disambiguity

Can We Use Consumer Power to Make Good Design Count?

How do we make Good Design so important to companies that they ensure that it is a component part of the product or service they are taking to market?

Part of the fallout from World Usability Day was a question raised by Jared Spool - Is World Usability Day Harmful for Practitioners? Part of this question was the relationship between design and usability and the importance of promoting good design and not alienating the business who might engage us to help them create good design.

In a subsequent comment conversation I got to wondering, again, about what we can do to make good design more of a priority. How can we change business processes and product development cycles so that rather than design being an afterthought, the quest for good design moves up the food chain and becomes more of an imperative, a requirement than a potential differentiator.

Jared is concerned that the focus on usability (which in isolation from design, does tend to take an almost disciplinarian approach to how things work) has the potential to alienate companies who might otherwise be inspired to engage with good design practices.

I think he has a point… for a moment I’d forgotten that for some, usability DOES exist in isolation from design (where people specialise in finding things that are broken and rousing on the designers who designed it that way).

Jared says we should just keep doing good design work and that eventually, the balance will shift and good design methodologies will become part of the overall business process for more companies.

(how many times can I say ‘good design’ in one post?!)

But, and tell me if I’ve being overly optimistic and idealistic here…

I think that there might be other things that we can do to help turn the tide.

What if we spent less time talking to each other about how important good design is, and spent a bit of energy evangalising the power and importance of good design to the end user, the consumer, the man and woman on the street, the people who open their wallets to buy the goods and services designed by the companies who may or may not care about good design.

Can we help educate and inspire people who buy mobile phones and who catch trains and who buy their groceries online to expect good design, to DEMAND good design? And can we do this in way that likewise inspires businesses to see good design as an opportunity, rather than alientating them, shaming them, putting them in the corner like a bad student?

Can we harness consumer power to promote the benefits of good design? To make good design culturally entrenched? Just part of our every day life?

I reckon we can. Although I’m not quite sure just now.

What do you think? Is it worth working on a plan?

Image Credit: Don Norman, of course

Making Life Easy for World Usability Day!

World Usability Day is 20 days out. Are you doing anything to celebrate?

If your work involves usability or user experience, you should be!

This is a great chance for us to make some noise and help spread the word that usability matters and that there are people like us who spend our time trying to make life easier!

At Flow, where I work, we’ve organised a little project we call MakingLifeEasy.org

Here’s the general idea.

On World Usability Day and in the lead up, we’ll be out on the streets of London tying balloons to the worst offenders. We want people across the world to do the same. Participants are encouraged to photograph the scene and either add it to our Flickr group, or email it to us (hello [at] makinglifeeasy.org) and we’ll post it to the website where we’ll be collecting votes for the Usability Hall of Shame and the Usability Hall of Fame.

We’d LOVE you to get involved. There’s a few things you can do.

1. Help get more people involved! If you have a blog, give us a shout out and send people our way to participate. If you have a Flickr account, come join our group and invite all your friends!
2. Share your examples of the best and the worst of usability where you live (or visit or holiday!). Add photos to the group or drop us an email and we’ll add your submission to the website and potentially to the Hall of Fame or Shame
3. Cast your vote! Take a look at the website and have your say in what *really* drives you crazy and what you really love.

Stay tuned for the announcement of inductees to the Usability Hall of Fame and Shame on 14 November 2006 - World Usability Day.

Meanwhile - I encourage you to make the most of the opportunity that this day and the lead up offer to put the spotlight on Usability and User Experience. Help us make a noise and raise awareness and - ultimately help us make life easy!

www.makinglifeeasy.org

Where’s the Gantt gone?

Having been a project manager in a past life, and still working day to day on projects, I watch with interest the deployment of a range of web based project management tools. In a lot of ways it’s like a dream come true. For most of us, Microsoft Project - the only real project management tool available beforehand - is possibly the most over featured piece of software in the world.

