Archive for category Interaction Design
The Myth of Hand-Eye Coordination
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on February 10th, 2010
Teens work on their hand-eye coordination playing Dragon's Lair - circa 1983. Photo credit: The Tribune News
I’m from the earliest generation of gamers. The first, really. I played table-top Pong when I was 7 or 8, even though it was only available in bars (parenting was more relaxed then.) I played Missile Command, despite the fact that it was kinda boring. Robotron was an obsession. I played Zork, with it’s command line interface, on my Apple IIc - drawing my own map. In college I got sucked into Myst, and Super Mario Bro.’s and there were dozens of others along the way. And then, like nearly everybody else of my generation, I quit playing video games. Why? In a word, guilt. Games were considered indulgent, addictive, violent -something for man-boys. Certainly not suitable terrain for serious people. But throughout this entire period of moralization against gaming there was always a bit of pop cognitive science floating around in defense of video games. Games build hand-eye coordination, people would say -everybody would say. After a 7 hour stint on the couch I’d think, well, at least I’ve got that going for me. In graduate school I studied cognitive science and learning theories and even video games- and never once encountered the phrase hand-eye coordination. So I set myself to wondering – what is it? is it important? and does playing video games improve it?
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.
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:
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.
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 »
Wired Misses the Point in Craigslist Cover Story
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on August 21st, 2009
The September, 2009 Issue of Wired
For several years now, I’ve been showing a screen capture of the craigslist.org home page to audiences at various presentations on usability. I ask a simple question. Is this website usable? The audience members, who are generally students, programmers and business people and not members of the design community, invariably return a resounding yes in response to my question. It’s taken for granted. Craigslist, in all it’s glorious straightforwardness, defines usable. Then I proceed to show them how the design breaks a lot of rules – at least by the conventional wisdom of modern web UI designers. For instance, the craigslist home page is crammed full and almost completely lacks any sense of visual heirarchy or prioritization. It provides little to no opportunity for serendipitous discovery of content, only myriad starting options for those who already know what they are looking for. It’s chock-full of cryptic abbreviations. It’s un-visual. It squanders precious screen real-estate on seldom used features. For instance, a full third of the screen is devoted to displaying all the cities where the various Craigslists are located – something which the average user rarely, if ever, has the need to change. Let’s face it, this site is a usability train wreck, right?
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Germane Cognitive Load
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on August 20th, 2009
It’s been understood since the 1950’s that human cognitive processing capacity is severely limited. In fact, you can put a more or less precise number on the amount of discrete pieces of information that a person can manage in their working memory at any given time – the “magic number” of seven. (see Miller, 1956) When asked to repeat a list of random digits or tones (e.g. 5,6,2,10), most people can manage about 5 to 7 of these “chunks” of information when drawing only from their working memory. It is no accident that we can all remember our phone numbers but only the most acquisitive of us can remember our credit card numbers. Of course, it’s a complicated business of how information gets moved in and out of working memory from long term memory (the closest thing nature has to the $4.4 million hard drive, the RamSan-6200). To get into that we’d have to talk about schema theory and the expertise reversal effect and all sorts of other cognitive science concepts… so let’s keep this simple. How can a basic understanding of working memory and cognitive load theory make us into better UI designers?
Think Like an Instructional Designer: Website Imagery
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Visual Design on August 14th, 2009
Everybody Loves Puppies, but The Instructional Potential of This Image is Zero
Careless use of imagery – particularly photographs – is often the difference between a dull “brochure-ware” site and a persuasive information experience. When we redesigned www.dummies.com, we initially populated our design mock-ups with the type of stock photography that professional designers mostly use… only to find that the otherwise attractive imagery added a level of generic-ness that felt downright off-brand. Then we created a style guideline only to use imagery that had true instructional value, whenever possible framed and centered on the action that was being discussed in the content. This applied not only to imagery embedded in the how-to articles, but also the landing page teaser thumbnail photos for the articles and videos. This is a policy the mega-successful book line has had for years, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to us on the web design side. Once we made this change the site felt instantly better. The difference? We thought like an instructional designer.
Interaction designers, graphic designers, and anybody else involved in the ongoing production of commercial websites should pay a lot more attention to instructional principles – even if the site is not overtly instructional. What makes material good for learning also makes it good for other conversion goals – such as explaining products, services, and brand building.
Dummies.com Uses Explanatory Imagery Even in Thumbnails
In fact, why not audit your site’s imagery right now for instructional potential? If you find that most or all of your visuals are falling into the “decorative” category – unless of course it’s fluffy puppies or blondes on the hoods of sports cars (two time-tested exceptions) – then it’s time to make a change. Fortunately, the educational psychologist Richard Mayer has conveniently classified types of imagery in terms of their instructional benefit and effectiveness for learning. The good folks behind the Wiley Visualizing series, which is a textbook line that is highly committed to applying cognitive theories of learning to the design of their products, put together the following summary table, which I’ve adapted with examples that might apply to a typical web designer’s challenge…
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