Quote of the decade

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

This is so funny...I wish I could have expressed it so well. "I mean why is it that so much usability material is presented more like the Boeing Flight Planning Performance Manual than an airline safety card? Seriously, what's with all the damn text? How can anyone possibly write about design and not provide a visual aid or two?" From a brilliant article at Design by Fire.

It’s the computer’s fault (no, really)

Monday, May 23, 2005

I started reading John Cato's User Centered Web Design this morning on the train. Something in the first pages triggered a thought. It used to be very common, and probably still is, to hear people claiming that some administrative or other disaster was "the computer's fault". I always treated such whingeing with quite some scorn: "the computer does just what you tell it to". I guess I've changed my mind now! John Cato puts it very well: "usability is being able to do the things you want to do and not the things you have to do". The computer does indeed do what it is told to do, but it is being told by a combination of developers, managers, managers' managers, beancounters and many others before the end user gets a say in things. Many of the victims of my superior scorn would probably have been far less inclined to blame the computer if the software they were using had been designed with their needs in mind rather than some budget holder's. Of course there are exceptions. These usually concern vastly overpaid and breathtakingly incompetent managers of massively overbudget IT disasters blaming "the computer". I was right about them! ps: whilst John Cato's book seems good, one thing annoys me. His book's website is useful, but all pages titles are: "Untitled Document". Ok, so it's a minor point, but still... practice what you preach ? [Posted from the scene with hblogger 2.0]

Information (Architecture) == Power (Architecture) ?

Tuesday, May 17, 2005

I'm a little further down the "what am I doing here" road now. It involves a huge amount of reading and information ingestion, as well as feedback and valuable insights from friends and colleagues (like for example "enough talking, let's DO something" ). But I'm still perplexed. I'm trying, essentially, to find a core concept which i'm happy with, which (IT) management is happy with, and which my colleagues are happy with, AND which expresses the basic idea of "a process which describes a design methodology focussed on making things easier for customers". In the field of User Centered Design, we can identify a whole legion of sub topics. For example, some common ones:

• Information Architecture
• Interaction Design
• Interface Design
• Usability Engineering
• Functional Testing

and some I would add from my perspective:

• Solution Architecture
• Requirements Management
• Functional Testing

But when you try to focus down on these they go all blurry and try to wriggle away. Each one tries to encompass the other, tries to be top dog (whilst desperately trying to appear not to). An exmple - in "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, surely a recognised reference, towards the end of the book they start to advocate all sorts of world domination schemes where Enterprise Information Architecture teams are implanted in major organisations. Earlier, they discuss deep IA topics such as taxonomies, classification and labelling without breaking out of the context they themselves define. But in Chapter 19 we find them tabulating proposed responsibilities for an EIA team such as Link checking, HTML validation, Content Development Poilcy alongside the more expected stuff. The idea of improving a company's products or services seems to be subsumed to the urgency to create a highly political guerilla unit. And whilst the IA undercover unit is secretly plotting to take over the world, the Usability team lurks in dark corridors pursuing their own secret mission, and the central commitee of the solution architects soviet is preparing the master plan they will unleash on an unsuspecting boardroom. Peter Van Dijck, in "Information Architecture for Designers", manages to create a highly visual book that by & large restricts itself to IA. References to other disciplines are clearly just that - references, not takeover bids. I don't have a problem with Morfeld & Rosenfeld's book - I'd be pretty stupid to not acknowledge that it practically defined IA, and is a thought provoking and enjoyable read. But I rather like this from Van Dijck's Final word: "There is a problem with the way websites are built. Succesful websites combine the best of visual design, business strategy, programming, content writing, marketing and branding, usability, and information architecture". This really helps to understand a concept of what IA is, what its boundaries are, and what it collaborates with. I know many, many people are fed up with this eternal requestioning of terminology, but finally if you can't explain what something is (as well as the much easier what it isn't), how can you even understand it, let alone persuade a company to adopt it as a core strategy ?

well I seem to have

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

well I seem to have solved my IE on Windows problem... how ? By adding: !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN""http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" at the top of each page. I never realised it was so important

The site needs redesigning

Monday, April 18, 2005

I'm not very happy with the current design of this website. I should be able to do better as a (sort of) usability professional. So I've decided to start off by trying to practice what I preach. In our work environment, a lot of what we do is heavily influenced by the work of Jesse James Garrett, a member of the Adaptive Path consultancy. In the past I've been personally attracted by one of his colleagues at Adaptive Path, Jeffrey Veen. To some extent I find the two don't always entirely agree. For example, unless I've misunderstood, Jeff favours flexible design, where content reflows to match the browser window - I've been trying to do this, up until today. Jesse, on the other hand, seems to be more in favour of fixed widths (which I'm trying now). In any case I suppose this is subjective. I have far more issues to deal with than layout, for example deciding what this site is for. Therefore, although it is intended more for commercial sites, I'm going to attempt to apply jjg's celebrated "Elements of User Interface Design" methodology to this site, and see what happens. However, I'm still informed by and interested in graphic design, and at the same time I'm a big fan of CSS. I recently bought (and read - doesn't always follow !) the book of the CSS Zen Garden website, "the Zen of CSS design". I have to admit to being a bit unsure about this book - and indeed the site. The idea is that given a fixed HTML file, contributors can supply their own CSS (and only CSS) to profoundly alter the look and feel. The scope is really on graphic design - not web design, and I think the idea is to demonstrate that graphic designers can recapture lost ground in web design. The problem is that so many submissions are exactly the same, if you abstract the background graphics and te typeface. And so many look as if the designer STILL haven't got the basic idea that the web is not print in their heads. The second problem is that the designs are for one single page. The web is not about single pages, but here the designers are not at all concerned with basics such as navigation and context. For these reasons, I don't find that the Zen of CSS design really contributes anything outside of the bounds of it's very beautiful, but walled up zen garden.