Sometimes design is funny. Or, at the very least, commentary on said design is funny. Check these out, in case you missed them.
NYT on Windows Vista
David Pogue in a YouTube clip explaining (sarcastically, in case you miss it) that Windows Vista is nothing like Mac OS X. Ignore the flurry of useless comments below it and you may have a good laugh.
(NYT is blocking the embed on this one, visit YouTube to watch.)
Wii Safety: The Missing Manual
First, check out this post on the near-comic pages and warnings from the Japanese Wii Safety Manual. That would seem good enough, sporting images like this one:
A Flickr set was started by The Iconfactory with hypothetical images for what was called “The Missing Pages” of the Wii Safety Manual. The first time I saw the group I laughed so hard I cried.
Many of us web designers always see the little details: our little icons, the borders and shadows in our widgets, the typefaces and font–sizing we use in our type. But how often do we really put emphasis on the copy we write, on the words and prose we use?
Being visually–driven is a typical trait of every designer; we web designers may even be a bit more attentive than our print design counterparts since we always have to deal with the ever–changing configuration of the media used to display our work, the browser being the usual and major suspect. At the same time, publishing on the web presents other concerns not always dealt with in print. Yet, the web is more powerful now more than ever. Web pages are always designed to convey information, to send a message that elicits action.
Words that move
Designing for the web calls for graphical acumen, but more importantly requires an understanding of a page or a site’s purpose. It is this purpose that we designers must transmit through our visual design and the copy we produce. Thus, every designer should learn to speak the language of a page, one that is in line with the site author’s goals and the readers’ expectations.
A simple weblog or a complex web application can be made more usable through good copywriting. Interface design should use proper dialogs with the right questions and labels, just as widgets and headings should be named descriptively expecting to be understood as an average user would have it. 37signals’ Defensive Design mantra immediately comes to mind.
Blogs, on the other hand, were by–design meant to be personal and honest, though with the rise of professional blogging has been reduced to lifeless text that bounces around in an echo chamber. Certainly, it can be avoided by reviewing some of our favorite articles on ALA: “Attack of the Zombie Copy” and the ever–popular “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.”
Let the writers write
Who should be writing for you? Who should be designing your interfaces?
If you are publishing your own site, you know your content inside out. It is you who knows how you intend to deliver your information. Building your own web application, you have an idea how a user should interact with your interfaces, ideally. But if you really think hard about it, the user determines how an article or an interface is understood, and should be written.
We sometimes get clients who provide us with content that reek of marketing–speak yet we don’t or are not allowed to make revisions to present it in a format more easily digested by a user. But honestly, there are times when we simply do not notice the content or choose not to. Web designers should learn to be good writers. Good web design does not end with the graphical aspect alone, it involves a process and a mission to get your message across.
Don’t just write
Projects typically allot a good part of the resources to design and programming. Unfortunately, interface and web copy is given little time and money for development. It is often overlooked, assuming that users already know how to use an application, or a reader already understands all the marketing and technical speak thrown around, assuming he actually got to finish reading a given article.
Good copywriting is part of the development process — it is not optional. It is part of good usability and accessibility. Don’t just let programmers or clients insist on what they think is good enough, look at it from a user’s point of view. If needed, let someone else who understands do the writing. Your design and content can only be good enough if it serves its purpose, if your message reaches the intended recipients.
Written by Markku Seguerra. He takes photos and blogs design at rebelpixel.com — sometimes.
They are all the rage right now. Everybody uses them. They are being blogged about every day. Hell, people feature them in their sidebar! I am of course referring to those incomprehensible “update” services. Twitter and Pownce are the major players in this market; the two real powers. One the established giant (if such a thing exists) and the other, the new up and coming underdog (Rocky anyone?). But what are they battling over?… Your thoughts.
The Psychology Behind The Service
What is it about sharing your thoughts that ultimately makes this a viable idea? I mean, honestly, I don’t personally find these things appealing; but I think I can see where some people would. It plays into our inner most desires to be seen and heard. We want to broadcast our thoughts because somehow we think that we are important; that we matter. Whether we do or not is a question for open debate, but with Twitter and Pownce, you can feel as important as you think you are.
Now, I kind of think that these types of services are redundant; I thought that there were already features in other services that filled these needs. Think of MySpace and its headlines or Facebook with its status updates. Doesn’t that cut the mustard? I mean, even though Pownce has more features than just thought sharing, it definitely doesn’t have anything that social networking sites don’t already have… But hey, who am I to question the usefulness of two of the web’s most popular services?…
Are You A Twit?
Let’s take a look at Twitter’s design, shall we? Well, my initial first impression was, “Wow, it looks like some of those Web 2.0 generators threw up in here.” You’ve got your vibrant blues and greens, with a lackluster menu and a bubbly logo. What more do you need, right?
Well, beneath its quintessential web 2.0 exterior beats the heart of a simple, direct, useful service (if, of course, you find the idea behind it useful). It is as if a minimalist and a utilitarian got together and worked on this website. It needs no instructions. Everything is obvious and to the point. It has only the one feature and the design does nothing to get in its way.
Sure, it doesn’t suit my taste, but I cannot fault it for not hiding away features and not complicating its menu. And if anything, the logo was a bit ahead of its time. It nailed the principles behind whatever web 2.0 is; it is looked upon as a standard now, and must be given credit for that.
Do You Prefer To Pownce?
For me, Pownce is a fantastically designed site. One for the CSS galleries of this world. There isn’t much I don’t like about this look; the logo, the color scheme, the layout. It all works in my book. In fact, I would say that the focus of the site is the design; which is quite the problem in and of itself.
You log in and see a welcoming, warm environment. And if it isn’t warm enough for you, Pownce offers 4 different themes for your profile; all of which are well designed. But we should also look past the design. And that is now small task. The basic functionality is easy enough to use though, and while some features are a little bit more cryptic, there is nothing too difficult to find or use.
Speaking of those features, there is a laundry list of them. Pownce does much more than just share your thoughts. You can post images, files, links, build a comprehensive profile, and we haven’t even gotten to the desktop companion yet. But is that too much? Do you really need all of that in this sort of service? I, for one, do not think so.
Who Will Come Out On Top
The idea behind both of these services is very simple; share your thoughts. And Twitter gives you what you need and nothing more. Share your thoughts with your friends and be done with it. On the other hand, Pownce does this and much more. With all of its features, I feel like its reaching too far. Don’t get me wrong; I was pumped to get my beta invite and try out this much hyped service. But in the end, Pownce comes off more like a half assed social networking site than anything else. These services should be competing on the basis of what they are supposed to be; they should not try to mimic what they are not. For now, Twitter is king (Alexa rank of 636) and I see it staying that way. Pownce (Alexa rank of 3780) may seem like a challenger, but the novelty of its myriad of features runs out fairly quickly.
Information/Pornography
The Web 2.0 love-in is already fizzling out. I’m not alone in thinking that we need a new term for what’s happening around us. Om Malik proposes that we just start calling what’s going on “innovation” again, while Steve Rubel coughs up the “Cut and Paste Web“. Very punk rock Steve, but I prefer to think of what’s going on as the pornographization of information design. *Insert your lewd buzzword here*
Military R&D pushes forward the boundaries of domestic technology. What starts off as the latest way to annihilate existence on a massive scale steadily mellows in old age into Stuff To Sell The Plebs. And what military R&D does for domestic appliances, porn does for the web. Long before we had user-generated content, there were readers’ wives. The Long Tail hardly came as a surprise to the purveyors of ultra-niche web smut, who had been nicely profiting from the divide-and-conquer rule long before Chris Anderson turned up on the scene. And Chris Pirillo’s 24-hour bedroom Ustream is little more than a noxious geekette blip in the world of camgirl telesex.
Porn knows how to survive, and evolve. As the Web 2.0 party starts to flag and falter, pornography offers four key lessons in how to weather the storm. They are an emphasis on:
- Presence
- Personalization
- Paucity
- and Promiscuity
Presence
Static content is screwed, and the content that will kick through to the next wave has presence built in. Pornographers know this and have long been using the web to offer premium content that titillates and entertains. The freebies are an incentive, but for presence you have to pay, register as a community member, or otherwise pass into the inner sanctum. The throwaway content is designed to be just interesting enough to lure you into engagement, into action. And presence is the lure.
