DesignAday

Disney Movie Snub

I have young children, and some years ago signed up for the Disney Movie Club. I don’t often order DVDs from them, but I haven’t taken the effort to close my account. Once a month I receive notification about the selection of the month and have to go on their website and say I don’t want it.

For months now, their website has been completely borked in Safari.

I had to use LittleSnapper to take the screenshot, as I can’t even see the sign-in fields without scrolling. It displays correctly in Firefox, and I assume it loads perfectly in IE. Now, I consider myself an expert in HTML and CSS. I have to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues every week. The differences between Firefox and Safari are negligible. I use CSSEdit, which previews using Webkit, and 99.999% of the time, if it is displaying correctly there, it is perfect in Firefox. Then I have to figure out the extra styles I need to add to get things to work correctly in IE.

For a commercial website to be broken this badly in a major web browser in this day and age is inexcusable, especially for a company as big and universal as Disney. And it isn’t just the login page—although it is the worst example—it’s the entire site! Background images repeat where they shouldn’t. Content is misaligned. Background colors are interrupted in strange ways.

It is obvious that somebody at the company said, “I don’t care. If they want our website to look nice, they’ll use IE or Firefox.” Well, I certainly care, and I’m going to let them know about it. I’ve been meaning to cancel my account anyway.

Update: I played hide-and-seek with their website, trying to find a way to contact them about canceling my account. I finally ended up having to type “How do I cancel my account?” into a field on their FAQ page (The question wasn’t listed in the FAQ). This took me to a page that answered the question—you have to call them. So, I called the number listed and played hide-and-seek with their phone menu. There was no option for canceling an account, but I was finally able to get the “…or please hold to speak with a customer representative” line. Of course, I was then presented with a message explaining that today is a holiday and to please call back later. They aren’t making me feel any worse about my decision to cancel.

Touch My Shag

If you have been reading this blog regularly, you know that I recently purchased a Nissan Cube. I’ve been enjoying the car quite a bit. I still have yet to see another one on the road, and everyone asks me about it.

One feature of it in particular always seems to pique people’s curiosity. “What is that thing on the dash?”

Nissan calls it a Shag Dash Topper. It sits right in the middle of the dash, in a slight depression, and is colored to match the interior of the vehicle. There is nothing practical about it, as is evidenced by their own marketing:

“Everything’s better with shag. This two-tone dash topper with velcro backing sits in place right up front.”

That doesn’t keep people from theorizing, though. Many have suggested that you could set your phone there and it would keep it from sliding off. I don’t think so. Almost everyone asks if it came with the car or if I put it there, which I find rather amusing. Most people ask what it is for, and some insist that it must be there for a practical purpose. Really? Why? Why can’t it just be there because it is quirky? Isn’t it enough that it attracts attention and starts conversations? Men typically make fun of it, but nearly everyone, especially women, have to feel it.

I initially thought it was rather silly, but I have come to adore it, if for no other reason than the reactions it provokes from other people. One of the primary design goals of the Cube is to be fun, and my impractical shag dash topper is certainly that.

Heavy Duty

I was eating leftover steak for lunch today, and I was having a hard time of it. My company stocks the entire office, including the kitchen, from Staples. I guess that easy button works. In one cabinet above the sink, there is a box full of plastic spoons, another containing forks, and a third offering knives. All of them say “Heavy Duty”. Now, I’d like to know what specifications had to be met to earn that designation. As I tried to cut my steak, the handle of the fork was bending, and the knife wasn’t cutting so much as it was wearing through the meat. This plastic cutlery is the wimpiest of any I can recall using. I’ve had the tines of my fork curl from the heat of my lasagna. The fact is, they labeled them “Heavy Duty” because they will sell more that way. There is no body like the FDA making sure that their cutlery adheres to some standard of rigidity.

Software is very often marketed in exactly the same way. “Easy-to-use” is a marketing catch phrase that typically has no scientific basis. The software is easy to use because they say so. Not only is there no standard metric for measuring ease of use, it is a completely contextual claim. A piece of software may be considered easy to use because it only takes a week of training vs. a month, or because it has a GUI rather than a command line, or because it has half the features of its competitors, or because it uses the same UI conventions as another piece of software the users may already be familiar with. Software may be easy for a specific group of users, while completely obtuse for another.

So the next time you are describing something as being easy to use, remember to ask, “In comparison to what and for whom?” Heavy duty is often a lie, and ease of use is in the eye of the user.

