dense: User Experience Archives

September 26, 2005

Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2

Despite Six Apart's warm promises of the easiest upgrade ever, upgrading to Movabletype to version 3.2 is everything but painless. I'm not sure how well their strategy goes, leaving enough users out there without a clue, hoping they will be drawn to buy the most expensive upgrade version with included technical support.
There is some sort of support through the MT knowledge base and the MT community forum, and of course, you can always find bits and pieces on the internet. All sorts of puzzle parts of information are cluttered around on the net, you'll find them in various blogs and wikis online. I don't know how many Google searches I've done already, desperately trying to move forward. It feels like walking in a swamp. Along the way, I have consulted Elise's incredibly helpful tutorial site for various times and spent half a night unsuccessfully trying to make a full backup using TypeMover. It's a plugin that's supposed to backup everything of a Movabletype installation, including all your blog comments, commenters data, categories and everything else that's not stored in a MySQL database, if you haven't turned on dynamic template rebuilds. Speaking of, those don't work either in the case of dense, because in order to make them work, I would have to get access to the Apache configuration. Which is of course maintained by my host, and that is probably the same case with the majority of Movabletype users, since we don't all have our very own web server, hosting our sites from our kitchen desk.

So why am I going through this painful upgrade you may ask? The new features of Movabletype 3.2 are nice, but what is really convincing is its new anti-spam functionality. According to Six Apart, that alone will be worth all the hassle. For the past month I have spent an increasing time with blocking off unsoliticed comments by some very persistent texas casino websites. All the time I kept asking myself if this was some sort of private revenge of Mr. Bush's clan, a personal raid following my continued comments about his failure as politician and leader of the United States.

Six Apart says it's the easiest upgrade ever. But apparently I'm not the only one having problems:
cantoni.org
Blogging: MT 3.2 Final - 500 Error Bites
MovableType Weirdness Again
mistressmaryse in the MT forums: "Moveable Type development team: Your software is the MOST difficult installation that I have ever attempted to perform on my website."

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 04:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 25, 2005

Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2005

Oxford Dictionary—Opinionated about twenty something bloggers?

The Oxford Dictionary is implemented in the current release of the Mac OS codenamed Tiger. It is using an odd line for an application example of the word blog in american english. Sure, it's just to show how it is used in a sentence. But how many will mistake this as an explanation? I don't know what they were thinking when they were adding this line. There are obviously better examples to choose from, hopefully considered for an updated dictionary.

The Oxford Dictionary: blog |bläg| noun a weblog : blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 24, 2005

Mike Matas goes to Apple

Delicious Monster co founder, 19 year old Mike Matas moves from Seattle to Cuppertino to work for Apple. He isn't giving away any details on his blog, but if you followed the news on Delicious Monster in dense last week, you'll see the relations, and you will understand why Apple is fishing where the best fish are swimming.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:15 AM | Comments (0)

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 23, 2005

A wearable web experience

While American Apparel is making efforts to become the new GAP, small venues like Defunker do more with tees made by American Apparel. T-shirts that make you happy is their slogan.

It's unclear to me what American Apparel wants to be. It's like a brand with an identity crisis. American Apparel's brand design reminds me of the purism of London based designers, slick, cold and very reduced. But the brand experience you get by visiting their site and when you're actually buying something online, is way different: Lots of cluttered elements crunched into small space. There is no consistent use of elements, no design language (icons compete with links in different colors) and it's confusing to get video with some items and only pictures with others.

There's more to the problem. American Apparel products are as dull as it gets. Some call them boring, others say they are refreshingly simple. It may be part of the success story that clothes by American Apparel can be combined with everything. But not all of it is equally boring. Some of the items feature nice cuts and interesting combinations of colors and materials. It seems obvious that American Apparel is a label that wants to break out of its own dullness. It's almost like a couple that's been together for a while and now they want to freshen up their sex life.

A closer look at American Apparel's website reveals severe problems with usability and user experience:

11 global navigation links

35 marketing entry point links, that is 32 too many

1 site map link

Slide shows of Bangkok bikes and Hong Kong housing mixed with fashion shoots are sexy to art directors, but confusing to customers

I think American Apparel could use a Brand Manager, or a Creative Director with background and experience in usability and user experience. Someone who helps them to develop a conceptual direction and who starts building a brand structure and a visual language for the young company that is based on user (read consumer) research. It just doesn't look like they're aware of this need.

After Amazon's successful book store concept was expanded to include consumer electronics and apparel, more consumer fashion labels dared to jump over the GAP between consumers who are not going to their physical stores but their virtual counterparts. And not surprisingly, users of the net behave the same way they do in the real world. So they're essentially expecting the same kind of shopping experience they get in a physical store. While almost all of the bigger brands get online sales right technologically (or at least functionally working), only few companies realize the importance and relativity of an online shopping experience and browsing through racks of clothing.

When you enter a clothing store, you are allowed to act intuitively. Every kid knows how to pick up a tee and try it on. But how do you try on a piece of clothing on the web? Early pop ups of the brief but intense dot-com era died because of this problem: the lack of user experience. The web can be anything you want as it seems, but can it replace a mirror?

I can see Flash designers rising their hands, waving their fingers eargerly, pointing out you can just hook up a webcam and with a little Flash tweaking and a heavy duty database in the backbone you can create the ultimate user experience. Sure you can, once people have all the same screen with the same resolution, using the same intuitive interface (hint, it will have an X in its name but no P, and it won't be Asta la Vista either—just kidding), and they all have web cams built in their computers. But until we are there, our t-shirt shops have filed insolvency.

What does it take to make the selling experience an actual fashion store experience online? Most sites are kind of getting there, but they don't seem to get it yet. Usability is something that has gained recognition only in the past two, three years. It was the foundation for earlier generations of designers (remember "form follows function"?). Now the economy finally awakes, realizing that user experience translates to business.

Start looking at your customers, your users. Sure, they want just to buy a simple t-shirt, or a pair of jeans. Sure, they want an easy shopping process. But they want to get the feeling for it too. Make them forget they don't look at a mirror. Don't confuse them too much. Let your website be smooth, soft and silky. Make it wearable.

This is more about ideology than it is about the design process. Sure it's important to brief your web shop designers right. Of course it is about good information architecture as well. Testing groups are a decent way to evaluate results. Trouble is, if you lack the philosophy and can't resolve what is important out of what isn't, then you don't know how to transform your testing results into an improved user experience and you won't need any programmers or designers.

So if you're an online fashion vendor, you have a product line of clothing. In real life, no other product comes that close to skin of your customers. Books can touch me inside, but clothing actually is touching me on the outside. And as a user of your stuff, I'm taking great care in only letting touch my skin what is worth it and represents part of me. Your clothes, in other words, are my expression as a user (always remember formerly called consumers are now users since they're using the web and expect the same quality from a web experience they expect from your products).

If you're a fashion vendor, you know I will let your product touch my skin. It may sound like a given, so we don't have to think about it in daily business. But if you think about it, that's as close as it gets. Quite an intimate story between fashion vendor and user.

In a store, in real life, I will browse through your racks anonymously. A sales girl may ask me if I find what I'm looking for, but that's about it. I want privacy when I'm looking, I want to be able to focus and I want to find surprises among your racks. Even when I'm looking for a jacket, I wouldn't say no to a nice top if it hits my eye.

Thinking like this, analyzing the store browsing experience may lead to the creation of a better web experience. There are some things more or less online stores have in common, but the list is short. In general, browsing for clothes, for fashion, is an entirely different experience than going to shop for groceries, especially online.

Resources:
American Apparel
Defunker
Neighborhoodies
Threadless
KD Dance
webcredible.co.uk: Ten ways to improve the usability of your ecommerce site
Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox: Usability —Empiricism or Ideology?

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 12:14 PM | Comments (2)

Ajax, the new kid on the blog

You may know this feeling. You're at a house party and you go to refill your glas of wine. When you're back the people you were talking to are gone. You look around and join a new group of people. And they look at each other and go silent.

It's not your odor or your tipsiness. It's because you're late. They were talking of a hot topic, but no one wants to introduce you to it, give you a short summary of what they were talking about. But hey, it's just a house party. It's all cool.

