5 posts tagged “design”
Sorry I haven't written in a while. I'll talk more about that in a future post.
Ask.com has come out with a new "experimental UI" called Ask X. While I appreciate the effort to differentiate from first-tier players, the focus on whiz-bang UI flies in the face of good user experience. Search engines should focus on relevance more than window dressing. But, if you're going to focus solely on the window dressing, have the common decency to put up some nice curtains, for crying out loud.
I seriously thought this was fake when it was sent to me.
Ask.com designers really need to understand the web landscape. I wonder how many of them use digg.com? What about 37signals software? I'm guessing few if any. Red to blue gradient? Bevel and embossing? It's gross and cheap looking. It feels more 1997 than 2007.
Ask.com executives: make some budget to allow designers to attend a UX conference. Or make your designers use brilliant leading edge websites like Vox, Threadless, Amazon's new gold box ...
Violating the Google Principle.
Regardless of the window dressing, search results brought back still aren't relevant. Instead of doing test searches I never do in real life (like "Seattle" or "wedding") I did some real searches (like "online mba" and "nicole richie dui".) Although the narrow and expand results are novel, I never find it vectoring me to more relevant results. I usually see the same links when I "narrow my search" or find a bunch of irrelevant cruft in "expand my results"
So, regardless of the window dressing, Ask.com hasn't won my heart or mind by achieving their core objective: helping me find what I need quickly. That's the search engine secret sauce, not some attempt at slick UI. Haven't we learned anything from Google, people?
I just read a fantastic article on boston.com about the design and branding for The Evening News with Katie Couric. Lots of insight into the process of marketing and brand for something as conventional as the national evening news. It's also a good way for people outside of the industry to understand how much thought goes into every design decision for a tightly-controlled brand like Katie Couric.
I heard Barbara Brennan speak about being an exhibit designer with The National Air & Space Museum. She reinforced the same concepts that we use in software design as they apply to museum design:
- Know your audience. For her museum, the audience is huge: infants to elderly. She has the unique challenge of making an engaging user experience for foreigners who don't have a command of English. It makes up 40% of her audience.
- Know your best assets. They have planes, we have talent, design, and content.
- Focus on the user experience and the brand will take care of itself. Direct quote from Michael Bierut. Being part of the Smithsonian, they have a strong brand, but have never really leveraged it. They are only beginning to have these discussions.
More great stuff from Barbara. Will post later.
User experience is providing structure. What we do defines and helps people understand their daily lives. It is an ancient art and one vitally important to human existence.
I paraphrase a bit, but that opening statement is how this year's UX Week 2006, hosted by Adaptive Path, kicked off here in Washington D.C. I'm here for four days, basking in the glow of all things user experience: design, interaction flow, information architecture, usability, accessibility, color, brand ... the list goes on.
After each day, I promise a series of posts about user experience and the takeaways. This isn't as much for you as it is for me; I learn best from writing and re-writing key points.
If I had to make a checklist of things co-workers should never give me, because they drive me batty, Search Engine Optimization checklists would rank high.
Unfortunately, I never gave my co-workers such a list. So, when I walked into the office this morning, I had two sample Search Engine Optimization checklists sitting neatly on my keyboard. These lists are from some piece of internet dreck called Deliver First-Class Web Sites: 101 Essential Checklists by Shirley Kaiser.
Shirley, being a true expert in the web, realized no one in the technology industry has the attention span to read a book that isn't in list format and that she doesn't have the content to write more than a few hundred pithy statements about what makes a web site first class.
I have no problems with SEO and really no problems with checklists. Best practices have their place and a list reminding you what those best practices are is helpful. My problem is when best practices are elevated to essential checklists for first-class websites. I know plenty of folks that will shake their head at a feature implementation because it violated one of these sacred checklists. "You've violated rule #14 on good web design," the SEO checklist holder says. To which I reply, we are building a great user experience. I don't care if we violate rule #14 or any other rule for that matter, because building a great user experience trumps any rule.
Let me repeat that: building a great user experience trumps any rule. It's the one rule that puts a site like craigslist over SEO optimized classified ads. It's the rule that puts EBay way above any other auction site, even with their dynamic variable loaded URLs (Rule #22). They built brand. They built a cult. And there's no list that will beat brand and cult.
In typical, passive-agressive Seattle fashion, I made my own SEO checklist and wrote it on the company's whiteboard, so everyone who passes by the windowed conference room can see it. It reads:
Build great sites that people love.
And that's it.