Practical Lessons from Games: Rewards

Whether it is the singular distinction of being “the winner,” access to additional content, or monetary in nature, every game benefits from a reward system. Certainly, games are played because they are enjoyable, but the reward is what makes any task within a game worthy of the time and effort spent. For shorter games, there may only be a single pay-off at the end. More involved games will likely have multiple, relatively small rewards building up to the end game finale. Such rewards are typically in-game, giving you more lives, more power, new abilities, better equipment, or allowing access to other areas of the game.

Then there are games like World of Warcraft (WoW), in which the game never actually ends. Such games must incorporate many different reward systems to keep players engaged. In a relatively recent patch, for instance, WoW added “Achievements” that keep track of all manner of things you can do in the game that aren’t actually necessary to progress. You collect achievements completely for the sake of collecting them—there is no benefit to your character. It is a surprisingly effective mechanic that adds yet one more layer of gameplay onto an already rich environment.

Such reward systems have only rarely been included in business applications. For example, Quicken will congratulate you every time one of your accounts balances. This isn’t particularly compelling, but imagine if it were taken a few steps further. First, pick a behavior that you want to encourage in your product—say, saving money. Set a goal, or allow the user to set one. In the case of saving money, the goal could be a significant purchase, or it could simply be a continuously tracked metric, such as setting aside $100 a month. Now assign a reward. If the goal is a significant purchase, that is the reward. For a continuous goal, there should be various levels at which the user is rewarded, some of them with small rewards and larger rewards at longer intervals. To keep the goal forefront in the user’s mind, visualize their progress.

This approach could be applied to software development, secretarial duties, lab work, education—practically any job that utilizes computer software and has trackable metrics. Sales people are already compensated in rewards-based systems. It doesn’t even have to be that tangible. Hybrid vehicles have incorporated rewards to encourage efficient driving behaviors.

Rewards are powerful motivators that can be used to advantage in software applications. They can encourage good behaviors, and sometimes just make otherwise boring tasks more enjoyable.

In the Details: Brightness

When you turn the headlights on, a car assumes that you are driving at night and dims the dashboard lighting. Of course, you may have turned them on because you are driving through a construction zone, or because it is raining, in which case, the dash doesn’t need to be dimmed, and it becomes hard to see. For these cases, a control is included that allows you to adjust the brightness of the dashboard lighting.

In my PT Cruiser, it was a dial that first returned the dash to daytime brightness, and then turned on the interior lights if you kept turning it. My Cube has a button on the instrument panel right beside the one that cycles through various displays such as gas mileage and the trip meter. I don’t know what the designer of this particular feature was thinking. There must be a dozen brightness levels, and you have to hold down the button for a good ten seconds or so to cycle through them. So, when I turn on my headlights in the daytime, to see my instrument panel, I have to press and hold the button as it gets dimmer and dimmer, finally turning off completely, and then turning on at full brightness.

I can think of no reason that I’ll ever need any of the brightness levels other than full brightness and the single step down that it takes when the headlights come on. I wouldn’t mind all of the levels being there if it were a single, quick action to switch between the two that I will use. Why on earth would you want to turn it off altogether? It seems to have been done simply because it could be done, without any thought given to how it would be used.

The Details Are Not the Details

The details are not the details.
They make the design.
Charles Eames

I was recently asked by a developer that doesn’t know me very well if I thought the little details were all that important. Eames’ quote literally exploded in my head.

The details are the distinguishing factors that make the iPhone something more than the knock-offs. The details are the decision points that lead you to choose an OXO Good Grips potato peeler over that other one. The details lead people to shop at Target rather than Walmart, to eat at Panera instead of Quizno’s, to pick out a pair of Nikes, order from Amazon, and play World of Warcraft.

But the details run deeper than just brand loyalty and rampant consumerism. The details can evoke emotion. They can turn an object into an heirloom, a service into a relationship, or an experience into a lifelong memory. The details are what make Disney World magical. They make a Pixar film ten times better than any other animated feature on the big screen. They make the Harry Potter novels just as riveting to my sixty-year-old mother as they are to a high school kid.

What I’m insinuating, is that the details are the embodiment of quality. The details make something special. If you aren’t thinking about the details, you aren’t designing.

A Cup of Joe

Today is the final day of the IxDA fundraising effort. If you have not already, please make a contribution. The organization will be engaging developers to implement its design for a new platform that will include a more robust forum, sections and tools for local groups, social networking features, a job board, and many other capabilities that the current site can’t support. This organization is growing rapidly, and we need infrastructure in place that will enable us to better serve the design community.

There are a lot of us, which means it doesn’t take much from any one person if we all chip in. If everyone would give a dollar or two, we would surpass our goal. Please consider the value this organization brings to our field. It’s worth a lot more than a cup of joe.

