Results tagged “design” from karlo.org

Coming soon to your local design-fetishist arthouse movie theater. Immediately added to my Netflix "saved" list in case I miss it in theaters. (Here's the film's Netflix page if you want to do the same.)

(This is an extended version of an email I wrote to one of the local tech mailing lists here in New York, in response to a developer's question. It seemed generally useful enough that I'm reposting it here.)

A very common design problem in web services project these days is the issue of user search. Most web services now involve pools of data that are far too large to be entirely "browseable", even if we're only talking about finding another user on the service. Very quickly you start to see a specification develop of increasing complexity, involving boolean ("AND/OR") concepts, keywords, and all kinds of other demands targeted at extremely precise results tailored very exactly to the knowledge domain or data set. What's the best way to go about building this user experience?

Back when I was at MIT, we used to call the standard Leatherman tools a "nerdtool" -- like a Swiss Army knife on steroids, they included pliers, knives, several screwdrivers, and a bunch of other components that you might or might not know what you were supposed to do with them. All-in, those things weighed at least a pound, didn't really fit in your pocket, and wearing one on your belt was the style equivalent of wearing two blackberries in holsters these days. (Some of you will think that's uncool, some will think it's cool, and that's exactly why the comparison is apt.) Even carrying one in your bag was somewhat of a commitment in the name of MacGuyver.

I still follow knife and tool design because it's a very interesting intersection of mechanical design, ergonomics and aesthetic design. Out of the various objects you're likely to find someone carrying every day (watch, eyeglasses, wallet, keys, etc.) it's one of the few where there is a great deal of attention paid to the functionality of the design, because it matters. In contrast, watches and glasses these days are almost solely about fashion, because the core functionality has become a commodity.

Portland, OR-based Leatherman has two new designs coming in May 2009, under the "Freestyle" moniker. These are 4.5 oz, stripped down multi-tools based on the popular Skeletool design that have been immensely popular as a replacement for the old nerdkits. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like they include basic screwdrivers, but having both a good knife and good set of pliers in a compact, light package is still better than trying to get things done with your bare hands in lots of situations. I'm going to have to try to get to a store and look at one of these firsthand when they arrive in May.

(By the way, since this post begs the question: my regular pocketknife is a very small (1.25" blade) Buck knife that has a skeletal steel frame and bottle cap opener built in. It's small enough to fit in my pocket with my wallet and cheap enough that if I ever brought it to the airport by mistake it wouldn't be a big deal. Unfortunately, it's no longer sold - it's been replaced by the Buck Transport, which in all honestly looks like a plastic piece of junk to me.)

I'm a huge fan of using patterns when designing web services, especially when it comes to user interaction and non-core tasks. There's a number of reasons why:

1. You can focus on what differentiates your service, rather than re-designing what others have already worked out through trial and error
   
2. Users are happier with interaction flows they expect -- and generally, they expect what they've seen before when using other products
3. If you're working with a team, they'll generally understand and build a known pattern faster  and more correctly than a totally new design, even if the new one might be marginally better
   

Sometimes though, using patterns can get you into trouble even if they do fit the immediate requirements. As part of building IsAlternateSideParkingInEffect.com, I utilized a very standard pattern for validating new users -- sending an email to a user with a unique token, then requiring that they provide the token from the email to the system in order to fully activate their subscription.

Frankly, it worked well -- too well. Only about 50% of users would complete the validation (and I assume that the number of spurious submissions is well below half.) For a service where the risk of a faked registration is almost nothing, the pattern was costing me way too many users in the process of guarding against them. The guards were protecting the front gate, but they were eating all of the villagers' food.

I've since changed the process to an "opt-out" model - when a user submits their email to the site, they are immediately "activated", but every message they receive from then on has an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Making this relatively simply change from the established pattern immediately doubled the yield rate of subscribed users per unique visitor to the web site. It was simply a case where the "best practice" pattern didn't fit with the realities of a very specific service design, and acknowledging that reality.

The Vitality Glowcap, recently released and available on Amazon starting at $30 is just a great example of design and technology applied to a longstanding, everyday problem: making sure folks take their medicine. They have both the simple, self-contained "glow" model, which bugs you every 24 hours to take the pill (and is reset when you unscrew it off the bottle to get the medicine) and a more complex version that connects via the internet to keep track of your usage, a testament to the design truism that giving users lots of options is often worse than giving them none. Both units have almost zero user interface or configuration requirements. Vitality is a new startup by David Rose, who used to head Ambient Devices.

Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.

-- John Gruber on iPhone Application Design.

In a world where services are moving online, and people aren't so much buying your software as choosing to use your service, I'd argue this applies to not just the iPhone but almost any "non-sovereign application" -- pretty much anything short of a word processor, web browser, or spreadsheet program.

"There are two types of people in the world: those who can't tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica, and those who despise Arial."

Daring Fireball on the New iPhone-Optimized Mobile Flickr Web Site

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.

So a few days after my post on the need to remake Windows from the ground up, this:

"Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now."

NYT: Randal Strauss, "Why Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air"

This could be used in the "what not to do" section of a user interface lecture. I'd bet that 95% of first-time users do what I did and press the green key (thereby cancelling their transaction) before realizing something's wrong and bending down to read the handwritten labels. What's worse, an ATM machine - where you're entering your banking info - is really the last place you want to encounter as slipshod a fix as this. One can only imagine how good their security is if this is the level of work on the part you can see...