disambiguity

cardsorting for validation: truth, dare or torture?

Card sorting in the initial stages of the project is a noble pursuit, in my opinion, and one that is bound to help you learn more about your users, how their heads work, and the problems that they’ll have with your site. Not to mention their ideas around what your content should be, and how it should be organised and what it should be called.

An IA Validation card sort happens a little way down the track when you think you know what your sitemap is going to look like, and what things are going to be called. You probably even have some draft wireframes that you’re not ready to commit to, but that you developed as you were thinking through the conceptual model for your IA and getting into the nitty gritty of the sitemap.

Once upon a time, I used to think that a card sort at the beginning and a card sort at the end of the IA scoping process was good practice. For my mind, I think that the second user testing exercise needs to be something related to the wireframes… maybe paperbased prototypes (or maybe even interactive prototypes?!), but definitely something that puts your IA into a context… a context beyond a few titles on some cards, that is.

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design is a good idea (on ugliness, with some thoughts on the DesignGuys Craiglist ‘realignment’)

There’s been a whole lot of talk lately about ‘ugly design’ and the perception that ‘it works’. The often quoted examples are My Space, eBay, Craigs List, and Del.icio.us. As someone who spends too much time thinking about design and trying to apply user centred design principles to the projects I work on, I find this somewhat annoying.

First up, let’s define what we mean by design. There are really two different aspects to ‘design’ that people are referring to - there’s the design that I’m most interested in which is the information and interface design. Then there’s the design that is most often talked about, that’s the visual design. Both of these types of designs are important when it comes to thinking about this idea of ‘ugly design’ and why, sometimes, it appears to work.

Information/Interaction Design: no one likes bad information design. Bad information design means you can’t find the information you’re looking for because its badly placed, or doesn’t exist at all, or the ‘flags’ (or scent) you need to help you find the information are hard to find or non existent. When you come to a site like this, you leave. And you don’t come back, unless you absolutely have to. The internet is abundent with information and making information that people are looking for easy for them is an essential part of making your site somewhere they’ll visit and return to, and recommend to their social network. Good information design (which includes information architecture) is entry level to having ‘a site that works’.

Interaction design, when poorly executed, is also a source of frustration for users, and a good reason for them to seek out an alternative to your site. Interaction design is poorly executed when it doesn’t allow users to perform the tasks that they wish to perform on your site with thel least amount of effort. Taking the time to identify these tasks and to ensure that they are implemented efficiently means that your site becomes ‘easy to use’, which is compelling reason to choose your site over other alternatives.

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you’ve gotta know when to hold ‘em…

I *knew* it was just a matter of time before I was able to use Kenny Rogers on my blog.

And it’s all thanks to Joshua Porter who has written a great post comparing design with playing cards.

Each design is a new hand of cards. Not only are the cards we’re holding different every time, but so are the hands of the other players. Our hand is our own knowledge of the design project, and the hands of the others are the constraints that we must deal with.

Josh uses the card game metaphor to demonstrate how every design situation must be considered afresh and all the constraints, requirements and opportunities be evaluated anew each time. That old ‘tricks’ don’t necessarily apply in a new situtation. Or, to borrow his great closing line ‘three fives beat two aces every time.’

I’ll definitely be borrowing this analogy in the future. Go read it now, you’ll love it.

Technorati Tags: design, kenny+rogers

links for 19 March 2006

argh. I can’t believe its 19 March already! Hope you all had a great weekend

Just one little link for you today, continuing some earlier thoughts on tag clouds and their potential for non-evilness.

• Tag Cloud Usability Guidelines
  a few guidelines for tag cloud usability, arrived at by playing with a number of tag cloud implementations. These are all fairly straightforward derivations of common usability heuristics.
  (tags: tagcloud usability tags)

Flickr? Not a flicker (of recognition)

I think I mentioned that I’ve been doing some user testing lately for a project I’m working on at the moment.

As part of that research, I included some questions to see whether services like Flickr and Del.icio.us were making any impact on the ‘general public’.

Working in web, and reading/writing blogs, it sometimes seems like *everyone* knows about Del.icio.us and Flickr and I find that perspective can influence the strategies that I am inclined to take with functionality and design for projects. It’s easy to start to think of Flickr, for example, as setting a number of 2.0 type conventions.

Except, it’s not really a convention if only a small group of people are aware of its existence.

And that, based on our research, is the case.

Not one person we interviewed (and, to put this in perspective, we interviewed about 18 people) volunteered either Flickr or Del.icio.us as services that they used online. Once prompted, they confirmed that they had never heard of either of them.

