Archive for category Reviews
Proofiness and User Research, A Book Review
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews, User & Design Research on January 14th, 2011
Proofiness is the mathematical version of "truthiness." It lurks in business, politics, media, and yes - user research.
If Charles Seife’s Proofiness has a lasting contribution to offer those in the fields of user experience, design, or even business, it will be in the elegant branding of its own subjectivist epistemology. This, in itself, is no small victory. It involves taking a complex debate on the origin of knowledge and in a single catchy word, turning it into a meme. Picture a future where somebody whips out a clever piece of marketing research in a design or business meeting, something with lots of correlations and a confident sounding sample. Maybe there is a scientific looking visualization, like a scatterplot diagram with one of those Jackson Pollack splatters of microscopic pinpoints, something that screams data was collected here. Its presenter starts speaking with the cajoling air of someone trying to impress the truth, with a capital ‘T,’ upon their audience. And then suddenly, the attendees stand in protest and accuse their tormenter, in unison, of proofiness.
Then try to grasp what a profound departure that is from today’s climate of info digestion, where almost nothing is spit back if it smells and tastes like it was cooked up from numbers. Jakob Nielsen, the founding father of pragmatism in HCI research, has condemned number fetishism in our field periodically since he came to prominence in the early 1990s – most exasperatingly in this 2004 post, The Risk of Quantitative Studies. He writes, “…most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science.” In a 2009 post, five years later, little has changed. He writes, “People still pay far more attention to questionable quantitative studies than they do to simpler qualitative studies that have much greater validity.”
My Reading List in 2010
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on December 30th, 2010
Well, this was definitely the most prolific year of book reading in my life – 61 books. Many of these were audio books, which a surprising amount of people challenge me about, as if it is not the same as reading. But as a heavy listener, I have learned to concentrate quite well while being read to through my iPhone headphones. I think it’s an acquired skill, because last year I retained a lot less and spaced out a lot when listening to audiobooks. Now I rarely do. I listen around 3 hours a day now because of my commute, dog-walking, and exercise regimens. I also turned back to reading print books again this year, more than ever, since going on a “low information diet” on all things other than books. No more newspapers or magazines this year and way fewer podcasts and blog posts were consumed. A couple of insights when reading over the list:
Great Moments in UI: The Bloomberg Terminal
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on December 5th, 2010
A screen comparing Credit Default Swap prices on the iconic Bloomberg terminal.
I am fascinated with the Bloomberg terminal and its inscrutable interface. To use it is to be at the center of an elite membership of global financerati. If one of these $1500 a month machines is on your desk, for your exclusive use, it is a sign of your arrival. Everything about its physical presence communicates its primary affordance, exclusivity. The outward appearance, which has changed little since the introduction of the original “Bloomberg Box” in the early 1980s, seems to say you’re probably too stupid to even use me. But if I’m on your desk, then you, my friend, are one serious cat.
Kami no Shizuku (The Drops of the Gods) and Scanlations
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on October 5th, 2010
Educational media that works: the wacky wine manga, Kami no Shizuku
Shizuku is approachable, a bit scruffy and rebellious, but with a pedigree inherited from his deep family roots in the wine business. He is modeled after Bordeaux. Issei inherits his personality from Burgundy – tight and complex, arrogant, and, well, ok let’s just say it – anal. These are the dueling protagonists in the Japanese wine themed comic – Kami no Shizuku. This is a wine nerd’s fantasy, a place where a cultured young lad can score babes with a bit of daredevil decanting. Yes, that’s right – decanting – as in pouring wine out of the bottle in which it was shipped into another vessel for aeration purposes. It’s also known for it’s passionate descriptions of drinking wine and it’s off-kilter tasting analogies. The comic series is so insanely popular in Japan and Korea that the wines it mentions sell out immediately. It has even been remade as a very popular television program in Japan. Kami targets young-ish men (mostly) and women, many of whom are in their thirties, with the express goal of educating them on the basics of being an insufferable old-world wine snob. And it works! While your average American in their thirties doesn’t know their left bank from their right bank (I’m talking about the Gironde river in Bourdeaux, of course, which I admit, I had to look up), young people in Japan and Korea are forking over $1000 euro for a bottle of Chateau Le Puy and reviving a whole export business in fancy French wines. Obtaining a copy of this manga has become my obsession – but unfortunately I don’t read Japanese. So what to do? Spend hours with a Kanji dictionary just to experience a 2001 Chateau Mont Perat compared to the ’sweet and husky’ voice of Queen lead singer, Freddy Mercury?
R/GA Has Stage Presence in Corporate Website’s Design
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on June 3rd, 2010
R/GA's main corporate website has a radical design in information architecture terms, which it hides in plain sight.
Dave Malouf coined a prescient phrase in the title of a recent blog post regarding the design of websites. It’s not really a page anymore, but more of a stage. “Like the real stage itself,” he wrote, “we can create sub-stages where sub-dominant contexts have great significance and focus if only but for a short while, while contextually relevant to the whole.” This is a tidy way of characterizing the very essence of the RIA movement, and an excellent conceptual framework for understanding the information architecture of the post-page web. Web designers have traditionally constructed virtual buildings, not narratives, out of information – with pages as their rooms and sitemaps and breadcrumbs as their planning tools and system of wayfinders. But this is changing fast and stagecraft is soon to become a key skill of all employed web IAs.
How to Name Your Website and Write A Tagline like a Pro
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews, UX-Driven Company on May 24th, 2010
I am a reluctant brander. Like most User Experience designers, I like to think of myself as a high-minded design thinker – not a marketer. You know the arguments. Designers think about solving real human problems and obsess on the essence of something’s purpose. Marketers define essence as that which gets noticed and remembered. Designers are empathically creative. Marketers are exploitatively creative. Designers seek timeless truths. Marketers are trend-chasers. Designers live in Brooklyn and sell artisanal pickles between freelance gigs. Marketers live in Manhattan and coin phrases like FroYo. Yet it didn’t take me long working in this field to realize that making such distinctions is wrong-headed. If anything, I relate more to the marketer these days. Marketers trend towards the pragmatic. Designers? At their worst: ideologues, aesthetes, navel-gazers. Design and marketing ultimately chase the same goal, “marketplace magic,” so why not think like a good branding brain in order to name and position your digital business? At a minimum you should know a little about the work of Lynn Altman before you set about trying to name your site and write a tagline for it. Her firm, BrandNow, and her book, Brand it Yourself, are excellent starting points for demystifying the creative process behind successful product branding.
Eight Homepage Designs That Would Work as Billboards
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design, Reviews on May 9th, 2010
Think of a homepage as something a user takes in at 65mph. (photo credit: Andrew Canion)
Increasingly users think of the homepage as that place where the search box lives. Web analytics data bears this out. A typical homepage, particularly if there is a large and diverse set of products or information on a site, will see a vast majority of it’s clicks consolidated around the global navigation and search box. If you think of a user flying by your homepage at 65 mph on their way to the search box, then how much information are they likely to take in? How can you make a statement about the value of your site that a user can tune in out of the corner of their eye? The best homepages confront this behavioral reality and offer the same concise, impactful designs as those on highway billboards. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
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.
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?
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