I’ve heard it said that most people only use about 5% of Microsoft Word’s functionality… I can’t imagine what a miniscule proportion of functionality most people use in Microsoft Project. And like MS Word but worse, often times that unused functionality would rear up and cause problems for users who didn’t understand it or weren’t aware of it.

Not only that, but it’s also prohibitively expensive. So unless you’re working in a company where they’ve got the finance and inclination to pay for your license fee - you’re unlikely to get access to it.

Then along comes 37 Signals with Basecamp, BackPack and TaDa Lists . Project managers everywhere were ecstatic (not to mention all those David Allen Getting Things Done disciples). With the ability to create and assign tasks, to post messages, to do simple scheduling and starting at the bargain price of free - 37 Signals and their products soon had a lot of evangelists wondering aloud how they ever managed without these web based project management tools.

Just last night I got my invitation to check out GoPlan. It’s been developed by the team at WeBreakStuff, so I had pretty high expectations. These guys think a lot about usability and user experience, so their work should be top notch. And, I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed.

GoPlan is a spunky looking piece of web application, and it has lots of great functionality.

You can create multiple projects with multiple users (users with varied permission to access content and functionality), there’s notes, a project blog, a calendar, a file upload.

GoPlan also has two similar but different sections called Tasks and Tickets. Tasks, I assume, are things you have to do in the course of the project. You can assign it to a category but not a person, and you can assign a deadline to it (although, strangely that doesn’t make it show up in the calendar). Tickets, I assume, are for bugs and variations. You can assign a priority, a severity (is it just me, or are these two *very* similar criteria… when is a critical severity ever a low priority? I guess there are exceptions… nevermind, tangent).

Oh, and there’s a cool inbuilt ‘chat’ so you can have your rapid fire online discussions AND keep a record of what you actually decided!

All good. All a lot like the 37 Signals offering. But all slightly disappointing to someone who’s managed some reasonably complex projects in her time.

I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the Gantt Chart.

I think it’s quite interesting that both 37 Signals and WeBreakStuff have not used any visualisation tools as a part of their project management offerings. (Well, ok GoPlan has a calendar… do we count that? I might if their task deadlines integrated with the calendar, so for now.. no).

One of the most recognisable features of Microsoft Project is the Gantt chart it generates. Back when I used to make lots of big MS Project files, I thought that I was really just making those charts for my clients (they’re pretty, they look seriously impressive - wow! that’s one complicated project!… this was before Getting Real, ok!)

Interestingly, if you take a look at 37 Sig’s Manifesto for BaseCamp, this is one of the first things you’ll read:

Projects don’t fail from of a lack of charts, graphs, reports, or statistics, they fail from a lack of communication.

Ah yes. But what I’ve come to notice is that charts, graphs, reports and statistics do more than just impress clients. And they can play an important role in communication, and motivation.

What is a Gantt Chart? Well, GanttChart.com (yeah, who knew!) says:

A Gantt chart is a graphical representation of the duration of tasks against the progression of time.

You can see why that might come in handy.

At a simplistic level - nothing focusses attention like a Gantt Chart with lots of red on it - indicating that you’re way behind schedule.

On a more practical level - when constructing project plans, I’ve come to realise how much I did actually rely on the Gantt Chart to help eliminate errors in my scheduling, and to quickly see the implications of alternate scheduling, risks and delays.

When reviewing a complex project plan to see if I’d made errors in scheduling, or understanding project relationships, or if I’d just missed lots of stuff out - it was the Gantt Chart that would most quickly let me know if I’d stuffed up. Breaks in the flow, a critical path that just stops (before the end of the project), tasks that just look too long or too short compared to the tasks around them - all rapid visual indicators that something’s not right.

It get’s really hard and boring to read through a long list of tasks, and even more difficult to understand the relationships between tasks in this format. This is where the Gantt Chart comes into it’s own. Relationships between tasks and groups of tasks are immediately apparent. Tasks that are on the critical path are obvious.

In retrospect, I’d have to say that Gantt Charts were really important in eliminating errors in project planning for me, back in the day.