An Appeal to English Teachers

Once upon a time, the only way to imprint type on a page was with a press. This was done by typesetters—expert professionals that understood the rules of typography. Then along came the typewriter. Yes, typewriters were convenient, but due to technical constraints, they could not duplicate the detailed craftsmanship of set type. They employed monospace fonts, in which every letter takes up exactly the same amount of space on the page. The Roman alphabet was not designed to be displayed in such a fashion, and as such, readability suffered. Due to the uniform letter spacing, a single space was not enough to sufficiently separate one sentence from another. For this reason, the practice of double-spacing after a period was introduced. People were taught to type that way. High School students were required to double-space their sentences when they turned in essays. The technique became ingrained in several generations of the populace.

In the mean time, technology advanced. Typewriters have been replaced by computers and high resolution printers. We now have more control over type and the printed page than ever before. In fact, our software now takes care of most of the fine points of typography automatically, from kerning and leading to ligatures and en dashes. What’s that? You don’t know what an en dash is? Don’t worry, Microsoft Word does. We have a large selection of quality typefaces, and monospaced fonts have been relegated to programming code editors.

And yet, everyone still dutifully enters the double-space after every period. They do so because that is the way they were taught. They don’t know that the extra spaces create holes, turning text blocks into swiss cheese. They don’t realize that it hinders readability. The teachers continue teaching the practice because they don’t know any better either. That’s what they were taught too. Graphic Designers are the only ones that are taught about this, and it doesn’t happen until they are in college.

I know this blog is not read by English teachers—I’m preaching to the choir, and likely some other ministers. So you, reader, have a duty. If you know an English teacher, please send this to them, or point them to this passage from The Elements of Typographic Style. It’s high time we all give our thumbs a break and lay off the space bar. If we are going to break this bad habit, it has to start with them.

The Bane of Web Design

Very rarely do I feel the need to rant on DesignAday. I spent hours today trying to solve what should be a very simple layout issue. I have a variable width div that I need to center within the window. I achieved this without a problem in Safari and Firefox. True to form, IE threw a wrench in the works.

In IE, the div is expanding to fill the width of the screen, instead of fitting to the width of its content. I spent hours trying to fix it. I finally figured out that IE doesn’t like the fact that I have some content within the div that I have floated right. I must have tried a dozen different approaches this afternoon to get some semblance of the layout I have designed, but to no avail. By the time I left the office, I had retreated to a fixed width div in which long lines of content will truncate with an ellipsis. However, there is a new layout issue plaguing me that I’m still trying to resolve. At this rate, I’m going to be resorting to using a table.

IE truly is the bane of web development. I would love to see a tally of the man hours spent troubleshooting its incompatibilities with web standards. I fervently wish we could forget about it—stop supporting it—and tell our customers to get a real web browser. But we can’t. IE has a chokehold on the industries in which our products are used. It has only been within the past year that we’ve been able to stop developing for IE 6 (what a nightmare that was)! I know IE 8 is a significant improvement, but I’ll be stuck developing for 7 in the foreseeable future.

Rant over. We’ll now return to our regular programming.

Giving Back

The Interaction Design Association started as an email discussion list back in 2003. I subscribed and made my first post to the list in January 2005. Since that time, I’ve been an active participant. As I am the only Interaction Designer at my company, the list has been an invaluable method of staying connected with others in the industry and keeping up to date with everything from books and conferences to firms and best practices. It has been an outstanding resource, and every post is available and searchable. In 2005, what was the Interaction Design Group (IxDG) incorporated as a not-for-profit organization and became the IxDA. The discussion list moved to the web, and 2008 saw the first conference. In addition to the global organization, IxDA has around 70 local groups around the world.

One of the things that makes the IxDA unique among professional organizations is that there is no cost for membership. All it takes to be a member is to declare that you are one. Hopefully, if you do so, you’ll take it a step further by actively participating through the discussion forum, your local group, the conference, one of the many initiatives, or any combination thereof.

As there are no dues, IxDA relies primarily on the money it makes from the conferences. Currently, however, it is developing a next-generation platform to serve the needs of the community. This effort requires additional funding, and we’re looking for contributions. The goal is to raise $30,000 in the next four days. A drawing will be held each day, giving those who have contributed that day a chance to receive a complimentary registration to next year’s conference, interaction ’10 in Savannah, GA.

Have you benefited from IxDA? Have you had questions answered on the forum? Have you made a contact at a local meet-up? Would you like to give something back to the organization and help it continue to give value to our community? I’ll be supporting it with my donation, and I encourage you to do the same.