The Design of Traffic Control
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 3rd, 2010
How do you know if you are well suited to a career in information architecture? Well, here’s a little test. When you are finished reading this post, follow the link I provide to the US Department of Transportation’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices(MUTCD), which is the definitive, 864 page style guide for the country’s road signs, signals, and traffic markings. If you soon find yourself delightfully lost in the visual minutiae and obscene specificity of the guidance provided, then you are either Rain Man or what I suspect is a natural born IA.
Interaction Design & Sustainability Case Study: Ford SmartGuage with EcoGuide
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on December 4th, 2009
The dashboard that monitors what the driver is doing, not the machine.
Ok, so I admit that I have a tendency to overvalue the impact of my own profession. I believe Malcom McCullough when he says that interaction design is likely to be one of the great liberal arts of the 21st century. The great American novel, when it finally arrives, will be planned in Omnigraffle. And the fact that most of us deploy our tradecraft in the service of streamlining the movie rental process, selling sunglasses or laminate flooring, facilitating the sharing of snapshots and how-to articles on pumpkin carving does not diminish our greatness. In fact, in my world, interaction designers are likely to be key players in all forms of meaningful societal change from here on in. (Just try and tell me that Obama’s website wasn’t pivotal in his election!) But what role does I.D. have in making the planet greener? Even I struggled with that one.
Anti-pattern: Periphrasis
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on November 19th, 2009
IA's Should Make Aggressive Use of the Red Pen on Wireframes & Designs
Two weeks ago, I wrote about precision in language and presented a strategy to identify competing meanings for words used in UI nomenclature. Today, I’d like to focus on storytelling and the crucial art of editing. If you are an Interaction Designer or a client or teammate of one who has a case of periphrasis, you should order a big, fat red felt marker immediately so you can attack the wireframes you are reviewing with the zeal of a stingy New Yorker editor.
Things I Lose Sleep Over #2 – Demand Media
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on November 2nd, 2009
4:14am, Brooklyn
Demand Media is Profiled in the November Wired: "Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell"
Last week, I tossed and turned over the successful online publishing formula of Smashing Magazine. Simple sounding in principle, Smashing’s approach is to develop enduring, high-quality content and to cultivate an audience with it. Each post is packed with value and is published to a hungry base of Tweeps and RSS subscribers, becoming instantly SEO’d upon publication. If this was easy to do, then Smashing wouldn’t be such an outlier (see table below), and I would be sleeping soundly in a villa on Bequia instead of up right now writing this. Tonight, my insomniac ramblings are focused in another direction, on a profitable online publisher who takes the exact opposite approach: cranking out low-quality content and spending as little as possible on it’s production. Reading the new issue of Wired (November), I was fascinated and disturbed by the story of Richard Rosenblatt and his Demand Media. Quoting Daniel Roth, the author, “Here is the thing that Rosenblatt has discovered. Online content is not worth very much.” The art, therefore, is in cost control – which is done in two ways. 1) Demand channels The Algorithm to tell them precisely what consumers are searching for, where gaps in the existing online content exist, and what advertisers might be willing to pay for. 2) Demand hires a new breed of freelancer who is expert at cranking out passionless, utilitarian content at wages that would make your average Hyderabad call center rep storm out in protest.
Anti-Pattern: Competing Meanings in Website Nomenclature
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on October 29th, 2009
Yes. A love of words makes you a better IA.
Wordnik.com doesn’t jump to mind as an obvious resource for an interaction designer. For a dedicated Sunday puzzle solver? You bet. Or if you have a grandiloquent and sesquipedalian consulting style (pompous and prone to long words), then this is your place – btw, remind me not to hire you. I read Wordnik fairly regularly and am now a self-diagnosed cremnophobic (one who has a morbid fear of being near the edge of a cliff, precipice, or abyss) and I also know the difference between an acronym, like ACORN, and an initialism, like NAACP (one spells out a word and one doesn’t). But geeking out on words sharpens an important instinct for anybody who trades in the design of screens- a fetish for precision in language. Obsessing over language will keep you from repeatedly stumbling into what is perhaps the most common antipattern of all – vagueness and ambiguity. Here’s three main themes to keep in mind when choosing words for your wireframes or designs:
Things I Lose Sleep Over – SmashingMagazine.com
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on October 21st, 2009
3:52am, Brooklyn
There’s not an unusual amount of stress going on right now in either my home or work life. Money’s okay. Health is fine. But I find myself often awake between the hours of 3 and 5 am. I realize it’s always the same things that are keeping me up. There are portentous trends brewing in my work as a user experience professional and a digital publisher, and in those hazy hours of early morning my thoughts are dominated by them. The first one I want to post about is Smashing Magazine.
