July 24, 2005

Design patterns help developers and users

The Nielsen Group announced the User Experience 2005 Conference, which will run the same program simultaniously in Boston and London. One of the more interesting of the listed topics is How design patterns can increase usability. Regarding my ventures with core, this is particularly interesting. In 1998, when I started out developing for the web, I studied and utilized modular elements for information architecture and design. Getting more involved in usability and the user experience, I began to understand that these design patterns not only help the developers of a website by eliminating redundant work, they are also useful to users of websites, because in the end, it is patterns on which humans rely on, as defined in cognitive science. Today, pattern modules are a core element of web creation with usability in mind. The Nielsen Group described their feature on the User Experience 2005 Conference this way:

Experienced interface designers depend upon a vast repository of knowledge about "what works" in a given situation. Design patterns, then, allow such knowledge to be captured in a standardized form, making it more accessible to new team members, less-experienced designers, or non-specialists such as writers, marketers, or managers. Individual design patterns are also collected into pattern languages—structural and conceptual frameworks that organize and link related patterns—to help designers generate high quality solutions.

Resources:
User Experience 2005 Conference
The Nielsen Group
Wikipedia: Modularity in Cognitive Science
Wikipedia: Design Patterns

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 05:20 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2005

Underestimating the value of user experience

No doubt, the web is booming again. Users have finally taken over and are now driving the industry with their demands. However, economy is still hesitant in picking up what is necessary to meet the dynamics of user demands.

When I'm talking about people here, I simply refer to them as users. I don't restrict them to be computer- or web users exclusively. My view of the web is a holistic one. I'm taking other parts of life in account and I look at people as users—people who want to do something useful with the web. Because that's how people are: they don't look at the web exclusively. They don't regard themselves as computer users only. That would make them a minority of geeks. What people really do in life is, bringing it all together. They use the phone, a computer and a tv at the same time, and for both, business and entertainment. In social perception, peoples jobs and private lives become more and more one integrated experience.

I work as a creative director and project manager. On the web more than anywhere else, this involves a high degree of organizational skills, as well as a deep knowledge of the matter. My work includes information architecture, usability, data structures and user experience. It's surprising me still how slow the industry is picking up on the most important part of my job, the user experience. In my perception, it's totally underestimated.

When I worked for YVOD, a small web company in Albany, Ca, my contractor gave me the job of reorganizing the company's production cycle. I started at three ends:

Efficiency: How to make things work smoothly, achieving goals within certain time- and budget frames, simplifying processing, taking steps with measurable success rate

Modularity: Creating solutions that could be modularized, like grids, patterns, recyclable elements, defining and regulating production phases, creating durable tools that could be applied to changing situations

Experience: Creating unified and usability driven interfaces for the products, joining a consistently smooth user experience with dynamics of client demands, but maximizing a positive experience for users, not for clients

My contractor, the CEO of YVOD, shared parts of my vision, but not all of it. To him, the user experience was merely something that would be reflected in the design—the look and feel in his eyes—of the final product. His focus lay elsewhere, based on the idea of clients wanting to make money. I never questioned that approach. Of course it's clear to me that business is about making money in the first place. What I think was wrong though was to concentrate on something else than the user experience. We ended up spending months and lots of money researching Search Engine Optimization.

Don't get me wrong. SEO is a valuable tool for large corporations who want to introduce a new product. It's also great for newcomers, perhaps startups who want to underline their marketing efforts by optimizing their content to get higher ranks in search engines. Other than that, in my opinion, it is wasted money.

The main clientelle for YVOD was small businesses to medium enterprises. We had a number of single-person companies, some of them working at home, and were looking into contracts for website projects around $10,000. A rather small number in web market. To spend a total of eight to ten months in researching and applying SEO to clients, to which we had to explain most times what this was all about, was mildly put an uneconomic effort.

Of course every company with a website wants visitors to look at its site. But if you're a copyright lawyer in Berkeley, people won't find you by typing "copyright law" into Google. It's not even that Google doesn't work like that. It's because of people don't work like that.

A woman who's looking for a copyright lawyer in Berkeley will do one of two things. One, she might ask friends or business partners. Two, she looks up specific directories, like the local phonebook or an online registry or directory. In short, she looks locally, in his nearest social surrounding, and if she is using the web, even if she would look it up at Google, she would most likely enter "copyright law, Berkeley". Because she needs local help, a person to talk to face to face.

So what is important to this person looking for a copyright lawyer? Say she found three or four of them in the area. What she will do then is go look at their website. From that point it's rather simple what happens next. She will look for signs giving her enough trust that she's chosing the right partner. The whole process is driven by user experience, by a mix of trusting your senses when you look at a website and by getting where I want to go quickly.

Is the website complicated? Is it full of content but it's hard to find out what I want to know? Is the site friendly or cold? Is it more about the law or is it about me?

Questions like these appear naturally. They actually reflect a natural user behaviour. Those are questions core is focussing on in user experience research groups. Those are the questions that come out of the users catalogue of needs, wishes and requirements, not out of the clients portfolio.

What is important for a client, in this case the copyright law firm but it's true to any company online, is to present itself in the best possible way. And on the web that means a lot more than it means in real life. It's more than a clean business card online. It means talking to your customers, making them feel home, making them feel understood and making them feel wanted. It means tuning your evangelism into the wavelengths of your customers, the users of your website.

