December 2006 Archive

2006 unraveled year in review

2006 was a relatively quiet year at unraveled. It was somewhat busy with my partner and I moving to Munich and Zurich, respectively, but that’s not much of an excuse for the small number of posts. After all, the train ride between Munich and Zürich is 4 hours 45 minutes — plenty of time for writing. I think the larger reason — particularly in the first half of the year — was a personal struggle to find my voice. In case you hadn’t realized, things around here have taken a more professional tone over the past few months. This wasn’t coincidental; unraveled has been and will continue to be a journal for my thoughts on design, products and getting things done, but you can expect much less personal posts. My new Vox blog will be taking over where unraveled left off in that category.

Despite the small number of posts, I started two new projects (Desigin Inside Yahoo! and Urban Experience) and belatedly finished publishing my Human Computer Interaction Papers.

I haven’t previously written a “best of” list, but considering the change in focus I think this is a good year to start. So in no particular order, here are my three favorite posts of 2006:

In terms of sheer page requests, 2006 was a stellar year, with total page requests increasing by 278% over 2005 and 326% over 2004. CSS Tabs continues to be the most requested page thanks to unraveled’s high rank in Google for “css tabs”.

Finally, the unraveled wish list for 2007, which currently consists of two items. First, I’m going to make a concentrated effort to publish something at least once a week in 2007. I think that’s a reasonable goal considering I posted 23 times in 2006. So once a week is only twice as often — not that great a stretch. Second, and I say this with a completely straight face, stop using those fucking Snap Preview Anywhere widgets. They’re about the most annoying third party interface tool I’ve ever seen and they’re everywhere. Even otherwise respected sites like TechCrunch are using them:

snapPreview.gif

Just a few reasons why these are evil:

  1. They interfere with a user’s flow, i.e. they’re worse than most ads
  2. You don’t know they’re coming
  3. There’s currently no way to turn them off. This is fixable using cookie preferences and would also fix #1 and #2. Editor’s note: Erik Wingren commented below that Snap’s Preview Anywhere bubble can be disabled

So please, in the name of Nielsen, just stop using them, or at least demand that Snap make them configurable so that users can choose to turn them off. Users have enough crap flying up in their face; why send them more?

Design Inside Yahoo!: Luke Wroblewski

Just in the past few years, Yahoo! has made leaps and bounds into the world of social media. Beyond acquiring Flickr in early 2005 (and relaunching Yahoo! Photos), they’ve launched a podcast service, a music service, and recently released version 1.0 of Yahoo! Video.

This is the fourth interview in the Design Inside Yahoo! series. I interviewed Luke Wroblewski, Principal Designer for Social Media. I talked to Luke about the role of design vision at Yahoo!, the tools he uses to communicate ideas, Yahoo!’s personality and more.

Joshua Kaufman: You’ve talked a lot about design vision and the role it plays within organizations. As Principal Designer for the social media teams at Yahoo!, how do you use this concept in practice?

Luke Wroblewski: Well there’s the obvious task of designing products that are useful, usable, and enjoyable. But doing so effectively in large corporate environments often requires applying design principles and problem solving methodologies to more than just product design. I actually spend a lot of my time helping various social media projects focus. Half of this effort is continually constructing and refining — through narrative and illustration — where we are headed. The other half is weaving our internal and external data streams into information that helps set that direction.

Painting a picture of where you are going is especially important when you have large (30 person+) teams distributed across the globe. You need a vision that resonates with people and gives them a clear sense of how their individual work contributes to our success. Too many times this type of strategic direction is only expressed as high-level mission statements and Excel spreadsheets. I instead employ design artifacts to illustrate where we are going and why. Whether that’s a concise roadmap that visualizes how several independent efforts will converge into a unified experience, a large-scale user experience architecture diagram that represents a product redesign, or a PowerPoint narrative that defines a problem space and potential solutions, the end goal is to communicate a tangible outcome that keeps us focused.

