Art direction FAIL

Wow, this is kind of a brilliant carcrash between a truck full of culture and a cement mixer filled with liquid discomfort.

Just look at the massively soapy looking head on that beer: look at the yellow splashiness of it. NOw ask yourself if you feel like drinking a beer. Didn't think so.

Okay this blog is mostly about UI and UX, but pure graphic design / layout is, strictly speaking, just a very short user journey and a tremendously uninteractive user interface. I can shoehorn my occasional jawdrops in here now and again.

At the same time, it's perhaps my complete misunderstanding, and Hite and its marketing people know their audience perfectly, and in Korea this poster is the perfect visual communication of awesome fun. It's actually a peculiar thing to read the ad campaign and find a press release describuing this campaign as "making beer drinking more of a fun thing, rather than just to relieve stress" - is it just me or does this sound incredibly depressing?

I suppose, convincing people to buy something expensive which wipes out their self image and destroys their liver (not to mention potentially ruining their life) is a bit of a depressing business. I can't think of an alcoholic beverage that doesn't have a massively grim underbelly to its advertising, even the upbeat lets-not-mention-getting-pissed aloofness of Guinness.

But seriously: that logo, that blue and *that* yellow - it just makes me think of urinal cakes.

A certain sense of achievement

So I've just signed off for a couple of weeks on the rebuild of my website and well, there's a lot of win for the couple of day's graft I'm putting in. I've allowed the domain to lapse, because a lot of clients are sensitive about spec work I've done for them, so please - don't send this about carelessly.

Filling a freelance schedule and finding the focus to put together a portfolio is unnerving - it takes a while to free up the space to do it. Thanks so much to Tony for the codework, too. Let's see how this goes when I get back to work.

I was hoping to make something reasonably resolution independent and as simple as possible here: It was fun to put together, and next steps will be just filling the damn thing out with content, which is proving to be a bit of a problem. Before I ship my main machine over, I think I need a drobo for all the drives. Dang.

Deep inside the user experience

...is something called the human brain.

Most of my UI / UX knowledge - apart from that imparted by academics I know, I suppose - has been learned on the job. But a very broad range of reading supports it. Writing the last post about patterns in usability made me think of this book:

"on intelligence" by Jeff hawkins

In my opinion, if you don't understand the biological process of learning that involves pattern recognition, then you're not 100% in the game. The way that we absorb and modify procedural tasks is central to user experience design, and even more crucial to UI. Read this book.

Pictures of globes with chains above them

Ah, the nostalgia, prompted by the blogger icon for "create link" - the early days of the web when, by some accident of overliteral icon design, the chain became visually identified with the term 'link'.

And it still is, in many graphic design packages where it's - IMHO - vastly more appropriate. Text in linked textboxes *is* linked - reflow is an actual connection between the boxes. However despite the conceptual notion that two web pages are "linked" by a hyperlink, clicking the link does not connect the pages together - it brings the user to the next page. There is no link established, except in the user's history.

Pedantic? Naturally. UI is a science of pedantic details. Irrelevant? I'm not so sure. Boring? Well, you're the one reading a UI/UX blog.

The point I'm trying to make here with regard to Usability is something that gets lost in endless meetings about whether icons or buttons "work". In a world where we've been talking about "traditional" web pages for about 10 years now, conventions are established and broken quicker than fax machines came and went. 10 years ago, the web worked in very subtly conventional ways, and as many of these came from accident as from design.

I recall one of my first ever web jobs - a fringe festival theatre website - listening to my collaborator speak with the client after we launched. It seemed that the client was deeply disappointed that we'd put no contact information anywhere on the website, and nowhere to get tickets.

This - for obvious reasons - both puzzled and panicked me. Hell, nobody was 100% sure what they were doing in web design in 1996: could it be a browser issue? Maybe PCs worked differently... but then came my collaborators side of the conversation:

"I think we may have a wee bit of a misunderstanding here. Can you see the way a lot of the text is underlined and coloured blue? Yes? Okay. Well do you see the way your mouse cursor turns into a little hand when it's near that text"

I could actually hear the "oh WOW" from 5 feet away from the phone. My coworker then commenced to explain how these "links" worked, and how everyone using a computer would be used to using them. Funnily enough, the site was pretty well designed and resolution independent (not such a tricky task when everyone's surfing a tiny range from 640x480 up to 1024x768) so we never even got to the "I can't see the edges / I can see big huge edges" conversation.

So yes, it's entirely possible that the literal representation of "links" was very necessary. Every now and again, I think of how steep the global learning curve has been, and how much of my notions of "best practise" are in fact deeply postmodern, and based on "everyone knows that" ideas which didn't even exist 20 years ago.

It seemed like such a short time before users needed to be given extra information, such as "this link opens a new window". Moore's law created an environment so quickly where people could keep a handful of browser windows open simultaneously - but even quicker than processor speed, users got impatient.

