He hates Powerpoint!  (okay, everyone knows this)
Keep an open mind but not an empty head.
Talent imitates genius; genius steals.
Annotate everything!
The two (2) biggest challenges/considerations in presenting data

1. any interesting problem is multivariate
2. information resolution

The three (3) key factors with regard to content

1. quality
2. relevance
3. integrity

The seven (7) fundamental principles of analytical design

1. Show comparisons, contrasts, differences
2. Show causality, mechanism, explanation, systematic structure
3. Show multivariate data
4. Completely integrate words, numbers, images, diagrams
5. Thoroughly describe (document) the evidence
6. Analytical presentations ultimately stand or fall depending on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content
7. (Not in book) – Use adjacency in space – don’t time stack data when you can display it side-by-side

Many, many more pearls of wisdom and insightful information that has had a strong impact on my work.  This is meant to be a teaser to lead you to explore his writing more (if you haven’t already).

Related posts:

1. How much information is too much?
2. Why should designers make more? (a miniseries)

My picks:

1) Low fidelity mockups for idea exploration and communication:  Balsamiq
2) Interactive prototypes to test and communicate interactions: Adobe Flex (Thermo may change my mind)
3) High fidelity drawing tool: Adobe Illustrator or OmniGraffle

Review:

	Balsamiq	Pencil	OmniGraffle Pro	Visio Pro
One liner	Cool!	This can’t really be a Firefox addon!	Amazingly simple and powerful drawing	Practical and business-like
Ramp up time	none	minuscule	small	small
Other expertise required	none	none	none	none
Supports interactivity	nope	nope	nope	nope
Full lifecycle product (rough to spec)	rough only	rough only	yes	somewhat
Fun to use	absolutely!	yes	yes	somewhat
Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation	drag and drop and populate	no tree stencil!	had to download Yahoo stencils	straight-forward
Time to build mockup of tree navigation	15 min	1 hr	1 hr	30 min
Quirky?	nope	somewhat	nope	nope
Cost	$79	free	$199.95	$559.95
	Photoshop CS4	Illustrator CS4	Fireworks CS4	Dreamweaver CS4
One liner	Gold standard for bitmap tools	Gold standard for vector tools	Bitmap + Vector but I still don’t get it…	Yes, there are countless HTML toolkits out there, but I still love it
Ramp up time	very large	very large	medium	large
Other expertise required	knowledge of bitmap tools	knowledge of vector tools	none (for this)	html, javascript, css
Supports interactivity	nope	nope	nope	yes
Full lifecycle product (rough to spec)	professional	professional	yes	yes
Fun to use	somewhat	somewhat	rendering is poor	yes
Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation	from scratch	from scratch	no default tree!	had to find javascript tree control and figure out how to use
Time to build mockup of tree navigation	1 hr	1 hr	gave up	gave up
Quirky?	difference between Illustrator and PS can be confusing	difference between Illustrator and PS can be confusing	average	nope
Cost	$699	$599	$299	$399
	Flash CS4	Flex 3 Pro	Thermo (codename)	Powerpoint 2007
One liner	You can do whatever you want – total interactive flexibility	With some programming experience this rocks!	Not released yet – but from experience on the beta I have high hopes	Great prototyping tool for the earnest product manager
Ramp up time	huge	medium	large	negligible
Other expertise required	programming	programming	none	none
Supports interactivity	oh yes!	oh yes!	yes!	okay… yes
Full lifecycle product (rough to spec)	yes	rough – not really a visual tool	sort of	rough only
Fun to use	yes	subjective, but for me yes	yes!	no
Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation	no built-in tree	easier than flash because of built-in tree, but still not automatic	medium	no tree
Time to build mockup of tree navigation	gave up	1 hr	1 hr	2 hr
Quirky?	not really	nope	nope	nope
Cost	$699	$699	?	$299
	Axure	iRise Pro	Microsoft Expression Blend 2	Microsoft Expression Design 2
One liner	Why?	Think process, large teams, … but why?	Microsoft’s Flash	Microsoft’s Fireworks
Ramp up time	very large	very large	very large	large
Other expertise required	none	none	a little more than Flash	a little more than Fireworks
Supports interactivity	I think	I think	yes	nope
Full lifecycle product (rough to spec)	yes	yes	yes	professional
Fun to use	no	no	no	no
Ease of creating a mockup of tree navigation	didn’t find tree immediately	didn’t find tree immediately	didn’t try – too tired to go on – opened the interface and started clicking around and just closed it	Stopped with Blend 2 – I hope the argument for these tools is not “MS Office integration
Time to build mockup of tree navigation	gave up	gave up	gave up	didn’t try
Quirky?	not really	not really	don’t know	don’t know
Cost	$589	$6,995	$499	$699 (for Studio – couldn’t find individual)

Related posts:

1. An online directory of tools for user interface design
2. Design Tools
3. Rapidrabb – an online prototyping tool

This is not fluff – it’s fact.  In my experience, successful design involves influencing and working with people from customers, to product managers, developers to technical writers, sales, and of course executives.  And designers must be willing to subject their “favorite” design work to critique, wisely defending what is defensible and surrendering what is not to a better solution, despite the strong feeling of attachment to what they themselves created in isolation and just know to be “perfect”.  I have attended several conferences at this point: UPA, IA Summit, IxDA, SXSW, VizThink, DUX, AIGA Gain, and others.  AEA is now at the top of my list and I plan to attend again in 2009!