To help set direction, Yahoo! has no shortage of internal data. When coupled with the information available online, we — like many companies today — can end up with more data than we can handle. So another part of my role is using pattern recognition and visual communication techniques — both part of a designer’s toolkit — to make sense of the information available to us. By applying design principles to prioritize data and illuminate relationships, I can help teams make faster and better decisions. Though I can’t speak to specific examples, you can get a sense of what this process entails and the impact it can have by reading a recent conversation I had with eBay’s first designer, Jamie Hoover about his role in eBay’s registration redesign process.

JK: In an interview with John Haven you discussed the designer’s role as someone who can help communicate the value of ideas. Communicating with comics was a specific example you gave in the interview. What communication tools (including comics) have you found most effective in your work?

LW: Well, Kevin Cheng is Yahoo!’s comic maestro, so I can’t compete there. Instead I employ many of the artifacts I alluded to above. In particular, there’s a few I continually return to:

JK: In that same interview, you mentioned ethnographic research as a tool that Yahoo! uses to investigate how people use Yahoo! products and services in the real world and then applying that knowledge within the design cycle. What key lessons have you learned about using ethnographic research methods as a design tool?

LW: Having just participated in an almost complete spectrum of user research from usability testing to home visits to “unfocus groups”, for me, truly innovative concepts are often not the real value-add any of these techniques provide. Instead, the summation of these techniques paints a very clear picture of a potential audience: their behaviors, motivations, perspectives, and more. It’s this type of understanding that for me — I can’t speak for all designers — is perhaps the core value of research.

It’s not research to find where “x marks the spot” and a treasure of innovation is buried. It’s research to understand people, context, and as a result current and future behavior.

JK: It has been widely thought that several Yahoo! product groups are self-competing but the recent memo from Brad Garlinghouse brought new light to the topic. One of the three pillars of his plan called for “focusing the vision”. As a leading designer, how can you help Yahoo! define who they are?

LW: I think any of the skills and communication tools I outlined earlier can help focus corporate interests but when you really want to enact real high-level corporate change it takes more than design chops.

Bryan Zymijewski just wrote up a great series on my Functioning Form site about being a “design” strategist. The first point he made was that the one of the most important skills of business is knowing what drives people to make decisions. This and the ability to rally people around a shared vision are skills that belong in Engineering or Sales as much as Design. Unfortunately, many designers aren’t interested in exploring outside the design toolkit for the skills they need to really make an impact.

JK: One of the big ideas in your book, Site Seeing, is that people need to be aware of the personality that their site is creating through its visual design. As Yahoo! has become increasingly “designed” over the past several years, what personality has Yahoo! been communicating?

LW: To allude to your earlier question about focus, as Yahoo! has grown from an Internet directory to almost a portfolio company of products and brands, the Yahoo! personality has been stretched accordingly. So some Yahoo! properties are more reflective of the fundamental Yahoo! personality than others. At its core, the personality of Yahoo! is simple, fun, innovative, and unique. Clearly some properties reflect more or less of these attributes than others — Y! Finance for example is not all that fun — but in general that’s where the company needs to be heading. And no, I don’t think we’re there quite yet.

JK: What’s next for Yahoo!’s social media products and services?

LW: What isn’t? Social media continues to be a major strategic pillar for the company and the recent reorganization announced last week aligns our assets in that space more closely. So I’m looking forward to lots of interesting social media integrations and customer experiences in 2007.

Luke Wroblewski is Principal Designer for Social Media at Yahoo!, Founder/Principal of LukeW Interface Designs and author of Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability.

Simplicity is highly underrated

Earlier this week I noticed Don Norman’s latest article, Simplicity Is Highly Overrated. As a designer, I take simplicity very seriously. (It’s in the first line of my bio.) So when Don Norman comes along and says it’s overrated, I feel obligated to respond.

Before we even start to take a closer look at this, let’s begin with the title “Simplicity is Highly Overrated.” Don Norman has been thinking about design for a long time, and lately simplicity has been a hot topic. The title is obviously provocative. Yes, simplicity can be overrated, but as design concept, simplicity is important, and, I believe, it’s too often underrated.

Getting back to the article, Norman makes his point in this paragraph:

Make it simple and people won’t buy. Given a choice, they will take the item that does more. Features win over simplicity, even when people realize that it is accompanied by more complexity. You do it too, I bet. Haven’t you ever compared two products side by side, comparing the features of each, preferring the one that did more? Why shame on you, you are behaving, well, behaving like a normal person.

The response from the blogosphere was vast, and I’ve attempted to round up what I feel are some of the most valuable posts here. One of the first popular responses came from Joel Spolsky who agreed with Norman and made a decent case for why simplicity doesn’t work as a long term strategy:

What works for bootstrapping, I believe, will not work as a good long term strategy, because there’s very little to prevent the next two-person startup from cloning your simple app, and because eventually you can’t fight human nature: …”The people want the features, says Norman. Just because handheld video was perfect for Blair Witch, doesn’t mean every Hollywood blockbuster will use it.

This is a good, but ancillary point. The meat of his arguement is in his conclusion:

If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product in which the user model corresponds closely to the program model, so the product is easy to use, fine, more power to ya. If you’re using the term “simplicity” to refer to a product with a spare, clean visual appearance, so the term is nothing more than an aesthetic description much in the same way you might describe Ralph Lauren clothes as “Southampton WASP,” fine, more power to ya. Minimalist aesthetics are quite hip these days. But if you think simplicity means “not very many features” or “does one thing and does it well,” then I applaud your integrity but you can’t go that far with a product that deliberately leaves features out. Even the iPod has gratuitous Solitaire game. Even Ta-da List supports RSS.

Spolsky made two mistakes here. First, the iPod and Ta-Da List are poor examples what he’s trying to illustrate. Yes, the iPod has Solitaire, but it’s anything but gratuitous: it doesn’t inhibit the use of the player and people enjoy using it. [1] And yes, Ta-da List supports RSS, but Ta-da List always supported RSS. 37signals never included it because they they needed to add features. It was part of Ta Da List’s simple feature set from the beginning.

Spolsky’s second mistake is that none of the definitions he gives for simplicity are correct. Most will realize that simplicity has nothing to do with matching the user’s mental model. Some will probably understand that simplicity means a lot more than a clean visual appearance. But not many are going to call him on defining simplicity as “not very many features” or “does one thing and does it well.” After all, the iPod doesn’t have many features and also it’s an excellent mp3 player. It also happens to have a sleek minimal appearance. This isn’t because Apple said “The iPod going to be simple, so it won’t have many features and it will only be an mp3 player.” This is because when you design with simplicity, you often end up with fewer features, and products with fewer features are inherently easier to beautify. Reduction is definitely part of simplicity but to say that simplicity is nothing more is to, well, oversimplify. As a designer, you have to balance simplicity with other goals, which sometimes emerge as features.

Dan Saffer chimed in and and reiterated this point. Saffer referred to this balancing act as “elegance”:

Elegance removes us from this trap. An elegant design contains the necessary, essential, and occasional features in a way that doesn’t impinge upon any of their uses, revealing and hiding them as necessary. Shaker furniture springs to mind, as do rolltop desks, Leatherman tools, and TiVo.

Luke Wroblewski, in his recent article “The Complexity of Simplicity,” gave this concept a different name: “gradual engagement”:

The most common solution for accommodating the needs of both average and power users without negatively impacting the effectiveness of either group is to gradually reveal complexity as users let you know they are ready for it. Though clearly a noble pursuit, gradual engagement of this sort is often quite difficult to design and implement effectively, as it is likely to require complex behind-the-scenes considerations for a product development team.

Wroblewski goes on to give an excellent example of why this is so hard: the menus in Microsoft Office 2003. Microsoft was definitely onto something when they designed this feature — a lot of users loved it, but it made the experience worse for just as many.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you call the pursuit of simplicity. It always comes down to the experience. And who better to make that point than Mark Hurst of Good Experience:

Don Norman is technically right that simple doesn’t sell, because what people are really buying is a good experience. Sometimes simple is good, and sometimes complex is good, depending on what a good experience is in a given context.

In other words, it depends. Hurst nails it by concluding that “it’s broadly inaccurate, and more than a little silly, to suggest that ‘simplicity is highly overrated.’” Smart designers know that simplicity is highly underrated.

[1] Recent generation iPods could be said to have gratuitous features, but like Solitaire, they don’t interfere with using the player and in some cases can be turned off so that they’re never seen. ↑

← November 2006 | Archives | January 2007 →