10 Great Interaction Designs – in Cut & Folded Paper
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on September 30th, 2009
Experience designers who work in digital media such as RIAs, video games, and DVD menus are already well conditioned to thinking beyond the page as a metaphor for organizing information structures. But paper itself is not the villain. In fact, paper can be transformed into all sorts of interesting interactive possibilities – including graceful and surprising transitions, progressive disclosure of information, impactful visuals, and above all, a compelling and satisfying simplicity.
5 Must-have Books for a Director of User Experience
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on September 24th, 2009
As a client-side Director of User Experience, my job is quite varied. The amount of web development that’s happening in a company of our size is truly staggering – so my role is as much one of providing continuity and thought leadership as it is directly designing or managing designers. The difficult parts of my job are a) giving people in the business the practical tools and methodologies to actually deliver on the promise of being “user centered,” b) finding language that achieves a common understanding of design ideas for a general audience, and c) pushing the expectations for what can be achieved online past the “status quo” state of incremental improvements and a myopic focus on what the competition is doing. These 5 books have been the most influential in providing guidance for my daily challenges:
1. Serious Play
by Michael Schrage
This is a slim book and a quick read – but it’s number one on my list. In fact, it virtually provides me with a grand unifying theory of implementing a UX culture at a large company. My mantra at Wiley is “always put a design deliverable in front of the specification and have it tested in a valid way.” By ‘design deliverable,’ I mean model, or prototype, of the end product -something vivid enough for a potential user of the product to actually imagine the experience of using it. Schrage persuasively explains the value to any organization of becoming a “modeling culture,” one in which every conversation happens around real designs and not in the abstract language of marketing and business plans. If you are in a highly design sensitive environment (I’m imagining Apple, but I don’t really know), maybe your company already is a modeling culture, but most large corporations aren’t even close. This book also conveys an important emphasis on experimentation and tolerance of failure at the institutional level. A Director of User Experience should buy multiple copies of this and give them out to business leaders in their company as holiday gifts.
Anti-pattern: Dead Zones
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Visual Design on September 10th, 2009
The Independent Film Channel's home page used to be one big "Dead Zone" before they redesigned it.
Ad placements are, by definition, dead zones. These are specific, predictable sections of a website’s screen real-estate that are subconsciously tuned out by the user as unrelated to the page’s main content and functionality. But designers unintentionally create dead zones of their own all the time. A classic and well understood example of a dead zone is “right-rail” blindness. Content and features below an ad – such as in the right-hand column of a typical two or three column layout – are tuned out as ads on the assumption that everything from an ad down is also an ad. According to Nick Gould, CEO of the design and research firm Catalyst Group, the evidence of this phenomenon goes well beyond the anecdotal. “There is no question that right-rail blindness is a phenomenon we’ve observed in both eye-tracking and usability testing. This is of course mainly due to the ingrained expectation that ads live there.” And it’s not just a matter of positioning elements in a layout. The manner in which a page element itself is designed can greatly amplify or lessen the dead zone effect, in the worse case scenario unintentionally deactivating important content areas and features from the user’s attention. Often this comes from trying so hard to make an element “pop” visually, that the reverse effect occurs. “The dead zone effect is obviously exacerbated if elements below ads are ad-like in their design,” Gould says. ”Furthermore, promotional elements that have standard ad dimensions and contain images are frequently mistaken for ads.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Rounded Corner Debate
Posted by Todd Toler in Visual Design on August 27th, 2009
Rounded Corners Are Cognitively Cheaper, Yet Facebook Drops Them Anyways: Image Source: UI & US
Yesterday Facebook announced that it decided to drop all rounded corners in their latest UI refresh, sacrificing those cheerful corner radii on most of its interface modules for the more severe but coder-friendly squared off look. It’ s almost like they’re declaring the end of web 2.0, once and for all. Keith Lang’s UI & Us has consolidated a terrific history of where this rounded rectangle thing started in the first place… with the original Macintosh apparently. Folklore has it that Steve Jobs pointed out to Bill Gates that the real world is full of rectangles and squarish shapes that have rounded corners -stop signs, coffee tables, beverage coasters – so why not user interfaces? Right angled shapes are computationally efficient to draw, but let’s face it – you can put an eye out with one of those things if you’re not careful. And that’s exactly the kind of human-centric thinking that has Apple rounding the corners on everything from your iPhone to those error message pop-ups that you’re getting in iTunes. Interestingly, Lang makes a cognitive processing argument for the benefits of the roundedness, quoting author Jurg Nanni. “A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our fovea is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.”
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