Douglas Bowman, Google’s lead visual designer announced yesterday that he was leaving Google to join Twitter. At the root of it, Bowman’s decision to leave stems from a clash of cultures between the world of Interaction and Visual Design. The best way to understand this this clash of cultures is to listen to the ghost stories each field tells the young’uns.

In Interaction Design, around the campfires at night, it’s common to hear a variant of this chilling tale:

I heard, there was this company once, where they, like, got these totally great designers to build this user interface for them and they were all excited about it being the best thing since sliced toast until they tried to watch some people use it in the real world and it, like, totally sucked. The things everyone thought were easy to use were completely confusing. Luckily, they went through several iterations of redesign and testing the thing until it became something users loved.

Interaction designers are actively trained to filter out expert opinion as a justification for design decisions. The expert, no matter how qualified and trained they are, is ultimately, not the user and is ultimately, totally ineffectual and predicting what the user is like. The only way that design decisions can be justified is through feedback from actual users. Uttering the words “I prefer…” as justification for a design decision is the quickest way to move you from the potentially-an-ally category to dangerous-fool-who-must-be-neutralized category in the eyes of an interaction designer.

Over in the Visual Designer camp, a different ghost story is being passed round the campfire:

I heard, there was this company once who hired this, like, genius visual designer who built them this totally bold and brilliant design. But then, in an attempt to please everyone, the design was buried under so many focus groups and QA evaluations that  integrity of the design was destroyed and what was ultimately put up, like, totally sucked and ended up pleasing no one. Luckily, a more design friendly management was put into place and the original design was restored which ended up creating the emotional bond with the users that saved the company.

Visual designers are trained to keep their artistic integrity in the face of pressure and to be the keepers of the secret knowledge against the tide of the aesthetically ignorant. Uttering the words “consensus seeking” as justification for a design decision is the quickest way for you to become a dangerous-fool-who-must-be-neutralized in the eyes of a visual designer.

You can see both of these dynamics play out in the Google saga. Douglas Bowman’s characterization of the design process at Google:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

The debate on border pixels dragged on because Bowman became a dangerous-fool-who-must-be-neutralized in the eyes of the interaction design team.

Similarly, on Marissa Mayer’s attempt to reach out towards the visual designers:

A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.

As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr. Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.

Is so, tin-earred it’s cringe inducing. Like rich yuppies trying to connect with the less affluent by speaking the language of the “street”, Marissa reads the culture of visual design so wrong and her attempt and consensus and compromise ends up doing more harm than good.

The sad thing is, both of these viewpoints are perfectly justified and are the result of a counter-intuitive lesson learned. Both of these ghost stories are repeated precisely so the newbies in the field don’t end up making the same mistakes the pros once made. Unfortunately this means for both sides, the views of the other side look like ignorance.

Look, I was like you once, and then I learned better. So I’m just going to sit hear and wait for the other shoe to drop for you Mmmkay? Do you want to hear a ghost story while we’re waiting?

So what you end up getting is a staring contest where each side is waiting for the other to finally blink. Unfortunately, in this case, Douglas Bowman blinked first and both Douglas and Google were both impoverished for this.

PS: In anticipation of the criticism that I have no business talking about visual design when the design of my own site sucks so much, I know, it’s being fixed, be patient.

It seems like how I use facebook is radically different from how facebook thinks I use facebook. For me, events are one of the killer apps that facebook provides, it’s basically the driver for my social calendar. But facebook has oddly seemed to relegate it to the red headed stepchild of it’s feature list. I talked a while ago about how you could infer company priorities through their mobile offerings and it’s quite telling how facebook regards events. Let’s review the status quo:

• Facebook for the iPhone app: events are completely missing. Theres no way to see them, there’s no way to interact with event news on the news feed, it’s almost soviet in it’s denial that events exist.
• Facebook website for the iPhone: Events are linked to prominently on the front page but the event description page is missing several crucial pieces of information. Address is listed but not location, both host and description are missing and, most importantly, the attendee list is missing. Photos for events is devoted an entire tab despite the fact that maybe 5% of events I go to ever upload any photos.
• Facebook Mobile: This is the only mobile offering that actually has a usable event interface but it’s also the least rich in user interface and most annoying to navigate to.
• Facebook main website: Post redesign, events are getting an incredibly short shrift on the new main website. Sure, you can see what everyone else is going to but trying to figure out how to get to a list of my events for the next week took me twenty minutes of poking around (click on the event app in the bottom left). I’m not sure anyone but a power user can still figure out how to see what events they committed to more than two days in advance.

I have to admit, I’ve quite puzzled by facebook’s attitude on this given that not only do I regard events as an essential part of facebook, I regard it as pretty much the killer app of facebook mobile. When I’m away from my computer, the chances are better than even that I’m heading to an event, at an event or leaving an event. Facebook needs to recognise the opportunity it’s been missing by neglecting events and return them back to their rightful place in the facebook ecosystem.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the usability of phone systems after been on hold for 45 minutes now (and that’s not hyperbole, I can see it right there on my skype window). Frankly, I’ve always been stunned by how abysmally awful most phone systems are designed. Let me list the ways…

• You call me when you’re done with holding. Rather than have people sit around listening to call music, why not allow them to punch in my phone number and have you call me when you’re ready to talk to me?
• Remember who I am. You call a number and it doesn’t know you from Adam. Caller ID exists, use it in an intelligent manner. If I called just 20 minutes ago and I told you my issue was with a notebook, not a cellphone. Shouldn’t you be able to use that to infer that my issue is STILL with a notebook? You told me 20 minutes ago to please listen carefully, some options have changed, I don’t need to hear it again.
• Never ask me the same thing twice. If I told my address to the last person, don’t make me tell it again to the next person. If I told it to you last month, just ask to confirm it’s still the same, don’t make me repeat it. If I told it to the automated system, don’t again ask me to tell it to the human being.
• Remove the cruft from the system. Pare down your voice prompts to the barest minimum possible. Don’t add a word that’s unnecessary. As a HCI person, it was hammered into us that users don’t read anything so be sparse with your dialogs. Well, users hate hearing stuff even more.
• Give me feedback. Tell me what position I am in the queue and how long my expected wait time will be. Don’t leave me in the dark.
• Provide me a text version of your phone tree. Don’t make me wait for all your options to be said out loud, put up your phone tree on a website in text format so I can skip through all the junk and get to where I want to go.

The general level of usability in phone systems is depressingly low and doesn’t seem to have gotten significantly better over the years which is a pity because they could be much less aggravating than they currently are.

• Clock – Why can’t the time zone for my clock be set automatically to which time zone I’m in.
• Weather – I want the default display to be the weather of my current location.

While cooking dinner last night, I accidentally broke the handle off of my pan and so I thought I would get myself a new one as an early Christmas present. Looking online, I was confronted full force with the sheer retardedness of the current state of Australian online ecommerce.

Let us currently review the state of the online offerings of the 4 largest department stores in Australia:

(more…)

Jason at 37Signals recently posted about how the Drudge Report is “one of the best designed sites on the web.” I just couldn’t let this one go.

It’s a load of bollocks, and one in a stream of “hey, let’s take a widely criticized site, call it awesome, and everyone will praise how witty and insightful we are.” It’s as if everyone thinks they can be hailed as geniuses if they rebel against the norm.

Design is not synonymous with utility, and the Drudge Report fails horribly at both.

Good design? Really?

THIS IS WHAT I SEE WHEN I LOAD THE PAGE .

It’s patently absurd to call this good design. from first load, I don’t even know what the page is.

Sites that are successful yet have bad design aren’t necessarily successful BECAUSE of bad design (therefore making it good?), but IN SPITE of. This is the same reason Fox is #1 in viewership despite their utter lack of journalistic integrity, taste, and quality. Fox isn’t #1 because it’s good news, it’s #1 because right-wingers have nowhere else to go. The Drudge Report isn’t popular because of its piss poor design, it’s popular because right-wingers surf it religiously.

The Drudge Report hasn’t changed the design, ever. This could mean that the first design was perfect. It could also mean that Matt Drudge simply doesn’t care. It doesn’t mean that the users love the design… they could be sticking around because no other site has the content they desire.

Let’s move down this point by point

1. “There are no tricks, no sections, no deep linking, no special technology required. It’s all right there on one page. “But it’s a mess!” you could say. I’d say “it’s straightforward mess.” I wouldn’t underestimate the merit in that.”
2. There ARE sections… if you can suffer to scroll down far enough. Straightforward = good. Mess = bad. Straightforward + mess = good & bad. Straightforward + non-mess = good & good, i.e., better design.
3. It’s unique. Certainly. So is every dump I’ve squeezed out of my anus. There’s a REASON the news sites look alike. They WANT to look alike. When you go to CNN .com, without even seeing content, the users say, “oh, this is a news site.” Is it bad to have a news site look like a news site? Saying it’s unique and therefore good is flawed logic – you and i have discussed this before.
4. It’s important. Drudge isn’t afraid to be noisy. Sure. That’s an appeal of the Drudge Report, and is totally irrelevant to the design. The argument here is for the philosophy of the site, which 37S claims to be good and extraordinary. Fine. Keep the philosophy. Keep a super noisy headline – the site could have top-notch design, and a screaming headline…(get this)… AT THE SAME TIME .
5. It’s cluttered. It’s messy, and there’s no good flow to the information. “Jason” thinks that constitutes… good design? The design doesn’t “encourage wandering,” it just requires effort to plow through. It’s successful because the users feel that the plowing is worth it. Just because it functions now doesn’t mean it couldn’t be improved. I wonder how many people don’t visit the site for specifically that reason.
6. Breaking news. Once again, this is a philosophy of the Drudge Report, and not one of the website design. This could be maintained, regardless of design.
7. One guy can run it. That’s a plus. One guy can also make a myspace page, or a geocities home. That doesn’t make good design, and is more a question of web authoring tools. With tools powerful enough, one guy could nearly run any site on the web. The design could be significantly improved, and still have one guy do it.
8. No news… once again, Drudge philosophy and concept. Not design. The design is the implementation of the concept, and not having direct info isn’t implementation in this case – it IS the concept.
9. Sending people away… see above.
10. It’s fast. That’s definitely a plus. I’ll grant that. However, with a little organization, better fonts, and better layout, the design could be improved without sacrificing speed. It’s cheap. See above. It’s one page. See above.
11. It makes him a great living – A site’s success can be completely irrelevant to design. See above discussion of Fox.
12. All in all, it’s bad design. It may function. It may serve a purpose. However, Drudge’s design limps blindly on like the buffoon in the White House he was so fond of.

Here’s a far more non-obnoxious way of doing ads from Ptable.com.

If someone has no adblocker installed, show them the original ad:

If an adblocker is detected, replace the ad with an option for them to donate instead to the site:

If you click the X button, the ad will close and remain closed forever:

Those who click ads aren’t typically donators, and those who block ads would probably prefer to donate so this seems like an effective way of pleasing both parties.

PS: Ironically, I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out why none of my images for this post were uploading before realising that any image with “ad” in the name gets blocked by adblock plus. This explains the naming of the images.

Why does remember me tend to work so universally poorly? Wordpress for example, is a particularly irritating case, logging me out seemingly at random. Some sites manage to get it right, facebook almost never logs me out. Is there some subtle issue with cookie management that most sites manage to get wrong?

Coupled with this, what’s the basis for remember me only lasting a few weeks? Is this a legitimate security feature? I don’t really see the basis for it. If I check remember me, I want the site to remember me until I am old and grey (or at least until 2038).

There’s an interesting discussion on reddit right now about the design of a certain computer retailer website in Australia and whether this was a legitimate example of poor design. It’s interesting to me because I actually bought a PCMCIA network card from those guys a long time ago and their customer service was so horrible that I swore never to do business with them again. Yet 4 years later, they’re still clearly in business and seem to have tripled the number of stores they own. So I think it’s an interesting question to ask of whether their website really is as poorly designed as the initial poster assumed it was.

Lets get the preliminary obvious things out of the way: The site has horrible aesthetics, a total disregard for correct color theory and horrendous usability problems (including PDF price lists, ugh). But as someone pointed out in the discussion thread, the stores also have lines going out the door every single day. To paraphrase Abraham Maslow, when all you have is Dream Weaver, everything looks like a web design problem and just because the site has a web design problem does not mean that it has a design problem.

Lets say you had a journeyman web designer in to do a complete overhaul of the site. Nothing fancy, no high concept flash based monstrosity, just some simple, well laid out minimalistic, tasteful HTML and CSS. Would this be a better design?

Lets say this web designer was also a part time analytics dabbler as well and he knew the importance of not only doing good design but justifying it as well. He manages to prove that user engagement with the site is up, the bounce rate is lower and informal customer surveys indicate they love the new website. Surely this must be a better design right?

Being the paranoid web designer that he is though, he’s prepared yet more information to make his case: He points to how annual revenue increased 60% year on year even after controlling for other sources of growth. Mining the customer records indicates a significant increase of first time purchasers and a larger average orders per customer, all of which can be reasonably conclusively linked to the new word of mouth marketing and better navigation of the new website. Based on a reasonable set of accounting assumptions, the investment on a new website yielded a stunning 50,000% ROI. Satisfied that the designer has convincingly demonstrated the utility of his role, he sits back, utterly unable to comprehend any counter argument to how the previous website could be considered not be considered an example of bad design.

And yes, at this point, I would probably agree with him. If a mythical competent web designer fell into their laps, then there would be no excuse for them to keep the design of their old site. But here’s the thing, I’ve interacted with the owners of this company, they’re a family of stingy Asians (in the totally non-pejorative sense). These are not the types of people who would a) meet and b) appreciate a competent web designer. To imagine the preceding set of events happening, you first have to imagine a completely different type of business which is founded on a completely different business model and would be arguably as successful as the one they have now.

I’m not arguing that the site has good design, just that I’m open to the possibility that it’s not obviously bad design given the context and circumstances.

iPhone applications provide an unwitting peek at what companies believe is the real purpose of their product. Because of the limited form factor of the iPhone, developers are forced to release cut down versions of apps and what features they choose to include tells a lot about their priorities.

For example, the youtube iPhone app does not even suggest that comments exist wheras it devotes significant space to “similar videos”. Clearly, youtube believes their business success lies in encouraging people to browse through more videos. This is reflected in their benign neglect of the web based commenting system which I think has the potential to be one of the more interesting arenas on the web if it were handled well.

The facebook iPhone app features prominently the ability to take pictures and upload them directly to your profile as well as a well integrated commenting feature. Chat as well is featured heavily in the facebook app. Curiously enough, events are completely missing from the app (although not the web interface) which I regard as a major limitation. Also missing is the ability to forward messages or do anything other than a straight reply. Facebook mail has the potential to become the de facto email replacement but it seems relatively clear that this is an area that Facebook is not super interested in as there have only been a trickle of new functionality related to it’s messaging service.

Google maps allows you to plot a route via car but it doesn’t include the walking or public transit modes that it has on it’s website. Even more annoyingly, it doesn’t have the ability to dynamically change your route to a location as you move around which makes it effectively useless as a GPS navigation system.

Some of these insights would have been obvious without looking at the iPhone app version of websites but I think it does place these distinctions in starker contrast. It doesn’t just have to be the iPhone either, looking at any reduced functionality version of a site can give you a sense of what their developers regarded as essential and optional.