Users don't just look at a website as something pretty or ugly. They make choices based on their immediate experience. The site is boring? Next. The site is confusing? Let's see what else we have... If your website is based on good user experience, you get the best chances that a customer might find you online, find your services valuable and finally becomes not only a user of your website, but also a user of your business.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:22 AM | Comments (0)

May 30, 2005

Think dense

For about three months I have been working on updating my website. It's been a work with lots of interruptions, mostly work in advertising and a couple of design jobs for friends. Equally abandoned was core, the blog. Not that I would run out of topics. I had to smile when I just stumbled over older entries, written in the heat of the last elections in the U.S. In the meantime my Powerbook's hard disk died and I a total of about 30% of my entire data, including pictures and music. My visa for the U.S. ran out. I had to go back to Zurich, where I'm now living with my brother for the next couple of weeks, possibly months. And still I'm looking for a permanent position in the U.S. as a Creative Director, ideally in internet business. In short, I simply didn't find the time to write anymore.

Once the heat had boiled down a little, I didn't waste time. This weekend I finally made progress on the site, establishing a new entry page with changing pictures and cleaning up the blog's interface. The blog has a new name, dense, which somehow emphasizes what core is all about.

The new core blog dense will cover all sorts of topics just like it previously did, but I will focus more on core related topics, such as design, usability, conceptual work and the entire internet experience. My last job as an internet consultant opened my eyes to what I had always assumed: This business needs a lot of work to follow up with the evolution of the web.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2005

As We May Think

Why did computers come to adopt the GUI as their primary mode of interaction, and how did the GUI evolve to be the way it is today?--A very interesting and deep historic overview of the GUI (graphical user interface). A must read for everyone who's interested in the foundation of Information Architecture and Usability.

Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called the "Memex," which he envisioned as looking like a desk with two touch screen graphical displays, a keyboard, and a scanner attached to it. It would allow the user to access all human knowledge using connections very similar to how hyperlinks work. At this point, the digital computer had not been invented, so there was no way for such a device to actually work, and Bush's ideas were not widely read or discussed at that time. However, starting in about 1937 several groups around the world started constructing digital computers. World War II provided much of the motivation and funding to produce programmable calculating machines, for everything from calculating artillery firing tables to cracking the enemy's secret codes. The perfection and commercial production of vacuum tubes provided the fast switching mechanisms these computers needed to be useful. In 1945, Bush revisited his older ideas in an article entitled "As We May Think," which was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and it was this essay that inspired a young Douglas Englebart to try and actually build such a machine.

Related Resources:
Interaction Design
Boxes & Arrows
IA Institute Library
IA Wiki

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2004

Blog on

The blog story continues. Different domain, same guy. It's on. My first blog based on Movabletype. People who have been reading me should know I was using Greymatter with spill, my old blog. It can't be really called an old blog, because its short time of existence doesn't call for such a definition.

Installing Movabletype on corebasis.com was a nightmare. It's not Movabletpye's fault, not Six Aparts fault, it's got to do with our server configurations, and above all, mostly with the fact that I don't know shit about Unix. In the end it worked out though, and it's always a rush of endorphines in your system when you get something running. It feels like having fixed an old cars engine, or something like that. It was not supposed to run, after frustrating hours and hours you spent on it, and finally it just did run.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:12 AM

August 05, 2004

OP - What?

In his blog Fishbowl, Charles Miller describes what he sees as flaws of the current version of OPML. My experience with OPML is limited. I have been looking for a notebook application that would run on OS X and allow me to keep track of entries easily for a long time. Among other things, the extensive hoist- and search functions of Hog Bay Notebook were convincing me to give this application a try. So far it has been a very pleasant experience.

Here are a few unique features of Hog Bay Notebook:

The outline metaphor is used for nested documents

You use the bookmark drawer to quickly find nested entries

You can link from one document to another within it

You can use one notebook for all (which tends to get larger) or divide them by topic, which is something I'll have to look into sooner or later.

You can use it to create outlines for Information Architecture or similar things, just like with Omni Outliner, but Hog Bay Notebook is giving you more features

You can export to various formats such as {{link http://www.opml.org/ OPML}}

You can also assemble your entire notebook document in a RTFor Word file

You can use the cloning feature to create a template-kind of document and add information in different sections in different documents. Example: One moment you're randomly writing down notes for your next book in a Hog Bay Notebook document. Next you may write something else in a different notebook and you go "wait a minute, I could use this for my book too". So if you have the book-idea document cloned, your new text can be marked, and it will appear in the exact same way in the mother document. Multiple documents can update one. This is particular handy when you have multiple Notebook files – say one for programming and one for your company, and you want to have cloned documents in each one of them to be updated, so you don't have to do it manually in the second one.

You can enter Apple Script code within the document entries and they will execute when you work in a related document (clone). For an example, you start writing your book ideas and it becomes more, so you have a whole chapter now. Your Apple Script can take just the title of each chapter and create a content list automatically!

Hoisting will only show a selected part of your notebook. If you have a large notebook file with dozens of outlined entries, you can select a few, chose Hoisting from the menu and it will filter them out and not show any other entries

You can use this for various applications, like when you want to split up a notebook in two or three, or you want to create a bookmark just with the few hoisted entries.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:05 AM | TrackBack

December 15, 2003

What people do on the web

According to Boxes & Arrows, There are only four things people do on the web:

"Boxes and Arrows is the definitive source for the complex task of bringing architecture and design to the digital landscape. There are various titles and professions associated with this undertaking -- information architecture, information design, interaction design, interface design -- but when we looked at the work that we were actually doing, we found a community of practice with similarities in outlook and approach that far outweighed our differences."

Avoid Santa Claus approach to content management.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 03:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack