Anti-Pattern: Anthropomorphism
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on July 26th, 2009
Design for humans – their work, their lives, their dreams. It’s #1 on the list to achieve that state of googleyness we’re all looking for these days. It’s hard to argue with such sage advice. But does this mean that we should seek to give machines human-like characteristics in our design work? Judging by the hapless Ikea-bot, Anna, it’s clear that we’re a long way from anyone passing the Turing test – which is when a computer simulation is created that actually fools a human into thinking it’s another human. A recent transcript from one of my conversations with Anna demonstrates the current state of things:
Don’t Fight Over the Homepage
Posted by Todd Toler in UX-Driven Company on July 23rd, 2009
Google's Homepage: The Web's Most Valuable Real Estate is Famously Uncluttered
The temptation is to think of the homepage as “waterfront real-estate” because it gets a relatively large amount of traffic compared to any other single page on a website. Traditionally, this has meant that competing interests within a company battle for placement on this “strategic” page, which often leads to a cluttered first impression of the company’s website for the user. And worse, a busy homepage can undermine its primary purpose – which, according to the wise Steve Krug, is to answer three questions:
-What can I find here?
-What can I do here?
-Why should I be here – and not somewhere else?
Our experience has proven that users move very quickly through home pages, especially those for broadly scoped websites that carry a lot of diverse products and content. The vast majority of clicks tend to be around the main navigation menu and search box area. Home page feature boxes tend to get very little traction. Qualitative data from the usability lab supports this data. Users assume that a home page is very general and is unlikely to provide useful information for a simple reason – they feel they haven’t told you what they are looking for yet. So how could you possibly have anything of interest to say to them at this point in the game?
Zooming in on Prezi: A Review
Posted by Todd Toler in Reviews on July 21st, 2009
The Prezi Menu
PowerPoint slide shows are like commercial jet aircraft– ubiquitous in business life, but with technology that hasn’t seemed to budge in decades. As a communication medium, PowerPoint is one of the great corrupting influences for those of us who trade in the office arts. It’s the junky sit-com of authoring environments, with it’s crammed toolbars full of lazy visualizations and transitions, text distorters, prix fixe layouts and color schemes, royalty free clip-art hokum and assorted other information-free nonsense. Its worst trait of all is more fundamental – that it constrains our ideas to the slide as the uniformly sized chunk of information. Once we commit to dealing in slides, we take an immediate hit on our mental agility and the level of focus we bring to the simple act of conveying our ideas.
Crafting Simple, Effective User Surveys
Posted by Todd Toler in User & Design Research on July 10th, 2009
Photo Credit: dgilder
Without a doubt, online surveys are the cheapest, easiest way to reach out to a large number of a website’s customers to gauge their opinion- but if not crafted correctly, they can result in misleading information. You do not need to be a research expert to field a successful survey, but knowing the limitations of each option in your research toolkit is the only way to get accurate, impactful, and persuasive results. There are many issues to cover within this topic, but let’s begin with the basics by crafting a survey that successfully answers three key questions:
- Who is using the site?
- What do they think of it?
- Are they accomplishing what they want to?
If we can get accurate answers to these questions, then we can deduce what needs to change about the site in order to become a greater success.
IA Primer: Landing, List, & Detail Pages
Posted by Todd Toler in Interaction Design on July 7th, 2009
From an information architecture point of view, it’s convenient to think of most website structures as a collection of three primary types of pages – landing pages, list pages, and detail pages. Everyone has seen plenty of examples of each of these, and the first two are often combined – making the issue somewhat blurred. A landing page is the type of page you typically see when you are either on the home page or a main category page of a site. It tends to be a page you pass through to get to a site’s full organization of content or products, which are organized as a series of list pages (screens designed to browse multiple choices with limited information about each one) and detail pages (screens devoted to a single product, article, etc.) Sort of like billboards, landing pages are typically plastered with feature boxes touting services, featured content or products, or smaller curated lists of links based on some attribute a designer thinks a user cares about (such as “most emailed”, “best selling,” “new,” etc.) Their layout is invariably some variation on the tiled or stacked boxes approach – a design choice made when the primary goal is to provide a layout where the designer has a lot of flexibility in assigning different visual importance to various elements. List and detail pages, on the other hand, are exactly as they sound – a framework to systematically display and organize items on a website.
A Typical Landing>List>Detail Page Progression at www.BestBuy.com
Landing Page
List Page
Detail Page
Choosing a Wordpress Theme: Part 2 – Blog, Magazine, or Portfolio Design Pattern?
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 30th, 2009
There are literally hundreds of Wordpress themes available, a number which seems to be growing faster than anyone can keep up with. Fortunately, most of them fall into a few basic interaction design patterns. An understanding of what these patterns are and how they differ will make it easier to identify the right theme to begin a project with. To distinguish this from other Wordpress theme categorization schemes out there, I’m grouping all themes into three major categories based on the way an information architect might think about it. It is important not to get too distracted by the visual design(e.g. colors and graphics) or content-type specialty (e.g. text, video, photo) of a pre-built theme – at least, at first. The look of things and the messaging and positioning of a theme is much easier to change than the basic flow between elements, how the navigation, pages and sidebars are laid out, which features are deployed and in what way.
Blog Themes
Magazine Themes
Portfolio Themes
Tim Ferriss Gives Solid State Blogging Tips
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 27th, 2009
Author of The 4 Hour Work Week – and therefore a deserving hero to us all – Tim Ferriss gives a very useful presentation full of practical tips for successful blogging. I was most impressed by the advice on establishing an efficient writing and editing process, which let’s face it – is the most time consuming aspect of blogging and where most of us fall over. Tim also demonstrates committment to a very Solid State UX principle – which is to always test your assumptions, then make small tweaks until you optimize your user’s experience. He shares some fascinating click stream data and insights collected from his own blog. From San Francisco WordCamp 2009: Approx. 50 min
Choosing a Wordpress Theme: Part 1 – Premium, Custom, or Free?
Posted by Todd Toler in Wordpress on June 26th, 2009
Photo Credit: Eric Flexyourhead
Wordpress can be used to pull off just about any type of website these days, and clearly the magic of this platform lies in the vast proliferation of pre-designed themes, plug-ins, & widgets. Choosing a theme – which is the single largest determinant of a site’s look, feel, and organization – can be a confusing process. If you’re hacking together a site yourself, don’t overemphasis the way the theme looks – at least on the surface. After all, you can always tweak the basic feel of things, swapping out your own graphics, colors, and images with just a little hunting and pecking around the theme’s file structure and a few basic style-sheet tweaks. Far more important are the basic information architecture and functionality choices the theme designer made – because let’s face it – you’ll be locked into these unless you really know your way around the code. Most Wordpress theme choosing advice is focused on practical tips – e.g. Is it Widget Ready? But let’s step back and focus on the overall quality of the design, assuming we can tweak the little things we don’t like about it later. To help make sense of it all, I’m proposing a simple taxonomy of types of Wordpress themes to help with the decision-making process.
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