You can view (and subscribe to) my list of upcoming design conferences and workshops at: upcoming.yahoo.com

Related posts:

1. New word: Criticallous
2. Four questions every software user interface designer and usability professional should be thinking about
3. UX Conference Survey Results

It seems that a part of human nature is to accept things as they are and adapt accordingly. This can be both a strength and a weakness. With regard to tools and products, we use what we have, most often accepting the shortcomings, until someone comes along and invents something better or makes an improvement. And then we examine the new product or improvement in awe, wondering why we didn’t think of it, surprised at how obvious it is in hindsight.

It is not easy to remove oneself from the everyday flow of life, from the behavioral patterns we form and adaptations we make, to acknowledge the problems and ask “how can this be better?” And yet, this is the space where designers should spend a great deal of time.

To that lofty end, I’m going to step down from my dramatic soliloquy and ask “Why in the name of all that is holy does it have to take so long to start Windows?”

I, like many others I’m sure, use my computer for hours and hours every day. And one of my chief frustrations is waiting for my laptop to start up, and for that matter shutdown. Because I use a laptop, I start up and shutdown often. This isn’t as much of a problem for desktop users who leave their computer running, but when the power goes out or you have to install new software, prepare to wait.

And why should this be acceptable? Would it be acceptable if it took a web site 5min to load? Would it be acceptable if it took your camera 5min to start? What about your TV? Your washing machine? Your car? We have adapted and come to accept it as “the way it is”, but I argue that it is the biggest usability bug in Windows! To be fair, this problem isn’t limited to Windows. I don’t use a Mac, so I can’t compare, but I’m sure it doesn’t turn on instantly.

If it were up to me, I would have a team working around the clock on a solution for instant-on/off computers. I’m sure it’s not an easy problem to solve, but a fix for this unacceptable bug would have a tremendous impact on productivity and the entire user experience surrounding computers.

Related posts:

1. Why usability is a path to failure (or “Usability is not design”)

But the new ribbon sucks.

I’ve been using it daily for months (Word, Powerpoint, Excel), and I consistently stumble on the same functions over and over again. I doubt I will ever master it. And I’m an interface designer!

When I want to center text both horizontally and vertically, I can always find the horizontal centering, but have to search for quite some time to find the vertical centering.

I consistently to this day scan all of the available options in the ribbon looking for things.

Just yesterday I couldn’t figure out how to change the paragraph style for some text without looking for 3 to 4 minutes.

When I want to print a page, I have to remind myself that it’s under the big Microsoft circle button. And there are so many more…

Bottom line, for me at least, nothing is automatic. Nothing is natural. Learnability is poor. It’s as if I’m looking at a bag of goodies and my eye has to scan through all of them to find the particular piece of candy I want.

If the problems were all a result of change, that would be one thing. But I’ve been using Office 2007 long enough to exclude change as a problem. If the changes were learnable I would have certainly learned them by now. I believe the problems stem from the following:

1) visual density/complexity

There is just too much to process on the screen. It’s a Swiss Army Knife with every tool exposed (well, not all of them). Not only is it too much, but the density, the proximity and variety, make it difficult to process quickly or to associate a function with a location. For example, it’s impossible to mentally associate upper-middle with paragraph styles because upper-middle is too broad and would include many other functions. My mind must process the ribbon each time rather than jump to a location.

2) anticipated functionality

The designers chose (through testing and usage data I’m sure) what functions to display prominently and where to display them. Whatever criteria they used leaves me with less than half of what I need visible on the screen at any given time to accomplish what I need to do. So I wind up searching for what I need — everytime. In my experience, anytime I’m asked to anticipate what users will want to do, I hesitate. True, very often you have to do it to some degree, but it’s challenging to get right. And the degree to which this was done with the ribbon, in my opinion, made it an impossible goal to achieve.

We (designers) all make mistakes. I recently designed a navigation system that I thought was innovative and efficient. In testing it failed miserably and I had to redesign it. What amazes me given what I know about the Office redesign, and the amount of work that went into it (along with the great minds that contributed), is that they must have gotten good test results and I can’t fathom how. I personally would have failed.

I would love to hear comments from others on their experiences. I haven’t heard many positive remarks personally (except regarding the context-sensitive right-click menus, which I think are excellent).

No related posts.