Creativity Kills

Posted on January 29, 2010

People are creative. It’s a fact of the state of humanity. People want to make things. It’s built into the human condition. But there is a difference between haphazard creation and focused, goal-oriented development.

Andy Rutledge states that creativity is not design. I agree with him. Creativity alone does not solve problems. Creativity, when allowed free reign, is as much a destructive force in business projects as it could be a productive partner.

Creativity can be a great driver for new ideas, but when creative focus remains the primary focus, the end product is bound to suffer. Web sites can prove a noteworthy breeding ground for creative direction overriding good problem solving. Continue reading »

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User Exwhatience?

Posted on January 26, 2010

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent out a tweet asking what the ‘x’ was in Ux. I shot back a pithy “Ux is User Experience.” In a small way, the question got my mind rolling. I didn’t realize, at the time, that I was considering who does and doesn’t know anything about user experience and why that might be.

Today I landed on a slideshow put together by a gentleman at Microsoft all about Ux and why it’s important. This is particularly poignant as Microsoft developed a reputation for building applications that weren’t always pretty, or clear, but essentially got the job done. Continue reading »

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Reactionary Navigation: The Sins of the Broad and Shallow

Posted on January 18, 2010

When given a task of making search terms and frequetly visited pages more accessible to users, the uninitiated fire and fall back. They leave in their wake, broad, shallow sites with menus and navigtion which look more like weeds than an organized system. Ultimately , these navigation schemes fail to do the one thing they were intended for, enhance findability.

Though one of my latest projects was the final straw, prompting this post, I’ve seen teams approach sites with the goal of findability and navigability in mind, only to end up with a system of menus and a field of links that are almost impenetrable to even the most tenacious of webonauts. Documents, pages and external links mingle in a taxonomic and architectural nightmare.

Perceived site architecture is to blame for this iniquity, regardless of the real information hierarchy. Although broad and shallow architecture is fine for small, simple sites, it is unforgiving as the site grows and the number of pages needed to contain all of the information provided balloons up. Continue reading »

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OOC: Object Oriented Content

Posted on January 15, 2010

Most content on the web is managed at the page level. Though I cannot say that all systems behave in one specific way, I do know that each system I’ve used behaves precisely like this. Content management systems assume that every new piece of content which is created is going to, ultimately, have a page that is dedicated to that piece of content. Ultimately all content is going to live autonomously on a page. Content, much like web pages, is not an island.

Six months or a year ago, I had an epiphany. Content can be handled much like programming, i.e. in an object-oriented manner. Web sites often have repeating elements which could be broken out into individual pieces and reused throughout the site. These pieces could be considered objects in their own right, and they would share quite a bit with objects in programming. After building a proprietary Content Management System around this concept, I coined the phrase “Object Oriented Content.” Continue reading »

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Party in the Front, Business in the Back

Posted on January 14, 2010

Nothing like a nod to the reverse mullet to start a post out right. As I started making notes on a post about findability, something occurred to me. Though it should seem obvious, truly separating presentation from business logic is key in ensuring usability and ease of maintenance. Several benefits can be gained with the separation of business and presentation logic including wiring for a strong site architecture, solid, clear HTML with minimal outside code interfering and the ability to integrate a smart, smooth user experience without concern of breaking the business logic that drives it.

The benefit that engineers will appreciate is the ease of maintainability. With business logic abstracted from the presenation, engineers can maintain the infrastructure without worrying about breaking the look and feel of the client experience. This alleviates stress and sleepless nights they might experience otherwise. Continue reading »

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The Selection Correction

Posted on January 11, 2010

User self selection is a mess. Let’s get that out in the open first and foremost. As soon as you ask the user questions about themselves directly, your plan has failed. User self selection, at best, is a mess of splash pages and strange buttons. The web has become a smarter place where designers and developers should be able to glean the information they need about the user without asking the user directly.

The innate problem with asking the user about what they want is, they will invariably give you the wrong answer. Sometimes it happens because they don’t know what they want. Sometimes they don’t care. Sometimes they misunderstand what you really want to know and sometimes they flat out lie to see what happens.

The question has hit my desk a few times now, “how does the user self-select in a nice, fluid manner?” The answer: they don’t. Continue reading »

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Ah, Simplicity

Posted on January 8, 2010

Every time I wander the web I seem to find it more complicated than the last time I left it.  Considering this happens on a daily basis, the complexity appears to be growing monotonically.  It has been shown again and again that the attention span of people on the web is extremely short.  A good example of this is a post on Reputation Defender about the click-through rate on their search results.

I was discussing these two aspects of the web with the graphic designer at my work and we seemed to agree that all evidence points to the growing trends of complexity and short attention spans. Then we had something of a revelation. Perhaps there is a correlation. Is it possible that the ever increasing complexity of the web and the numerous sites which live there are encouraging the limited attention of users? Perhaps it’s the other way around and short attention spans affect choice to add extra elements to an already architecture-overburdened site. Continue reading »

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Well, Now, Isn’t that Flashy?

Posted on January 7, 2010

I make no secret of the fact that i’m not a huge fan of Flash.  It’s not really because I feel there is anything inherently wrong with Flash.  I am opposed to the gross overuse and misuse that happens every day.  Sometimes only Flash will do, and in those circumstances it is the answer.  Sometimes Flash is the answer to a question that is totally incorrect.

When someone proposes making a website, I immediately start asking questions of scope, regularity of updates, audience, intent and so-on.  Typically I don’t ever ask what technology the client is interested in using.  When it comes down to brass tacks, I’m typically uninterested in the technology the client wants because the user is the important piece of the puzzle, so the tech that fits is the tech that gets used.  I can only imagine what goes through the minds of people before building a website that is run only with Flash.

“Hey Joe, what do you think of building a site using only Flash?”

“Cool idea! How do you think users should interact with it?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it. I just think it would be neat to have an all Flash site.”

“Let’s do it.” Continue reading »

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