May 2006

As of today, our Google Hosted account has a calendar. Excellent! Now we essentially have an office suite online for free. Now if they just added a document management and customer management modules we’d be set.

tags: google, software, tools

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Sorry about the boring title – I couldn’t really think of anything natural.

If you are a regular reader you may have realized that I have jumped on the design patterns bandwagon because I think it’s a valuable tool in creating valuable user experiences while keeping yourself sane. There is a debate as to whether design patterns should act as principles to adhere to or lenient guidelines.

If you haven’t been reading the design patterns series at Functioning Form, you should really check it out as the gurus have been giving their two cents regarding the practicality and reasons behind design patterns. One thing noted is that relative to other design areas, ie art, architecture, industrial, our industry (web development) is very young. Obviously design patterns are subject to change and should be challenged. Architectural standards have not sustained throughout time. People figure out differently equal or better things. It’s the nature of change.

That being said Jeff Jarvis recently wrote about Yahoo being the last portal claiming it to be the last ‘old media company’. In response to that Kenji Mori calls for a change claiming that the problem with Yahoo is their structure and information organization. He says we need a change and should move to a bottom-up hierarchy. He left us with no reasoning, but just that we should.

Naturally that got me to thinking. Is this a relevant challenge to one of the oldest digital information design principles – hierarchical, top-down information organization? We see this pattern everywhere from websites where your entrance to the site is the ‘home page’ to your Windows Explorer where folders are displayed hierarchically and files are organized as such.

Below I’ve diagrammed the difference in what I am discussing. The difference is obvious but I thought visual explanation would help

The more thinking I’ve done on the subject the more I agree with Kenji. In working on Managing the Edge I have been researching the many interfaces a company has with its customers. This same mentality can be applied to information design on websites. Flattening the hierarchy and providing many interfaces to your website and web application does create a more valuable user experience.

There are several ways to flatten your information hierarchy to give your users several paths to use your site. I will use delicious as an example. As an hourly delicious user I very, very rarely see the delicious homepage. In fact I only hear about their new homepage designs and added functionality from bloggers. Thinking of this made Kenji’s idea even more appropriate.

How does delicious do it? Well, first of all they have web services that allow me to create content without visiting the site. Second, all of their content is aggregated to me via RSS, delivering me the content I want from their website. Third, they use semantic URL’s so I know what to type to get an RSS feed, or to search, or to browse by tags. Futhermore consider the tagging phenomenon as a whole. In essence this is an adoption of a flat categorization method to organize and classfiy content.

Now, I do not disown top-down structures because they definitely still serve a purpose and are an excellent example of an evidence based design pattern. Hierarchical organization of digital information is as natural for people now as using a mouse. I just like to challenge the norm. And you do not necessarily have to create a flat structure for your site. Consider giving your users a variety of avenues for usage. This creates a better user experience because it lets the user define how they use their application making them much more comfortable.

tags: design patterns, web design, design

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Yet another web 2.0 showcase site. These are getting about as trendy as CSS design showcases. But this is a pretty cool implementation.

Check it out at http://web2.0slides.com/

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The idea of left and right design came to me recently when working on prototypes for a web application I am building. At the same time I have been researching interaction design techniques and design patterns because since I became a web application developer I have been generally interested in interface design.

Now, I’ve never claimed to be a designer because, well I’m not that great of a visual experience creator. I dabble in it here and there but I know when to stay out of it working with an excellent designer like TJ. But design aside, creating user interfaces and interactive experiences is what I do – and is that not design?

Once I figured out that design was essentially two complementary parts the realization occurred to me that as a web application developer I am in a sense a designer. Sure, I do not know the first thing about getting around in Photoshop. I don’t use design view in Dreamweaver. I look at markup and code all day – how can I be a designer? This is a common mistake for web developers. Not considering themselves a designer limits what they can do with their applications. It will often cause pitfalls in the development process because they are not familiar with design patterns that affect their work and their user’s experiences.

Well, I am a left designer. The idea of left and right design is analogous to the theory that human thought is divided into cerebral hemispheres (left and right brain) and that people are naturally stronger on one side or another. People stronger on the left side are more logical and sequential in looking at parts of a solution. Right brainers are those that look at a problem more subjectively in a holistic big picture approach.

In comparison left designers are students of patterns, evidence and creators of interactive user experiences. Right designers create visual masterpieces that communicate a message using many design techniques like typography, layout, organization, etc.

Left and right design are complementary, meaning they are mutually dependent upon one another in the same sense a computer and a monitor are. Sure, you can get by with one or the other but combining the two together the experience is the most rewarding and valuable. You can create a great web application but if it looks like crap no one wants to even try it. TJ touched upon this months ago in his post ‘First Impressions’. Users make up their minds in the first twentieth of a second. Without a good right designer you have just lost your user before you got to show off your amazing code.

This works the other way around. A wonderfully designed website will get the users to stay but if they cannot figure out how to use it or get confused the user will leave. There is nothing more frustrating to the average web user than not knowing how to use an application.

So, team up. That’s what TJ and I have done. Look in your organization, class, or team and find someone with complementary talents. Good designers on both sides need each other. If you are good at both – congratulations. But I still think a team of two complementary designers is the best because each will have input in the others work.
That being said, I hope to be of some help to web developers who have not embraced the fact that they are designers. You don’t need to know Photoshop or have any artistic skills to be a left designer. In fact left design is more appropriate for developers because it uses evidence based patterns and sequential logic to create valuable user experiences.

To get you started, LukeW at functioning form has an excellent series started yesterday about design patterns. Check out part 1 and part 2.

UC Berkeley has a site called Web Patterns – A UC Berkeley Resource for Building User Interfaces.

And, Yahoo has provided a great resource for developers in their Design Pattern Library.

Interaction Design Association Resources

That will get you started – the rest is up to you.

tags: design, interaction design, web design

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