I can wax lyrical about this bizarre dance that makes up UI/UX: assumptions building upon assumptions, and visual language recreating itself. I can remember the earliest signs of it - like receiving icon edits around 1998 which said that American kids would no longer recognise a classic victorian "key" shape, that a yale key was to be substituted. The idea that, as a UI designer, you're playing with this colossal collective unconscious, and trying to spot the paths of least resistance through their learning patterns and how they interact with a computer screen.

Read your potted internet histories, and you'll see many applications and services which failed in this at exactly the same time as other apps and services succeeded - and no doubt, you will find that successful UI was a significant part of it: but when it comes to UX - the entire picture - you'll find as many accidents as you will planned successes.

After all, what you should hire a UI/UX person to help you with: well, it didn't exist 25 years ago. It was lying around as various parts of retail design and industrial / product design. The convergence of skillsets is - IMHO - incredibly interesting.

El Reg speaks on cloud and costings

Here's the link to a hunt for the chimera that is cloud costing

I just love, btw, that the link button for blogger is this eensy teensy green-blue blob with a pretzel above it - oh no sorry, that's a globe with a chain above it. A subject for this afternoon's nostaligic icon rant, no doubt...

Meanwhile, the cloud around cloud computing grows - and our information, along with our dropbox stored password text files (no, I don't do it: but many do) continue to migrate online while we make a nice cup of tea.

I have to be honest: the only thing the cloud means for me is that RIA UI designers like me get a crack at very serious, very high throughput UI design. So of course, it's all fun for me. As for the actual large scale price of aggregating that much data into more or less invisible data centres? Well, all I can say is, people manage their files badly enough on local machines. It makes me dizzy to think of the terabytes of files names "untitled_01(3).doc" currently circling the planet.

I'm not 100% sure how to seque this into the topic of why everyone should hire UX / UI people, but you can take it for granted that as soon as I do, I'll be back.

oh, indeed

So, the iPad gets that much use eh? Damn.

Well look what's coming down the pipe

Oh look, it's Lion. Hmm.

Thank the lord, since I left my Powerbook G4 in a Dublin taxi in early Feb, most of the drawbacks don't affect me: I sprung for the first shipment of 8 Core Xeon Mac Pros and it's the best money I ever spent (even if it is stuck in Dublin for now) - meanwhile this new 15" MacBook pro handles an awful lot of work, I must say.

Though as I pointed out recently, the document sizes I'm working with keep shrinking so it's hard to tell what the speedbumps are. In the early 90s I was working up to A2 on machines that simply couldn't handle the work: as soon as machines became more than up to the task (the last machine I bought while still working on print was a G3 aqua - it was the first machine I recall being truly comfortable with print jobs) I was designing websites and interactive screens for an absolute max of 1024x768.

Wow, that was considered high resolution once.

The 8 core was the same with regard to fullscreen video - I recall feeling it was the first machine to be truly at home with HD files in After Effects... at which point I started designing for 320x480.

Buuut anyways - I digress. Paradoxical career paths fighting with moore's law apart, it's interesting to see Java and Appletalk hit the dust. I'm just glad I don't depend on legacy software...

Tragic tales of woe

Oh what a sad tale we tell when we ignore basic UX notions.

Despite my distaste for windows as an OS, this is a sad article to read for any UX designer - but a parable, perhaps, of the fate that awaits a company which thinks a product can sell itself.

Did you read that part about not creating a new OS to run on tablets *despite the power disadvantages*? It's almost funny.

Peoples' attitudes to simple processes which involve imagining you just spent a months wages on a device and need a series of hugs and handshakes to feel better are bizarre. For me, trying to imagine an environment where decsions like "we need this to remain on all day away from mains, but we're not re-engineering the OS cos like, that would be crazy" is difficult enough.

Obviously, not every UX or UI designer (myself included) gets to change the OS. Or gets input into the OEM manufacturer specs. But we have this wierd ability to keep things in mind like "that will be difficult to manage for 12 hours" or "so the user needs a power source?"

That's why companies like apple - which, whatever you feel about them, show healthy profits - listen to UX people, industrial designers and UI people. Hell, the reason that company *exists* is thinking about the user: Steve Jobs (again, however you feel about him) put everything he learned about legibility from a short calligraphy course into his UI, and 30 years later it shows.

Listen to UI/UX people. Hire them. Then listen to them some more. We know how to make money.

L'images Dangereuses

Hey hot dang - so from hence forward (and okay, I'll probably go back and add one for each of the other few posts, too) I'll be adding a random selection of icons from whatever I've been working on this week; who knows, I may occasionally create something - yes that word's coming - 'bespoke'.

But of course - and I did spend all of five minutes on this problem, so my bad - this template clips the images to a preset size and aligns them left, senselessly. Honestly, it's enough to make your balls turn sour.