I guess its not really all that surprising. More like a reality check.

I’d be interested to hear of any other research that’s been done re: awareness of ‘2.0′ services in the world outside of the blogosphere.

Technorati Tags: Flickr, Delicious, User+Research, Web+2.0

links for 17 March 2006

• Sparkline PHP Graphing Library
  Sparklines are “intense, simple, wordlike graphics” so named by Edward Tufte. Great visual device
  (tags: design informationdesign tufte visualisation sparklines)
• Particletree · Lightbox Gone Wild!
  lightbox can be used to provide additional info, show an image or present a form for user input, makes it easy to extend a web application’s interface without having to add clutter.
  (tags: interfacedesign Javascript demo)
• the unseen video - milosh - you make me feel
  The Unseen Video is much more than a normal, static music video. It is a video that is affected by the weather and local time from the position of the viewer. V nice. V cool.
  (tags: dynamicVideo ambient flash music visualization inspiration)
• Graphical visualization of text similarities in essays in a book | munterbund.de
  A collection of essays is collated for readers with visualizing graphics. The graphics should both serve as a thematic and structural overview of each text, and pose the essay in question in relation to the other essays in the book.
  (tags: visualisation design informationdesign)
• The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press
  why have I not looked for this earlier?! (actually, its a little underwhelming, but,.. its still Tufte and we love him)
  (tags: Tufte visualisation informationdesign)

congratulations Reach Out! (Winner @ NetGuide Australian Web Awards)

Hooray for Reach Out! who were winners at the recently announced NetGuide Australian Web Awards

Reach Out! is an initiative of the Inspire Foundation who are dedicated to making the future a great place for our young people.

They’re a bunch of smart, dedicated and passionate people who have used the web well for a long time to help achieve their objectives and to communicate with young people. Young people are highly involved and integral to the decisions made and the projects undertaken.

And they do really cool stuff, like my favourite: Reach Out Central or ROC - a great little interactive environment designed using the principles of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to teach kids skills that will help them manage their mental health through the challenges of adolescence and for the rest of their lives. If you’re not into CBT, it also has a great Aussie soundtrack, and Joel Edgerton volunteered his time to narrate along with some other special guests doing voiceover.

If you had a spare bit of cash to donate to a worthy cause, you could do a lot worse than get behind these guys.

Disclaimer: I know as much as I do about Reach Out! and Inspire because I’ve worked with them on a number of their projects. But, don’t don’t just take my word for it. They totally rock. See for yourself!

Technorati Tags: Reach+Out+Central, Inspire, Awards, Youth, Mental+Health

monkey lessons (step away from the nut)

Cameron Reilly posted earlier a story that he heard somewhere about how to catch a spider monkey, or more importantly, how important it can be to let go of the nut.

In order to catch spider monkeys, hunters in South America simply walk through the jungle and drop heavy containers on the ground. These containers have very a narrow top and a wider bottom. Inside the containers the hunters drop a special kind of nut which is particularly attractive to the monkeys. Sometime later, the spider monkeys come down from the tops of the trees, smell the nut, but the tops of the containers are so narrow they have a tight squeeze to get their hands inside. Once they grab the nut at the bottom, their fist is too large to remove if through the opening. And the containter is too heavy for them to carry.

So instead of letting go of the nut, the monkeys just sit there until the hunters come back, pick them up, and throw them in a bag.

The spider monkeys are not prepared to let go of a small nut in order to gain their freedom.

This story and Cameron discussion around it, really resonates with me at the moment. There are some nuts that I’m kind of holding that I think I might need to drop. All of this discussion that I’m engaging with around process and documentation - that’s one nut. There are a lot of people out there who are clinging to the nut (the ‘old’, familiar process) and who are going to be trapped because they won’t let go… but then, at the same time, I think others have just grabbed another nut in place of the other (e.g. Getting Real methodology), which seems like a more attractive nut, but which is not necessarily a good nut. And probably not one worth getting trapped for. (Am I wearing this analogy a little thin?

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links for 16 March 2006

• Functional specs subvert the hierarchy of nature - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)
  more on the ‘func specs are evil’ discussion… commentary to follow
  (tags: agiledesign gettingreal 37Signals methodology documentation)

links for 15 March 2006

• Searchscapes
  “SEARCHSCAPES: MANHATTAN” is an attempt to create a tridimensional map of Manhattan, using existing data from the web. The objective is to compare the city’s “physical spaces” and “information spaces” (search results). In the continuing theme of me hunting for cool map interfaces. This one is pretty cool.
  (tags: map dimensions text data interfacedesign)