So, the Gantt Chart is much more than just client eye candy. It also plays a real role in faciliating the detailed planning phase of the project. It also helps with rapid comprehension of project progress and task relationships as the project continues.

Gantt Charts allow you to understand how long your project is going to take, in what order tasks need to be undertaken (no, it’s not always self evident!), and what tasks are dependent on other tasks. This means that if you move tasks around, or some tasks get delayed, you can see what’s going to happen to your project as a result.

This is all really handy stuff to know if you’re managing a team and have a deadline. It helps you communicate within the team, and to your client, early and accurately. It helps everyone make decisions.

In both the 37 Signals products as in GoPlan, there seems to be no notion of a critical path, or dependencies between tasks. To me, that means that I either have to work a lot harder to keep my projects under control or to impose a structure of my own, or that these products are only intended for reasonably simple projects where, perhaps, the deadline is not such a big deal.

I’ve been using BackPack and BaseCamp for almost as long as they’ve been available, and I have to say that they’ve certainly been valuable to me. Particularly when I was freelancing and had to manage my own tasks on several projects. In these cases though, when I was working on big projects, I was a resource (information architect) and someone else was a project manager who had the biggest Gantt Chart you’ve ever seen in your life! (I needed a separate tool just to manage my tasks!)

I find it intriguing that both 37 Sigs and GoPlan seem to have taken such an anti-chart approach to their tools (and there’s much more than just the Gantt chart that they could have included). I suspect it’s to do with the lack of the critical path. Or perhaps, they’re not actually *project* management tools, but ’sets of tasks’ tools.

Either way - if any one’s planning a web based PM tool that *does* include a critical path and some pretty pictures… I’d really love to see it!

What about you? Do you miss the Gantt chart? or are Critical Paths soooo 1.0?
Technorati Tags: 37+Signals, BackPack, BaseCamp, GoPlan, WeBreakStuff

international emergency (a case for standards)

Help Me Crazy Egg!

There’s a kind of grim irony in exploring Crazy Egg, only to discover that the very thing that would make their website and service useful for me would never be able to be detected using the tools that they provide.

Crazy Egg is designed to help you continually test and improve your site.

They do this by capturing where on your site people are clicking and providing you this information in a range of formats, from a simple list, to an overlay (which we’ve seen a fair bit of now, and is even included in Google Analytics these days), to a ‘heat map’ that looks a lot like something you’d generate from eyetracking, but is of course based on the volume of clicks in various parts of the page.

There’s obviously a lot of interesting information you can gather from this kind of data, and it’s particularly digestible thanks to the visualisations. It is only one of very many ways that you can establish what people are doing or not doing on your website, and it is far from telling you what is working and what is not. Crazy Egg says their data can help you:

• Test different versions of a page to see which works better
• Discover which ad placement gives the best results
• Find out which design encourages visitors to click deeper
• Learn which content leads to improved sales

I don’t have a huge problem with most of these claims… except for the first one - how on earth do you define what ‘works better’ based on clicks?

What Crazy Egg doesn’t tell you, though, is why something that you’re *not* doing is making people unable to use your service.

Case in point - me!

I got an email from Crazy Egg this morning to tell me that they’re up and running and inviting me to register and have a play with their service. It’s a particularly interesting service for someone in my line of work - might be another quick, cheap tool to add to the research kit. I’d love to use their services if only they’d make it a little easier for me!

I couldn’t find a word of ’support’ or ‘help’ content on their site, nor did their blog appear to have a search facility so that I could see if they’d address the issue I was looking for help with.

My problem is that I want to try Crazy Egg, and I want to use my Wordpress Blog as a test. I’m guessing that I won’t be the only person they’ve emailed today with this question. I’m guessing they’ve emailed a lot of people who blog today.

At the moment, I’m at the point of abandonment with Crazy Egg because of their lack of support. Surely an FAQ or a discussion board or a Wiki could be in order? OK, so they’re new and they don’t necessarily know what people need to know… let us all help each other. OK, so they do have a ‘Contact Us’ form… eh, at a pinch, perhaps, but I’m still disappointed.