Onward and upward. PS Blogger - 1996 is calling, they want their image uploader back.

As a lover of systems

I've just been thinking over the process of adjusting to Brooklyn - not in an especially personal way, but at the same time in terms of my deep personal love of infrastructural systems. Obviously there's a prejudice here - I'll prefer an electrical grid or a signalling system or a typeface or an internetwork because of my love of communication.

But next to type and systems, postcolonial architecture and transit systems are what I grew up with in Ireland. And it's incredibly similar to where I am in brooklyn, but through the looking glass of a vast industrialised country, and one of the world's mega cities. New york is - at a nuts and bolts level - an incredible system.

Take the brownstones on my street - end to end, that's about 6 or 7 miles of houses. The frontispiece of each house has three panels of cast iron rail: some long gone, some replaced with ratty railings, most still there. Both sides of the street, times every block from atlantic avenue to marcy avenue - actually quite a small portion of the city.

These rusty pieces of iron - cast in neoclassical shapes abstracted from copies of drawings of studies of 2,000 year old roman ruins - and every wire and bolt and skirting board and chainlink fence that wraps this neighbourhood create a system for storing humans. Laid out in grids which ergonomically improve ease-of-use and furnished with corner buildings which house shops and restaurants. Because of the overlaying of systems in the area, you can make guesses as to how the system improves itself, or whether it's working or not. Generally speaking the best way t0 assess this is to examine the people who are stored there.

Like studying the footfall and user journeys in an interactive application, the urban landscape tells its own story of design mistakes and successes, shows use at key points, bottlenecks and areas of poor attention to detail. But the humans are in very good condition, so I'll take a guess that it's fulfilling its functional specification within a reasonably tolerable degree.

And if you could actually stand listening to this kind of wildly pretentious crap at work - sometimes even at meetings, to prove a point about work, for crying out loud.... well, yes you should hire a UX/UI designer with an entire mobile library of obsessions, most of them infrastructural systems.

...and back to what it says on the tin

So: I've gotten the obligatory introduction out of the way.

And the first thing I want to discuss is about simple attitudes to UX. I want to discuss the actual idea of there being universal wisdoms about User Experience.

What I'm getting at here, is the tendency of people to speak in absolute about trends in new media: "print is dead", "Nobody reads anymore", "People don't want that".

Now, before you slap me for calling it 'new media', it *is* new media. It's not a new paradigm or a new way of communicating, it is a series of new communications media. Tubes. But unfortunately, it has inherited an awful lot of the bad habits of its crazy uncle, Old Media. Namely, the insecurity.

This insecurity leads people to make ridiculous generalisations that we're so used to hearing, we don't see them as useless anymore. Ironically, there is a tendency in people to nod sagely when told that "people don't want that".

I have never set myself to a design brief where the target audience was "people" (presumably age 0-100). I have never sat down to a brief which is aimed at "anybody", nor have I seen a global established paper based publishing trade disappear last week.

And the quick and easy remedy - are we ready for the science? Is to take the trouble to qualify your sentences. User experience design is the opposite of making assumptions and generalisations. It can't work if you try to design an experience for everyone. You can cast a wide net, but... well, it's a wide net, follow the metaphor.

No: you design for an audience. If it's males age 12-22 in north america, there's a chance you may find they read *less* than another demographic. But you can be guaranteed that no age group anywhere in the world have stopped reading. It may sound facetious, but I'm trying to illustrate a point about what happens when people attempt to discuss UX design: smart people become clouded by a need to be the declarative guru of short, sharp knowledge.

I mostly hate it cos it makes me want to giggle or even sneer. I don't like being reminded that I'm petty.

So - with this as a given - is there any universally applicable wisdom for UX? No there is not: there are simply reliable testing apparatuses, decent data sources, and a layer of more conventional wisdom undewriting the process of asking questions.

UX people should not be making declarations of any description outside of the labels of graphs. The information we deal with is transactionally relatively simple - that is to say, it's not rocket science. The decisions we make based on this data should be similarly made within frameworks that accomodate rethought and reapproach.

And naturally, given this approach, you should hire a UX designer with a lot of experience of asking questions. Why, there was one here a minute ago.

I'm aware I'm not fooling anyone, by the way

The entire impetus behind this blog is to provide legible design background for a job search. I should have started it years ago, but you know what? I have issues around blogging.

Blogging and procrastinating.

But I have a lot to say about UI and UX, and this blog has been sitting here for seven years, pretty much unused. I think I deleted 15 posts in all when I restarted the blog. I figure if I write enough in the next couple of weeks (note to people reading this blog in the proper, backwards way: that's the last couple of weeks for you. Man, you come from the future. Did I get a reasonable job?

