Posts Tagged antipatterns
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:
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 »
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:
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