Sean Bonner rips into MySpace, calling out its poor usability (far, far too many clicks to do anything). Sean was inspired by Evan Williams’ analysis of how MySpace gets so many page views. Evan was in turn building on Mike Davidson’s analysis. Mike’s characterization of MySpace as an “Unnecessary Click Factory” is spot-on.
Oh, and Mike also shows you how to make a profile that looks anything but shit-ass. Well done!
Sally Carson, a designer I met at SXSW, put together a thoughtful examination of what happens when people are intimidated by technology:
I think that instilling confidence into our audience — whether on the web or on an electronic device — is an important component of good interface design. Something about Phil’s phone intimidates him, and eventhough he is embarrassed when his phone rings so loudly (keep in mind, embarrassment is a strong motivational tool) he doesn’t even attempt to change the settings himself because he is sure he won’t be able to figure it out.
You learn things when you talk to actual users:
Jensen asked his product team for a list of Top 10 features wanted from users. It turned out that 4 of them were already in the product. People couldn’t find functionality: the UI was keeping them from exploring the power of the product.
More smart writing frm 37signals: Jason Fried on why good software is simple software: Less as a competitive advantage and why functional specs aren’t helpful.
At last month’s BayCHI meeting, Alan Cooper of Cooper gave the best talk I’ve seen on software development, Ending the Death March. Unlike the rest of the BayCHI talks, this one wasn’t recorded or podcast. (Aside: please email BayCHI and Alan and ask them to make this available.)
However, Allison at BayCHI did take good notes.
Key point number one: bad software is a business problem, not a technology problem:
Death marches happen, according to Alan Cooper, for three reasons related to managers, who are still (1) using intuition instead of methods to run businesses, (2) letting programmers intimidate them with techno-babble, and (3) assessing the economics according to industrial era logic.
Key point number two: engineering organizations are badly structured:
The Triad of Entirely Separate Roles in Software Construction:
Programmer – Interaction Designer – Design EngineerProgrammer: Construction for shipment
Interaction designer: design for humans
Design engineer: Design for CPUs
Product managers are not Interaction Designers. If they are professional interaction designers, they aren’t doing the work of product managers. Keep those roles clear, Cooper said emphatically.These three software construction roles are separate roles and have separate career paths. Cooper reiterated that the roles are fundamentally different: “You don’t graduate from one to the other, and one is not more advanced than another.”
For the past two years, I’ve been playing hockey at Ice Oasis. It’s a nice enough rink, but their web site is terrible. While they’ve since ditched the neon colours, the schedule page is pretty awful:
My ice oasis schedule fixes all of those problems, and gives you even more. Features include:
The site caches data from their site and converts it, much like Google makes PDFs and Word files available in HTML. It’s pretty gentle, not hitting the real site more than once a day.
From Membranophonist:
Lots of other good stuff there too.
Next, ThinkMac rethinks the spotlight window. Their design is lacking a few things, like an “all” button. I’m not convinced.
In a satire of iTunes 5, VoodooPad is now available in Dalmation and Flower Power window styles.
CreativeBits rethought the Finder, but I don’t get it.
A former Microsoft Internet Explorer (for Windows) designer explains why he switched to Firefox.
Paul Scrivens (rightly) notes that MySpace sucks in terms of design:
It’s also a designer’s and lover of design’s worst nightmare because the UI of the site is atrocious yet it boasts 17 million visitors a month (and rising) and was recently purchased for over $580 million by News Corp.
…
Trying to navigate the MySpace UI is frustrating at best. So why does it work? Besides the community I think it’s the fact that you can customize your pages and if you explore the community you will see some crazy designs going on. 90% of them you can’t even read the content, but people love it.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to offer a solution. Nor, in my opinion is he scathing enough. Memo: neon pink text is always a bad idea.
Brushed Metal: I’m the bad-ass theme. I’m the one who flouts the Human Interface Guidelines.
Mike: This guy trashes the HIG the way Johnny Depp trashes a hotel room. He even sports a custom radius on his window corners. No other window on the system has a shape like this. It’s wild. Just wait until the HIG zealots get a load of this guy.