The postmodernity of hammering on about good UX and UI into an interface like this is kind of awesome. I'm like a rhetorical hipster.






Oh dear: I should maybe shut up now.

Okay so a quick introduction

So, who am I to talk to you about UI and UX design?

My 15 years experience designing user interfaces for web, kiosk, DVD, projection, performance, children's museums, visitors centres, mobile phones, smartphones and desktop applications permits me to speak with reasonable hands-on experience of UI design.

More than that, I built my first computer in 1980 and played coin operated video games and concoles through the 80s and early 90s: I've watched User interfaces develop since programming COBOL on college mainframes and BASIC on home computers. I've been sat in front of a computer for an awful long time.

With UX I'll I'm less academically qualified: I have also worked back line tech in music and venue management, organising events and festivals, promotional campaigns and a huge amount of print and packaging design. In otherwords, I've been working close to consumers and attempting to anticipate their needs for 20 years now. User experience as a subject for me has really come from a process of learning my trade, and how to best make a given form of enterprise effective in a communications medium.

I spend an awful lot of time around user interfaces, and obsess about how to optimise them. Most of what I'm responsible for is the pixels, but I've got a lot to say in the bits that aren't made of pixels.

That should work for now as an explanation. It's a bit sick-in-mouth talking about my career - but from the brief runthrough there you should have an idea that I'm an extremely experienced and competent interactive designer who has worked in a very broad swathe of channels. You should hire me.

Yes, yes, I know

I can download the template, edit it properly, and re-upload it. I'm not stupid, I'm just busy. Fucking columns.

Oh lord, look at the columns

So: Being rushed, I haven't had time to style this template properly, and that makes me feel a bit feeble: I guess it will do for now, there's more important things to do like filling it.

Hopefully in the future this post will make no sense, then: because right now, this blog is published in a single column of text that is 90-110 characters wide at a quick guess. Okay I checked, a random ragged left line is 104 characters.

If you're reading it laid out like this, you're going to get tired of it sooner than if it was properly typeset. No, that's not an opinion. Sit down.

This is one of the basic things that I have to explain to people again and again:

When setting text online, the relationship between x height, line height (let's not call it leading) and physical column width is making your websites unreadable. Monitors were not designed to display reading material originally, but cleverer people than I have based handset display sizes - as they have based reader and tablet screen sizes - around the notion of legibility. The iPhone reader - hell the Nokia N9 reader - understands the legibility of text in columns because one newspaper-ish column of extremely readable text held at arm's length is a comfortable thing to read.

And here I am, complaining about it, in a shitty 105 characters a line HTML blog. Ah, the irony. Hopefully by the time you read this, you'll have no clue what I'm talking about as your eyes glide over my perfectly measured columns of crisp text.

But I'll say it again: to everyone who has made apocalyptic proclamations in development meetings with me about what "people" will and won't read:

Time spent reading text online, or on mobile devices is (sigh) simply a matter of how well you present it and how it's written. I know this is a revolutionary concept, but bear with me for a moment:

It's not that people aren't clever or cool enough to read the information you're publishing: it's that people have five second attention spans on material that only warrants 5 seconds of attention. It's as simple as that. Almost as many people who pronounce that "print is dead" or "nobody reads online", are people who have asked me to make their dull copy and poor photography 'look sexy' .

Dullness is not attractive to anyone. Dullness isn't even attractive to the dull. It does not make your business run and it actively makes you harder to understand and to approach as a business. And it does shine through any number of designer trickery and nice logos - your crashing dullness, the dullness that will disengage your customers and flatline your income.

People don't especially *see* where this dullness is coming from, because it's seeping imperceptably from every piece of your published material. It's in the lack of thought about legibility. The occasional typo. The use of stock images. Make them as pretty as you like, but they are not worth the money if you need to make a connection with your customer.

Text held at arms length - in the style of a newspaper - should be in columns, in certain proportions. This is not difficult, people. This is purely about the shape of peoples' eyes and the way the muscles work that allow you to read: make your text easier to read.

And while you're at it, consult your local UI / UX expert about type. We can make you money and save your customers a headache.

Well this kicks something off, at any rate

It's amazing when you realise how much you've written about best practise in your profession, and consequentially quite depressing when you realise that you've only the vaguest notion of where all of that writing may have gone.

This blog represents one of those "a year from now you'll regret not starting today" efforts to pool my thoughts on UX, UI, layout and interaction design. It also represents the deletion of a cobweb-ridden predescessor, so who knows.

I was born in 1973, was drawing by the age of 4 and built my first computer age 9. I've been lucky enough that these two things - which once seemed the polar opposite of connective, communicative hip social technologies - have basically conspire to gainfully employ me ever since.

I don't think I can complain about that: but I think I can have a tiny whinge about not having written down a lot of the arguments and learnings from any of this huge amount of work I get through every year. I think this blog may be worth the effort.