design

Technical excellence via hand work

Jay Small — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:14:26 +0000

A Slashdot post points to an online discussion with Khoi Vinh, design guru at NYTimes.com, in which Vinh is asked how the team there maintains visual consistency. His answer, in part:

"It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or
TextMate, to 'hand code' everything, rather than to use a WYSIWYG (what
you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like
Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results."

Like I keep saying, people ... like I keep saying.

What's up, DOCTYPE?

Jay Small — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:56:02 +0000

Advocates of Web standards now warn that a heavily used technique for switching between standards-based browser rendering and, well, everything else -- called the DOCTYPE switch -- is broken.

OK, so that last sentence is meaningless to you if you don't work often in Web design or development. Even more meaningless would be any attempt I make to explain it for general audiences.

So, my advice:

If you're a Web developer, check out Aaron Gustafson's description of the problem, consequences and possible solutions at A List Apart. Then read Eric Meyer's take on it, with lots more background and debate over solutions.

If you're not, but know someone who is, refer that someone to the articles. This stuff will matter to him or her sooner or later. Then you can return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Link bucket: Anyone got a paper quip?

Jay Small — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:38:54 +0000

Links in search of someone in a quippier mood than me, all the better to say quippy things at a rapid quip (enough already, Small!):

Slashdot points to research (news release) showing that the so-called Google Generation is a myth. Key claims: "Although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web. ... Research-behavior traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now becoming the norm for all age groups."
Search Engine Watch riffs on that same research from a different angle: "Let's abandon the notion that people only use Google or other engines, click on results, and then finish their research quickly. When there's serious exploration and study under way, people use many sources and touch points. They care if their sources are worthwhile and credible, and also depend on others to let them know."
Dave Barry's "stealth bloggerette" Judi notes a job posting with, um, hints of oppression. Yeah, that sounds like a great career move!

New social networks know a little too much

Jay Small — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 14:30:33 +0000

Am I the only one creeped out by how easy it is to invite acquaintances en masse to new social networks such as Spock and Plaxo Pulse?

Both these nets use the program interfaces of existing services such as Facebook and LinkedIn to let a new user log into those sites and pull their entire "friend" rosters into new accounts.

If I had done that, and automatically invited everyone on my rosters, we're talking about hundreds of e-mail invitations from Plaxo or Spock going out to people I know for all kinds of reasons -- some business, some personal.

Though the intent appears to be "meta" social net management, it feels like spam.

These new-generation social nets use the older nets' (weird to describe Facebook this way) back-end interfaces to copy over news items about people on a user's roster even if that user did not invite those acquaintances to join the new nets.

So I can track a Facebook friend's activity on Plaxo even if I never "connected" with that friend on Plaxo.

Both Plaxo Pulse and Spock advise new account holders to be very selective about invitations and connections. But that makes little difference if people from your other social net rosters, and even your e-mail address books, are treated as connections in the news rolls of these sites.

I maintain my LinkedIn profile and connection roster actively, because they have been valuable to me in my work. I have a Facebook profile but find all the zombies and slayers mostly just distracting.

When a new crop of social nets comes in, I wonder: Does anyone really need this many places to go scan the mundane details of lives of less-than-best-friends-forever? Do we really want our own mundane life details multiplied under the table to sites beyond the ones where we actually signed up?

I turned 45 today. Maybe I should be checked out for degenerative Luddite syndrome, because I clearly miss the point of these new services.

Nielsen: Move away from the bright light

Jay Small — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:34:02 +0000

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous, reminds us that fancy trick plays in site development don't always bring the same great benefits as good old blocking and tackling.

Nielsen calls out Ajax, rich interfaces, mashups, so-called "user generated content" and online communities -- noting they can be valuable in proper context, but can also distract Web teams from more important user experience objectives. One example:

"Facebook has much drama that makes for good press coverage, but most of its features are worthless for a B2B site that, say, is trying to sell forklift trucks to 50-year-old warehouse managers. Instead of adding Facebook-like features that let users "bite" other users and turn them into zombies, the B2B site would get more sales by offering clear prices, good product photos, detailed specs, convincing whitepapers, an easily navigable information architecture, and an email newsletter."

I know Nielsen has a rep in corners of the design community as being too curmudgeonly, but I read this piece twice and can't find fault in it. In my "day job" and in consulting, I find myself practically begging site and product managers to focus on the basics of their businesses, and divert their gaze from faddish bright-shiny-objects of Web development.