Is lack of help content a bug? (They want us to report bugs… what do you think?)

For now, I’m hoping that someone out in blog-land can help me?!

I have my Crazy Egg Code and I was thinking of putting it on my blog homepage. Anyone got any idea where in the template code I should be putting this code? I had a quick look at places that seemed logical and couldn’t see anything that matched Crazy Egg’s instructions.

Seriously… not even an FAQ on their website. Who do they think their customers are?!

Technorati Tags: crazy+egg

FlickrMaps a failure?

Pretty underwhelming really, isn’t it.

There is more to this than just the US-Centric product focus. There are also some pretty significant (in my opinion) flaws with the way that the Map service has been designed.

Let me start by saying that once you *find* the map section, then adding your photos to the map (assuming there is a decent map of the where you took your photo) is a real pleasure.

But here’s the problem - when are you *most* likely to add locations to your image?

I’d hazard a guess (and it is only a guess, perhaps Flickr have user research to show differently), but I’d guess that it would be at the point that you’re uploading your photos. I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty much the only time that I add things like tags to my photos. And it’s when I’m uploading a bunch of photos that I might think about putting them into a set.

(Again, this is dangerous business, looking at your own behaviour and theorising that everyone else’s behaviour is the same… so I’d be interested to hear how/when you add tags or make sets… and at what points you think you’d add geotagging to your photos).

Alas, while you’re uploading your photos, and even once you’ve uploaded them, there’s no hint of the map.

When I went to explore FlickrMaps this morning, I literally felt as though I was hunting for them. Where was the first place that I went? Well, to the detail page of one of my photos, of course. I was sure I’d find a call to action asking me to put my un-mapped photo on the map. Nope.

Eventually I got to - ‘oooh, the organiser’. Perhaps it’s there.
And there it was.

So, I find the Maps either because I’m hunting for it, or because I happen upon it. This means that I’m unlikely to geo-tag very many photos.

And, as demonstrated by the map of London and number of uploads, it seems that not so many people *are* geo-tagging their photos.

BUT - things may not be as they seem. Did you notice that strange paging device on the map? This one:

Do you get it? I sure don’t. Maps and pages… what is this? An atlas? (See it in context in the image at the top of this post)

After playing with it a while I learned that if I clicked on the arrows to the left or right I got to see the map refresh and show me different numbers of photos uploaded in different locations. Apparently this is a page.

Now, am I just being thick, or does the concept of ‘pages’ just make no sense at all on a map like this? I don’t know about you, I’m basing my expectations on the other Yahoo and Google Map mashups with all the masses of pins poking out all over the place. And no pages.

I can’t even begin to get my head around what a page might mean in this context… what goes on one page and not another? And playing with the pages didn’t clear things up for me either.

I can’t think that these pages are helping the situation any though, because according to this widget there are 3.5 million images that have been geo-tagged. That’s a pretty impressive number.

Go play with the map though, and tell me where all these images are… I sure can’t find anywhere near that many. I’ve played around with England, NSW (Australia) and East Coast USA and I don’t reckon I’ve seen more than three thousand photos on the map (and that’s erring on the generous side).

Firefox is driving me bonkers (my accident prone tab closing experiences)

I’m terrible at tagging. How about you?

I don’t know about you, but when i look at my Flickr and Del.icio.us tags and even the categories for my blog, it makes me realise that folksonomies are not so simple.

Particularly my Del.icio.us account is now so completely out of control that I frequently can’t find things that I *know* I saved and tagged… and I’m supposed to know a thing or two about how to label things!

Where are the main problems? Plurals and abbreviations are my biggest foes. Sometimes I pluralise, sometimes I don’t. Generally I use the full word or term, but occasionally I’ll use an abbreviation, or both! If a term has two words to it, the way that I join the words to make a term varies.

It’s a complete mess.