Sometimes when I read about new trends on the net I feel like being late to the party. It's like everybody else already knows what they were talking about, only I am asking questions. Being the geek I am, despite my efforts to dissolve that image, this is something that bugs me. I admit it. It's less the fact nobody told me about the new hot topic. It's more like "How could I not see it coming?". Because of course I did see it coming. I was just not paying attention. If you're going with the flow on the internet, if you dig really deep into it, then it's almost impossible to not notice any movement in the developers scene. Still, you may oversee something that's going to be the next star, especially when you don't know what it actually is.

Ajax is the new kid on the block. It's just like that with Ajax: on every blog you read, everybody who is talking about it already seems to know more than you. Some act like they are experts, but don't look for links in their blog entries. Frankly, some of these experts have no clue what they're talking about. I told you, it's just like on a house party.

So what is Ajax? The Amsterdam soccer team? A swiss car? Is it the lesser or the greater Ajax in the Illiad by Homer? Kitchen bleach? Or a fictional company in Mickey Mouse? Ajax may have had many meanings in the past. In future however, it is likely these other meanings of the word will be overheard. At least among web developers, information architects and designers, Ajax serves a different purpose. Ajax is a new hype to be, as more and more big companies are actually adopting the technology. Consequently, blogs are tumbling all over pointing out smart usage of Ajax.

Calling Ajax a technology by itself may be a little bit too much. It's more a smart combination of existing technologies within a set of robust rules. It is a common pattern in web evolution: While big players like Adobe and Macromedia (or now Adomedia or Macrobe) are spending a lot of time, marketing and financial efforts to establish and tigthen grounds for their proprietary technologies, it is the webs nature of evolution that finally comes up with a solution that actually works, using existing technologies, without a plugin.

Programmer Mat Hertel in Germany writes a blog about Ajax. He defines it as follows:

Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax programming is an interesting way of bringing real interactivity to web applications by using the proven internet technologies HTML and JavaScript.

You can find some Ajax demos on Mat's website. If you're more experience driven than interested in digging in code, go check out Googles Earth- and Moon-map projects or Amazon's Diamond Search engine.

Resources:
Technorati search on Ajax
Ajax = Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (+ DHTML)
Ajax demos
The Amsterdam soccer team
Ajax, a swiss car
Ajax, King of Salamis in ancient Greece
Ajax, a kitchen cleaner containing bleach
Ajax, a fictional company in Mickey Mouse cartoons
Adobe bought Macromedia
Google earth map and satelite pictures
Google moon map
Amazon's Diamond Search engine.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 06:47 AM | Comments (1)

July 20, 2005

core on netdiver.com

Netdiver is the number one source for cool new websites. It features exceptionally designed websites and news of the industry, mainly focussing on issues of design, illustration, photography, user experience and technology.

In 2003, www.corebasis.com won an award of Netdiver and was featured on their website. It was funny, because I had never sent the link to editor Carole Guevin. She had found it and decided to feature core in the current issue of netdiver. Later corebasis.com was selected to be one of the Best Sites in 2003.

Today, corebsasis.com in netdiver news has been featured in netdiver's news again.

Resources:
netdiver
Imaginative design page on netdiver
Best Sites in 2003

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2005

Delicious

Delicious Monster, creator of Delicious Library software has won the prestigious Apple Design Award. I never had the time to check out the software, but it's nifty, with a couple of amazing features, utilizing your iSight camera to read bar codes of books, CDs, DVDs.

Posted by Henning von Vogelsang at 08:33 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:

Modularity:

Experience:

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.

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

September 26, 2005

Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2

September 25, 2005

Painful upgrade to Movabletype 3.2

August 10, 2005

Oxford Dictionary—Opinionated about twenty something bloggers?

July 24, 2005

Mike Matas goes to Apple

Design patterns help developers and users

July 23, 2005

A wearable web experience

Ajax, the new kid on the blog

July 20, 2005

core on netdiver.com

July 18, 2005

Delicious

July 09, 2005

Underestimating the value of user experience

May 30, 2005

Think dense

May 20, 2005

As We May Think

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