I'm reminded of the current IBM commercial with an interactive developer showing a product manager a digital avatar of himself.

"Can you make money?" the manager asks. "My avatar doesn't know how to do that," the developer replies.

Scripps papers now (almost) all Ellington, all the time

Jay Small — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:01:12 +0000

This is a milestone day. As of 1:30 a.m. Eastern time this morning, Scripps Newspapers Interactive Group and our many local sites completed the main phase of their 18-month content management system rollout.

All of these newspaper sites and affiliated niche products now run in Scripps' version of Ellington, the content system built atop the Django framework and Python programming language. In no particular order:

Albuquerque Tribune
Boulder Daily Camera
San Angelo Standard-Times
Redding Record-Searchlight
Rocky Mountain News
Evansville Courier Press (Our first conversion, June 2006.)
Knoxville News Sentinel
Memphis Commercial Appeal
Abilene Reporter-News
Wichita Falls Times Record News
Naples Daily News (Our latest conversion, just this morning. Naples had already been in a version of Ellington, but the overnight move put the Florida sites in the Scripps-managed version.)
Scripps Treasure Coast newspapers
Corpus Christi Caller-Times
Ventura County Star
Kitsap Sun
Blount Today
Anderson Independent-Mail

The project included much more than a systems conversion, though that alone represents a very heavy and difficult workload. All these sites took on new designs and new features, such as a video player/playlist platform, in the process.

Mind you, we still have some local niche sites and other projects to move into the new CMS in the coming year. But this list includes every site we set out to move in the main project, and a couple that we added along the way.

It took a cast of hundreds, on site in local markets and within the corporate team, to get this done. The teams' work, as manifested in these sites, speaks for itself. Mine was a bit part, and that allows me to be extremely proud of the fine creative and development work of the whole organization. Thanks, gang!

Facebook ... faceless?

Jay Small — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:51:08 +0000

As I suddenly start receiving many invitations to connect on Yet Another Social Network -- in the most recent case, Plaxo Pulse -- I note the ever-astute Scott Karp contemplates the current crisis suffered by the darling of these nets, Facebook.

Karp, in considering the uproar caused by Facebook's advertising beacon, concludes technology and design of same offer less substantial and less enduring competitive advantage than ever:

One look at Plaxo Pulse validates Karp's point. It obviously apes some of the best networking features of both Facebook and LinkedIn. And it has quick processes for importing one's connections from either of those services.

So Pulse says me-too and switching-is-easy. But it doesn't give me a compelling, unique reason to switch. I'm still trying to find a compelling, unique reason to keep up with both Facebook and LinkedIn. The latter has helped me in my career; the former, not so much.

Karp nails it:

The next great internet company will not be one that makes a breakthrough with technology -- it will be one that makes a breakthrough with people.

If my chosen industry -- newspapers -- didn't already have such an undistinguished reputation (that may be too kind) with so many people, I'd say that was good news for us. We're certainly not going to win on technology.

About the changes at Small Initiatives

Jay Small — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 20:06:36 +0000

The new design of this Web site means a lot more than just a visual dust-off. Small Initiatives, the company, no longer represents just me, my blog and my occasional Internet design consulting.

My wife, Ka, has reached a point in her executive career where she has amazing advice to offer her industry -- banks and credit unions -- as a business strategy consultant.
So SI becomes a consulting firm with two primary practices. Hers covers growth strategies, marketing and operations for financial institutions. Mine covers Internet user experience, including my longstanding design efforts, but adding site architecture and development projects atop the Drupal open-source content framework.

Ka's brand-new blog joins mine, which has posts dating to 2002. Her first post dispels some popular talking points in banking, refactoring a focus on "differentiation" to a focus on "relevance" -- both of and to customers. I think it's a useful read even for my regular non-banker crowd.

So that's why things look different here, and why the attention now splits between Ka's banking practice and my user experience efforts. If you really want to know the gory details, I've tried to provide them in this handy Q&A format:

Are you both consulting full-time? No. I still have my "day job" as general manager of the Newspapers Interactive Group at the E.W. Scripps Co. Meanwhile, Ka's still a banking professional, taking on consulting projects as she evaluates choices for her next great executive opportunity.
What does banking have to do with Internet user experience? Sometimes, nothing. Sometimes, everything -- such as the time I redesigned a credit union Web site. Our practices may overlap more than you'd imagine in the areas of interactive business strategy and overall customer experience.
You changed a lot about the way the SI site works. Why? As part of opening up my consulting efforts to include site development using Drupal, I thought it best to run this site in Drupal as a living proof of concept. That's nothing against WordPress, the excellent blogging software I used before, only an attempt to put my money where my mouth is.
What else are you changing? We're in the process of incorporating Small Initiatives. We also changed hosting providers as part of the relaunch of this site -- we're now happy SliceHost customers. And I replaced my old blogroll with the Drupal news aggregator, so you can see nearly live headlines from blogs and sites related to our two consulting practices.
How can I make my [site|blog|comments|tags|feeds] work more like yours? Sign me to a contract and I'll show you.
Are those rotating home page posters done in Flash? No, they're done as regular JPEG images that a Drupal module, Views Slideshow, rotates using a JavaScript library.
I'm an RSS subscriber to SI. Where can I find a list of all your available feeds? Use the site map. I'm also trying to make sure my old FeedBurner feed addresses work with minimal upheaval. Trying, I said.
I'm trying to find [insert name of old article here]. You moved stuff around. Where do I look? All the blog posts and most of the non-blog content from the old site should be here, though the directory paths are altered slightly. If you remember the headline or even a keyword or two, try entering them in the search box.
Don't you know changing directory paths will mess up your search engine rankings? Yes, but I had to do it sooner or later, and I'm taking steps advised in Google and Yahoo! Webmaster instructions to mitigate the effects. It shouldn't take long for the path changes to be reflected in search engines' caches of this site. I hope.
SI now has two newsletters. What's the deal? Ka and I wanted to develop separate e-mailing lists for our occasional alerts and longer-form newsletter essays. I had a list before, but it has been months since I sent out a letter to those subscribers. So I thought it best to let people choose subscriptions anew. You may subscribe to either newsletter with just an e-mail address, and unsubscribe anytime.
How do you say "Ka"? Just like you'd say "Kay," as in Diane Keaton's character in The Godfather. It's short for Karen. Around the house we all call her Katie. And yes, people do chuckle and ask, "Where's L?" when we introduce ourselves as "Jay and Ka."
You didn't kill Sid, did you? No. He wouldn't like that. You'll find Sid's sayings on the right side of all my blog pages.

Who is Sid?

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:34:55 +0000

So who is that little guy in the bottom right corner of Jay Small's blog? The guy who says any old thing on his mind?

Sid (he got his name from Jay's consulting theme, Sensible Internet Design) is our conscience and our muse. He doesn't have to be serious, and rarely wishes to be. He manifests our belief that Sensible Internet Design must be anything but grim work.

Sid pays attention to what the rest of us say on this site, and you may notice a comment or two from him that are particularly topical. Then again, he also has a fondness for trying to remember turns of phrase that would make great band names -- and you'll definitely get a good dose of those.

Sid's role model is Gus Bode.

By the way, that likeness of Sid is derived from a 1988 illustration by John E. Scott, now the lead designer and architect of IndyStar.com, and an occasional SI consulting associate. John drew it as part of a gag newspaper page; somehow we doubt it occurred to him that the drawing would take on its own persona. Sid is grateful to John for giving him life.

Enjoy Sid's company. We do.

Ideal Web design: No one knows what it looks like

Jay Small — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 21:22:32 +0000

This article by Jay Small was originally published in 2002 in the NewsFuture section of the American Press Institute Web site.

In what I'd call a biorhythmic convergence, several things happened recently that opened a window of clarity in my thinking about Internet design:

Chuck Jones, the cartoon director, died.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report based on U.S. survey research indicating people's Net habits are becoming more focused:

"The status of the Internet is shifting from being the dazzling new thing to being a purposeful tool that Americans use to help them with some of life's important tasks. As Internet users gain experience online, they increasingly turn to the Internet to perform work-related tasks, to make purchases and do other financial transactions, to write e-mails with weighty and urgent content, and to seek information that is important to their everyday lives."

I led a Web design discussion with students from Full Sail, a Florida college that provides intensive degree programs for digital creatives, including three-dimensional animation, film editing and direction, and game development.
Gary Kebbel, director of news services for America Online, wrote an essay for the February issue of NewsFuture. To paraphrase his key points, local news sites are boring, disorganized and undeserving of audience loyalty.

I don't wholly disagree. But I do see pitfalls in some of Kebbel's suggestions to attack boredom. I fear we are heading off on tangents that add no value for those task-oriented consumers Pew found, or worse, interfering with their workflows.

I have significant experience, but claim no unique expertise, in media design. I'm certain of only this: no one yet knows how to design an ideal interactive service for a general news audience.