So now, after a significant lag, we have live streaming video broadcasting for the masses, and in place of cybersex booths, the teenage bedrooms of Stickam users, hat-mounted camera of Justin.TV, and one-to-one call-in action of ubergeek Chris Pirillo.
But presence goes much further, and is only going to evolve from here as a crucial part of web media. Tumblr, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Facebook status-updates are only the tip of the iceberg of the presence economy. Dynamic engagement at every turn is becoming a crucial component of effective information design. Ignore it and be ignored.
Personalization
Girls and guys are waiting to meet you in your area, and porn knows exactly where that is. It even knows which type you’d like to meet, because you’ve already given some helpful hints about your thoughts on the matter through your clickstream. But personalization of web content is quickly moving beyond ISP-tracking and ultra-niche-targeted content.
The semantic web, bastard child of spyware, is slowly coming into being through - among others - microformats, folksonomy, and the evolving APML standard. With Firefox 3.0 set to bring microformats into the limelight, if you haven’t started using them in your content already, now would be a good time to start. The semantic web will be an increasingly niche-focused web, as rich as the gamut of human perversion.
Paucity
Still reading? You are in the minority.
Keeping information as brief as it can be, and preferably just a bit shorter than that is the order of the day. As with porn, you need to focus on delivering bite-sized, perfectly timed chunks of gratification, while still leaving them wanting for more. Overkill isn’t going to win you any friends - that’s why MySpace and Plaxo in their uniquely horrific ways are never going to be Facebook. And why the most popular blog content at this point in time is made up of snappy content-lite, information-rich top-lists.
Piling on surplus features, ostentatious visual flourishes or superfluous information is like making someone sit through the pre-coital storyline of the worst type of porn. Twitter has more users than Pownce for this very reason - it does one thing, well. No plumber, no photocopier that needs mending. Straight down to business.
Promiscuity
The widgetization of the web isn’t going to slow down any time soon. Closed content, content that refuses to be shared, is not going to be seen. By anyone. Like a porn star that won’t put out, taking a walled garden approach to information design is a sure-fire way to put a swift end to your career or business.
Informational promiscuity is thriving in the world of the widget, the Creative Commons license, p2p file-sharing and the host of other technologies that enable the easy copying and sharing of your information. YouTube videos, Netvibes start-up pages, desktop widgets and mashup-ready APIs are fast becoming mainstream. Focusing on portability and working with the promiscuous nature of bits and bytes are going to be even more important information design traits in the next couple of years - as the web moves out of your browser, and makes a lunge for your desktop.
Naked Information
Pornography is laser-targeted by niche, succinct, mono-functional, dedicated to broadcasting presence and very open to the concept of ready sharing. The standout services and content in the web industry today bear an uncanny resemblance, and it seems likely that the next breed in the strain will succeed by being even more so.
Michael Pick doesn’t sleep. When he isn’t forging tremulous connections between web++ and porn, he blogs, makes videos for the web and sometimes gets paid to tell people how to do the same. His far from erotic blog can be found at http//www.Michael-Pick.com.
Those of you who know will cringe at the thought. Those of you who don’t know are (in a sense) lucky to be so naive. I had hoped that the time had passed, the time when we would click open pages only to see:
Under Construction.
Will it ever end?
Alright, enough with the melodrama. Seriously, what used to be an epidemic has been stifled to a case of the common cold, luckily. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth treating.
The Reason for the Madness
I wish it were as simple as finding one reason that this trend has even taken place. But I can think of a couple. The ones that come to mind are:
- The designer wants to create all the pages he will ever want to add, today.
- The designer creates all the pages the client wants before there is content.
Both stem from the same conceptual problem: what you don’t do today will not get done tomorrow. By this I mean that when an Under Construction page is created, it is created because someone doesn’t want to take the time to build the page that needs to be built. In #1 above that’s the designer’s fault, in #2 it’s the client’s fault (but still technically the designer’s fault).
