an expert on enterprise search, offers her set of guidelines for search suggestions.

It worked for me. I was able, knowing only approximately what I was looking for, to find my book in a few short strokes. And I bought it, encouraged and propelled by a good experience.

Crate and Barrel Gets It

I've shopped online at Crate and Barrel a few times, so got added to their email list. My appetite for household stuff is actually pretty small, so when the most recent sale notice arrived, I clicked to unsubscribe. I landed on a web page that let me opt-out in a single click: easy.

A minute or so later, this arrived in my inbox:

It might seem risky for a company to email to a customer after that customer has explicitly removed herself from their list, even if it's just to confirm the opt-out. But I thought Crate and Barrel got a few things really right:

• They confirmed my request. They restated my choices and gave me a link to their privacy policy. This gave me confidence they'd registered my preferences and will act on them.

• They thanked me for my business. In fact, that's the lead, the main story. They acknowledged my business is meaningful to them. My cabinet full of snow white dinnerware was not cheap, thank you very much, so this is gratifying.

• They asked for the next sale. Just because I've opted out of receiving emails doesn't mean I'm no longer their customer. It just means I don't want to receive their emails, at that particular email address. Where other companies might have lead with a "Sorry to see you go," Crate and Barrel assumes I'm not actually gone.

Crate and Barrel understands it's the last experience that sticks in the customer's mind, and is the one they'll judge you by. With this email, they've demonstrated good faith, so my final impression was positive: I'd shop there again. Just not today.

Wild Helleborine

This orchid grows by our stone wall. Epipactis helleborine, the weed orchid. Each blossom is no bigger than a fairy's crown. The experience? Magical.

Would you like to Next, or Submit?

Okay, buttons should be verbs. I think we can all agree. But Next and Previous, or even the ugly but more parallel Prev, are well established actions, or implied actions, so they're used a lot. But still, what verb?

At my husband's company, a vendor is developing a UI to collect clinical data about a medical procedure. First draft: a tabbed interface that requires the user to enter data on the first form, move to the next, and so on. Sound okay so far?

Each tabbed form is so long you have to scroll. Uh oh. Scrolling on tabbed interface = bad. We're not off to a strong start.

Then, here are the three buttons at the bottom of the first tab screen:

Previous  |  Next  |  Submit

Please take ten seconds and think about what each of these would do to the data you just entered into this (long, scrolling) form.

Ready?

Previous: Please recall that this is the first form. So why is previous even enabled? It does absolutely nothing.

Next: This takes you to the next tab of info to enter. But it doesn't save your data.

Submit: This runs a validation check on your data. If it passes, your data is saved. If it doesn't pass, your data is discarded. And in any case, it throws you out of the tabbed UI altogether.

Where to begin? This vendor obviously doesn't know thing one about UI design. In ten seconds I bet you came up with better ideas.

The Smiling Whale

I get the Twitter "over capacity" error screen at least once a day:

Why does this whale look so self-satisfied? And why aren't the birds straining on the ropes?

I would be embarrassed to run a web service that was so under-resourced, even if it were free to users, and I would be scrambling to enable additional capacity. Maybe the tweeting peeps at Twitter are scrambling; I don't know. This error screen sure doesn't tell me so. Maybe it should.

Magnetic Fields Visualization

This short film, recorded at the Space Sciences Laboratory UC Berkeley, offers a striking visualization of magnetic fields.

Hat tip: cboone

Effective, Not Evil

"It’s no secret that designers have to appreciate things most people either take for granted or are not consciously aware of. In fact, unconscious awareness is one of the primary realms we seek to manipulate through design. In order to exploit natural human tendencies and manipulate perceptions, though, we must first understand them... If you’ve used contrast to craft a visual information hierarchy, you can compel viewers to look where you want them to. If you’ve done a really good job, with intelligent contrast, calls-to-action, etc., you can even compel them to follow a specific path through the layout."
—Andy Rutledge, Contrast and Meaning, A List Apart

Communicating Design

I'm reading Dan Brown's new book, Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning (companion website at communicatingdesign.com). The book deconstructs ten core web design process deliverables, including usability test plans, strategy docs, wireframes, site maps, and flow charts.

Brown highlights the critical role process deliverables play in keeping team members, stakeholders, and clients harmonized. It's not enough for a team to focus on the end product—the website, web app, intranet, or microsite they're developing. It's also equally critical to develop clear, concise documents that describe visually, numerically, and structurally what's happening, when, and why.