Why did this happen? Because I didn’t make any rules when I first started, and my ‘rules’ have evolved over time as I see different ways that other people use tags, and as I succumb to using ’suggested tags’ that break my ‘rules’.

Not only that, but usually I tag in haste, often times because I want to come back and look at the page/site at leisure but I don’t want to lose the link. I’m not really thinking too much about whatever my latest tagging rules might be, and there’s nothing to remind me of what rules I’d decided on.

And, most of all. The system doesn’t care how I tag and doesn’t keep me in line!

it drives me crazy. I feel like a plumber with a dripping tap. But will I ever go back and tidy it up? Probably not. I have a whole lot of links there now - it would take a serious investment of time to tidy up now… and what’s to stop it from ending up in the same state of disrepair in six months time?

If I’m having these kinds of troubles with tagging, then surely others are having even more troubles. And the value of the tagging must surely be diminished because other people are getting less rich results due to my haphazard tagging.

I do love the freedom and flexibility of tagging… but more and more I find myself wanting some rules, and some compulsion to stick to the rules or knowingly break them. And I want a smarter system that realises I’m being silly when I randomly choose to make a tag a plural for no good reason at all.

I want some structure to my tagging.

Do you? Or do you think I’m taking all the fun out of folksonomy?

Photo Credit: AnnDeeScraps @ Flickr

who moved my @ key?

The McFarlane Prize for Excellence in Australian Web Design

Greetings from Koh Tao, Thailand (a.k.a. heaven on earth).

Just a quick note to help spread the word about this new Australian web design prize. For me, I think a lot of the current ‘awards’ are pretty lame at the moment (speaking from both the judging and the judged perspective). Hopefully this one will actually help to unearth, promote and reward real excellence in practice in our industry.

This prize is a little different from others in at least two ways.

Firstly - you don’t have to pay a fortune in entry fees to have your site considered. Too often, great work is not included in awards because the entry fees are prohibitive. Congrats to the Macfarlane Prize team for not following this trend and allowing everyone to be involved. However,…

Secondly. There are only four judges, expert in each of the critiera for the awards (Usability, Design, Accessibility and Coding). I hope these guys (and gal!) have nothing much on in the next few months, because they will have a mountain of entries to get through, I predict (especially due to factor one: free entry!).

I have mixed feelings about the small number of judges here and the fact that there is only one per category. Particularly Design and Usability which can be such subjective areas. (Perhaps accessibility and coding can also be subjective, certainly coding seems to be! I’m not so expert in those fields so I’ll leave others to comment). For me I probably would have rather see 3 judges per criteria, but perhaps that would start administrative hassles that the ‘Prize’ can’t afford just now.

Anyways, congrats to the team for getting it off the ground. Go check it out for yourself.

Here are the details as forwarded by Maxine Sherrin:

Named in memory of noted Australian web pioneer Nigel McFarlane, the inaugural McFarlane Prize, aims to recognize and encourage excellence in web design by Australian developers.http://www.mcfarlaneprize.com/

The Prize will reward excellence in web design in the broadest sense, from the appropriate use of technology, to design aesthetics, to its impact more broadly on the web.

Open to Australian designers or teams for a site launched or significantly upgraded between August 1 2005 and July 31 2006, the Prize aims to be a showcase of the best in Australian web design, and to inspire other developers in their endeavours. Nominations are now open.

http://www.mcfarlaneprize.com/nominationform.html

The McFarlane Prize will be awarded by a jury of Australian experts in various fields of web design and development. Based on two rounds of judging, the McFarlane Prize shortlist will be announced on September 22nd.

The announcement of the winner of the inaugural McFarlane Prize will then be made at the Web Directions Conference Reception, September 28 2006, during Australian Web Design Week.

So, if you’ve been doing some web excellence lately, be sure to get along to the website and submit your site. I look forward to seeing an amazing showcase of great Australian work.

Meanwhile, for me, I have some snorkelling to do, followed by some lazing on the beach with a trashy novel.

I’ll be back online ’seriously’ in a couple of weeks. Hope you’re all well! Until then