You might as well try to design a faster-than-light engine. Key components have not been discovered, invented or properly combined. Key problems have not been solved. And even if all impediments were removed, we could never all agree on where to go first.

Today's pale proxy for the ideal interactive service is the World Wide Web, that giant consumer-experience compromise. Every major component of Web infrastructure is tuned first to match the needs of the least common denominator: Hypertext. Packet switching. Stateless connections. File compression. Simplistic scripts. Buffered streaming.

Like MacGyver riffling through a toy chest, we're rigging things up with the ragtag parts we have. In seven-plus years, the best server, database and software engineers in the world have not made the best Web sites behave as well as the worst packaged desktop software. You can almost hear Johnny Cash singing, "I got it one piece at a time ..."

Yet we're still debating how to arrange the deck chairs on ... err, make news Web site designs "less boring." Fine. Let's talk about that.

Kebbel suggested designers were mistakenly "not paying attention to any of the design principles so evident on newspaper pages," using too few visuals and too many link-list columns. (No argument on that last point. In another NewsFuture essay, Steve Yelvington, of Morris Digital Works, counted more than 200 hypertext links apiece on home pages of several news sites.)

But newspaper page design is the wrong metaphor for a Web site. A newspaper is a distribution medium with limited space, and ranking/packaging stories by journalists' estimation of importance evolved there as the best of several imperfect methods. The Web is a demand medium with unlimited space. Our sites are not fixed editions, but archives of information on demand, where ranking by importance becomes increasingly impractical for editors and consumers the more items we store.

Besides, journalists aren't as good at ranking by importance as we like to think; just remember all those disagreements at newspaper Page 1 meetings, where editors' tasks are to select and rank just five to seven stories. At best, "importance" is an inconsistent and easily misunderstood list-sorting criterion. Further, traditional news sections (news, sports, business, features, entertainment) alone are too broad and vague to be effective category labels for Web indexes.

Do you believe the front page of any paper makes the news judgment of its editors obvious? If so, put one edition in front of, say, 20 regular readers and ask each to identify the most important story, then the next most important etc. You will get at least 10 significantly different lists.

Kebbel also suggested that news sites add full-time specialists to tweak out home pages with "photos, sidebars, polls, some multimedia and definitely with message boards tailored for each story." I'll set aside the subject of "empty rooms" on currently installed Web message boards and chat servers - except to say it's clear people do not wish to commune online over every news topic. (See Rusty Coats' discussion of community publishing in the January 2002 NewsFuture.

Again, to be fair, Kebbel's not alone in calling for aggressive design efforts atop our sites. The Full Sail students were all over it, too. I call this philosophy Design By Adding Things, or the Andy Hardy school ("We'll put on a show! Mom can sew the costumes! Dad can build the stage! My uncle just happens to have a 500-stream video server he never uses!"). It feels right, too, because richly designed pages look great if you have a high-resolution display and megabit connection. Most digital creatives do.

The Full Sail students asked whether I thought 3D "virtual worlds" would be the computer interface metaphor that someday replaces "desktops," "folders" and "files." I told them I doubted it. Text will remain the key component of human-computer interaction at least as long as displays and input methods are two-dimensional, though we still have much to learn and apply about how people process text in interactive media. Consider the mental effort required to immerse oneself in a 3D interface presented on a 2D display (if you have ever tried to learn the controls of a new PlayStation 2 or Xbox game, you've felt it). The extra effort doesn't promote workflow or comprehension in an information space; it distracts from it.

You should have seen the looks on the students' faces. They, like Andy Hardy, instinctively want to solve a problem by piling on showy features. It's more fun to design overwrought Flash interfaces or even just home pages that look like magazine covers. Digital creatives are trained to attract attention and entertain, not to manage workflow or inform.

Macromedia sells Flash creative tools to designers, but gives the Flash file viewers to consumers. Why? Because Flash doesn't solve a consumer experience problem on the Web, it solves a designer frustration problem with the Web. Our consumers are focused more on tasks than stimulation (add your own adult-oriented site joke here) - honestly, if consumers had to pay to see Flash animation, how many would do it?

Consultant Vin Crosbie, in the January 2002 NewsFuture, observed that the near-infinite content space on the Web leads to equally plentiful advertising inventory. The more pages we build, the more inventory we create, in turn forming a downward spiral in value per ad impression.