Perhaps a topic many regard as soporific, but one that's kept me awake at night: How can I convey the complexities of the schedule without using Gantt? How can I show dependencies in the application while keeping the schematic diagram to one page? Should I break this project apart into constituent pieces or show it all together? Do I need more detail?

My key stakeholder-slash-internal client is visual and concrete. I think in Myers-Briggs parlance she's probably an ESFP. She's not going to follow me if I speak abstractions about what a site should be and do. She needs a diagram, and she needs me to talk it through with her. She also prefers to see a design comp early in the process, which is always fraught with danger, since graphic design is optimally done as a very last step.

So all my design deliverables for her and her immediate colleagues are detailed, complete, and convey visually as much intelligence as is available about the project.

Another client naturally inclines toward abstraction. She couldn't really care less about visual design. She needs a different kind of deliverable (and fewer deliverables overall)—outlines and schematic site maps work just fine for her, as do low resolution prototypes.

The point is to adapt your diagrams, designs, and deliverables to your audience. Any good experience designer knows to do that for the end-user. But the message of Brown's book is that we don't really have one client to please, we have two. Which doubles the work, but it also doubles the fun. What's your experience developing design deliverables?

Whose Polar Bear Is It?

I recently completed a survey for Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville, who are developing the third edition of their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, a.k.a. "The Polar Bear Book." Here are the questions, and my responses below.

Question 1: What's obviously new in IA? Over the past five years, what major trend(s) have emerged in the field of information architecture?

Okay, this is super obvious, but tagging and folksonomy; i.e., forcing-slash-permitting the user to classify their own content, with messy, ambiguous, inappropriate—and often very powerful results.

Question 2: What's new in IA that's not so obvious? Over the past five years, what's changed in information architecture that hasn't received the attention it should?

Maybe this is an extension of the first question, but collective tagging/authoring/collaborative use is creating an even more webby web, and it seems like it's getting harder to tell the boundaries of a publication or system. So, if a site or app repurposes content from flickr using google's API and custom code, and allows users to add comments and tag or track or classify, whose site is it, really? Whose hand is on the dials? Who's in charge of saying how the thing's information structure should behave? Sites are becoming more like cognitive systems—computationally complex, yet still reason-respecting, and deeply embedded in their enviroments. But the additional complexity can yield an unruly creature that nobody really owns.

What to Call it?

I mostly call it experience design. I also call it customer-centered design, user-centered design, or just plain design, since design is always about use.

Adaptive Path recently surveyed over 800 practioners to see what they call it. The results are in.

So, what do you call it?

Everything Has a Color

Designers with a wee bit too much time on their hands. View the Flickr photoset.

Don't Click

Dontclick.it is a Flash-based interface in which actions are initiated by mouseover movements—not clicks. What do you think?

Simplicity

I've been following the work of John Maeda off and on for a few years. Maeda is a graphic designer, artist, and computer scientist who teaches at the MIT media lab. So we're a lot alike, except that he's famous.

Maeda's been writing and thinking recently about simplicity. He has a new book, The Laws of Simplicity, which I have not read, and a new eponymous blog, which I have, and recommend.

Here are Maeda's 10 Laws:

• Law 1: Reduce - The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction
• Law 2: Organize - Organization makes a system of many appear fewer
• Law 3: Time - Savings in time feel like simplicity
• Law 4: Learn - Knowledge makes everything simpler
• Law 5: Differences - Simplicity and complexity need each other
• Law 6: Context - What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral
• Law 7: Emotion - More emotions are better than less
• Law 8: Trust - In simplicity we trust
• Law 9: Failure - Some things can never be made simple
• Law 10: The One - Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful

IDEA2006

The IDEA2006 conference, held October 23-24, 2006, in Seattle, will bring together user experience professionals to discuss design strategies for managing information in our increasingly complex world. Read their vision statement:

Throughout their days, people are engaging with complex information to manage their lives.

And designers now realize that information isn't simply this stuff you find - the appropriate presentation of information helps people make sense of the world around them.

This conference addresses issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where "cyberspace" is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes.

This conference brings together people who are addressing these challenges head on. Speakers from a variety of backgrounds will discuss designing complex information spaces in the physical and virtual worlds.