How to Fix the Problem
When clients want a bunch of pages, but haven’t taken the time to fill those pages with quality content ahead of time (or pay you to do it) then don’t create the page. Stand up for a quality internet by explaining to them the potential harm an empty page could do for them.
This goes the same for those webmasters who want to add pages that don’t yet have a purpose. It’s worse to add an empty page today than it is to wait a week or two and add a page that contributes. Just bite down on that self control for all its worth. Your users will thank you for it.
The rise of various content management systems has allowed almost everyone to publish multi–page websites discussing everything, from the popular to the mundane. These days, you don’t even need your own webhosting account to launch your own site. Popular blog publishing solutions like Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad can be used to house every aspiring publisher’s bright ideas. Just the same, with the abundance of free themes and designs, new sites can look reasonably acceptable visually.
But with a decent design, engaging writing, and valuable content, what would fuse them all into one solid product? Sound site navigation.
Navigation types
The three elements mentioned above can build a good webpage, but only with good site navigation and information organization will it result in a good site. Typically, navigational links can be categorized into three types:
- Global — Used to give access to a site’s main sections or divisions.
- Hierarchical — Denotes hierarchy or layers of sections and pages, allowing readers to go deeper or higher in a site’s information structure.
- Local — Often used to navigate within a page, or towards other similar pages of the same level within the hierarchy of content.
Expectedly, global navigation is present throughout all pages, though hierarchical and local elements are shown as needed. Unfortunately, it is the dynamic nature of the latter two that makes them hard to implement in a straightforward manner, thus resulting in pages with no clear navigational paths.
The past, the present, and the future
Ideally, every webpage serves a purpose; to sell a product, to provide information, or basically to provoke an action. A site visitor may chance upon a page through several means: from search engines, from another site, or from a page within the same site.
If the visitor gets the exact information from your page, then its mission is accomplished. But what’s next? And what if the content isn’t exactly what they’re looking for?
This is where your information structure matters. You want your readers to get exactly the content they’re after, and keep them reading for more, if needed. Because of this, readers must know where they currently are in relation to other pages and sections (present), where they can go next (future), and if applicable, where they were just before they page they’re on (past). The “Where Am I?” question is a good metric for evaluating a site’s navigational soundness.
If a page provides no insight regarding the options a reader may have, they leave and go somewhere else.
Applying what we know
Informing a reader’s present location within a site can be done in many ways. At its simplest form, it can be the title of the page itself, presented in relation to other navigational links. This can be easily implemented using visual cues, through CSS, markup manipulation, or graphical effects, or a combination of all these.
The “Past, Present, Future” way of denoting state and location is usually done with “< Previous Article | Current Article | Next Article >” links. In a hierarchical context, breadcrumb navigation is a common solution, and it works. “Home > Archives > My Article” is effective because even casual web users understand it, as they have seen it from other sites. Of course we know that when it comes to interface behavior, what works is what the users expect. And what users expect is based on what they typically encounter. If it takes them several seconds to figure out your navigation, chances are they will leave and search for something else.
From a local point of view, the “My Article | My Other Article | Another Article” approach is helpful in pushing relevant content to a reader. Like in a weblog, it is of value to your reader that a list of links to related entries are provided right after your post.
A point of contention among some web designers asks if a page should link to itself in navigational elements. It can be confusing for a casual reader since it takes them back to the same page. I personally think it is unnecessary, except for links labeled as “Home” that takes a reader to a site’s index page, or a page’s header which by convention (and users’ expectations) behaves the same way.
But what about Search?
In today’s search–driven web, sound site navigation and structure is even more important since it pushes the rest of your site with just one good position in the SERPs. Assuming a blog talks about oranges and a specific entry ranks well, visitors to that page will be presented a wealth of related information discussing oranges, assuming they can get to other relevant pages on your sites. And then your readers will be very happy reading about oranges.
Site-wide search works the same way. As they find their way to specific pages they’ve searched for using your own search functionality, you get them what they want, and then some.
Good navigation is the glue of all your content, it connects information into one vital structural unit and helps you serve your users and readers better.
Written by Markku Seguerra. He takes photos and blogs design at rebelpixel.com — sometimes.