Apply similar logic to design. An explosion of high-end creative tools, in a medium free of space or time limits, encourages Design By Adding Things. DBAT doesn't make design better, it simply means there are more things to design. Poorly managed, it adds complexity to index pages instead of creating the "visual order" for which newspaper designers say they strive. Complexity makes it harder to maintain an intuitive information hierarchy as our database of articles grows. Task-oriented consumers find what they're looking for less often, diminishing the effectiveness of each article we post.

I'm not saying there's no room for high-end design on the Web. I'm saying good design in any medium is as much about editing as creation. Those 200-link lists grow organically because lots of people are creating but no one is editing. As bad as that may look, a rich interface that grows unrestrained could be much worse.

As Yelvington said, "In a networked world, data isn't scarce. ... What's scarce these days is scarcity itself. What's hard to find is clarity, brevity and importance."

And workflow. That 200-link list may be unattractive but could be more usable than a "poster" site - if you're scanning the list for something specific, and if those links are sorted and categorized in ways that make it simple to find the one link you need. Task-oriented consumers may wish to make their own decisions about "importance," for example, or at least compare their decisions to ours.

If hiring Web staff, I wouldn't want to put one or two designers just on building things for my home page. I'd rather see a class of interactive design editors emerge - people who can set design priorities, who know we need to:

Design workflows, not distractions: Index pages and other directories of content (such as site maps) must be categorized and sorted in ways that are intuitive for consumers whose task is finding details. Kebbel suggested brief story abstracts accompanying headlines in link lists, and I agree those can be helpful layers of information. A simple search tool with high perceived quality of match can also compensate for deficiencies in the hypertext indexes we provide, helping consumers get to the specific bits of data they want.
Design sequences, not pages: Chuck Jones was not the best technical artist or animator, but he was a master of sequencing and timing, and we can learn from his work. We can stop thinking of Web design one page at a time (or worse, one .GIF file at a time) and start designing complete event sequences for consumers. Like rivers and tributaries, sites should have multiple flow paths, some for heavy use, some for occasional use, all with an obvious outcome. You can't anticipate the sequence of every session, but you can handle diversions and outright errors gracefully (here's a simple thing not enough sites do: overwrite your default "404 Not Found" error page with a custom page that includes a search form and the top level of your site map, so a lost Web visitor might quickly get back on track).
Spend more time designing downstream flow, less time upstream: We instinctively commit resources to intensifying home-page designs while article-level pages often sit unadorned. That may be misguided effort. I found most of the links in this essay, for example, not by visiting the sites' home pages but with Google, an external tool designed for the task of Web searching. Since Google linked straight to detailed pages, home pages weren't part of my workflow. Even if a task-oriented consumer enters your site on the home page, she is probably there to find something specific. If she lands on a home page with 100 places to click, 99 of them are likely not relevant to her task. They're just potential distractions, even potential annoyances. But let her find and finish with the item she wanted, and you get a fresh marketing opportunity with a more receptive consumer who is either between tasks or at the end of her list. So why don't more Web article pages carry links to related content or other on-site options? Why do we stack banner ads on home pages, when a call to action might get better results at the end of an article?
Personalize designs for many possible workflows: Yes, Web consumers are task-oriented, but they aren't all working on the same task with the same tools. So it doesn't make sense to present the same interface to everyone. Many sites smartly individualize content selection and sorting, store consumers' search criteria, run e-mail "agents," and retain individual preferences for site appearance. Personalizing workflow may also mean storing entire sequences of events as consumer preferences for future visits, just as players save their places in levels of computer games to avoid repeating steps.
Focus design experiments on things beyond the Web: The preceding four strategies apply no matter how capable, fast or ubiquitous future interactive media become. But they're practical, not freely creative, strategies - and it's counterproductive to subdue creative enthusiasm entirely. I encouraged those Full Sail students to pull some of their wildest dream projects off the Web to escape its mainstream frustrations. Digital creatives should use today's high-end tools, completely unfettered, to build and test models of future interactive interfaces for homes, offices and portable devices. The news profession should do the same. Yes, it's smart to build prototypes of the next six-month iteration of your Web site design, but don't stop there. Also sketch out how your services might play on wall-sized HDTVs, electronic paper or digital jewelry. You'll keep your digital creatives inspired while keeping your production Web site usable.

I don't consider myself a "futurist," in the sense that I would dare forecast what is likely to happen. Real futurists don't read tea leaves. They clear paths to any of several possible futures. We should design Web sites within today's usability confines - even if it goes against creative instincts - while preparing for a future that certainly will not bore us.