DesignAday

Cornucopia of Conferences

The folks over at Interaction-Design.org have just released a new resource that will be quite useful for any designer looking for opportunities to share their work or to learn from others that do. Their World Map of Conferences provides a Google map with pins for IxD-related conferences. Interested in visiting Hawaii? There is UMAP 10 next June. On the other extreme, there is NordiCHI 10 next October in Iceland.

They provide a number of other useful views. They provide a calendar that can be viewed online or downloaded as an iCal or .ics file. They have a list of approaching deadlines, a printer version, and an RSS feed.

I must criticize them on coverage, however. They are missing Interaction 10, coming up this February in Savannah, GA, and I don’t see SXSW. With these obvious ones missing, I can’t trust it as a comprehensive, authoritative source.

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.

I’ve got a Hunch

I’ve seen a little bit of buzz about the new “decision-making tool” Hunch, so I took it for a spin last evening. I’m impressed with its robust feature set, but a bit dubious about its utility.

The first thing I did was search for “Where should I eat lunch on Friday?” The closest topic match it presented was “What should I eat for lunch?”, although there were a number of topics like “Where should I eat in Seattle?”. It then asked me seven or so questions about my preferences before giving me its answer: Mexican Food.

Thus far, I was unimpressed. But, I decided to delve in a little deeper. I started with the homepage, which asked me a series of twenty questions and then prompted me to sign up for an account so that it could save my preferences and learn from my answers.

Once my account was set up, I decided to try something a bit more focused. I recently purchased a new lawn mower, so I searched for “electric lawn mower” and found an appropriate topic: “Which type of lawn mower should I buy?” I answered a few questions, and it suggested that I should acquire an electric lawn mower. One of the features on the result page is “Pros & Cons from People like You”. The first entry listed dealing with an electric cord as a con. Well, I got a cordless electric mower, and there really should be a distinction made. So, I figured this was a good opportunity to try out the user contribution portion of the site.

I created “Cordless Electric Lawn Mower” as a new result, selected a picture to illustrate it, marked which of the answers to the existing questions applied to it, created a new question with four answers, and finally marked which of the existing results applied to each of my new answers. To Hunch’s credit, this was a very easy process, and I felt completely comfortable throughout the entire process.

While I think the interaction design of the tool is quite good, and I rather like the concept, it is questionable whether or not it will ever become more than an amusing diversion. So far, the few topics I’ve explored have been superficial at best. The lawn mower question, for example, needs to be fleshed out in much finer detail, asking about swappable batteries, cutting width and height, mulching vs. bagging, self-propelled and motor-assisted propulsion, and so forth, narrowing down not to a broad category (of which one is grazing animals), but to specific models. I could do this, but you would have to pay me to take the time. I only entered the one result I did because I wanted to try it out of professional interest. I have no compulsion to contribute more.

I love the concept, and who knows—maybe it will become as popular and useful as Wikipedia, but I have a hunch it will be a minor player.

Let me know when it’s beta

Wolfram|Alpha has been released to the public, and while I find it a very intriguing concept, I’m not impressed with the current implementation. Some people are mistakenly comparing it to Google as another search engine, but that’s not what it is for. As explained on the site:

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

I was hoping this would be a really good source of information for students taking my visualization class (whenever I teach it again), but I’m disappointed. I picked a couple of past projects and tried to get similar data in Wolfram Alpha. I tried getting crime rates for the state of West Virginia, a comparison of population growth with unemployment, and a comparison of population between WV and the US. I also tried getting album sales for Michael Jackson, which was completely random. What I found is that there don’t appear to be any crime statistics at all. “Crime rate” isn’t recognized, and “crime” gives me dictionary-type information. I was able to get the current population growth rate of WV compared to the number of people unemployed in the US in March of 2009, and a few other combinations like this, but never what I was trying to get. I have not had success getting data for a range of years. Finally, while it recognized the name Michael Jackson and gave me some information about him, it doesn’t appear to have any data on the popularity of his music (or anyone else’s).

So, my take-away is that Wolfram|Alpha is going to be hit-or-miss for awhile—usually miss. I was frustrated by it’s inability to understand my queries. It’s biggest problem may be that it presents itself like Google’s search page. Here’s a field. Type something in it and we’ll give you information. But, it isn’t free-form like Google’s engine. The order of words and the specific words used matter. For example, moving the state name from the beginning of the query to the end will break it. It seems to me that rather than giving us a free-text field, they should impose some structure from the start. This will change the user’s expectations, and help them think about the query in a way that will be more likely to result in an answer.

It needs to change the user’s expectations, because it does not work like Google. If it doesn’t think it can give you the right answer, it doesn’t give you anything. People are going to find that frustrating as well. You can’t enter a “wrong” query in Google. It will give you something regardless of what you put in (Okay, on the rare occasion that I have entered a specific string in quotes, I have once or twice gotten no results.). Receiving no results, I have found, to be very frustrating, and it happens more often than not.

This is just a beginning. It will be loaded up with more data, although I must say the amount of data in it already is impressive. It will become more robust, and hopefully become more capable of understanding free-form queries. But until then, I’m not finding it particularly useable, and if it isn’t useable, it can’t be useful.

World Wide Weber

My Weber grill is several years old, and there are a few parts that need to be replaced: the grates, the burners, etc. I went to Weber’s site expecting to have to dig into my filing cabinet for the manual so that I would know the model number and thus be able to find the right parts. I was very pleasantly surprised.

At the bottom of the homepage for their store, it says, “Replacement Parts - Begin by choosing the type of Weber® grill you own.” Then it has three illustrations labeled Gas Grill, Charcoal Grill, and Portable Grill. Upon selecting “Gas Grill”, the next page asks how many burner control knobs my grill has—one, two, or three—with photos. I selected “2”. The next question asks what material the work table is made of and again presents three options with photos. Selecting “Thermoset”, the final question asks if the thermometer is on the right or in the center of the hood. Mine is centered, and this final selection loads a new page with all of the replacement parts for my grill.

I didn’t have to know any abstracted information, just what my grill looks like. It was quick; it was painless; it delivered exactly what I needed. This was an enjoyable experience that reinforced the positive associations I have with their brand.

Patchwork

Occasionally, I’m reminded how old I’m getting. My students—graduating seniors—were in junior high when I purchased my PT “Loser,” as they call it. But it was so cool back then! Times change.

They are putting the finishing touches on their portfolio websites. I didn’t have my own website when I was their age, of course—my portfolio was submitted to graduate schools as a tray of slides. I was, however, the first student in the program to give my presentation from a computer generated projection, rather than a slide projector. I and one of my classmates were also the first to create interactive pieces for our senior projects. I created the presentation and the project in (then) Macromedia Director (version 2, if you’re wondering). I’ll repeat myself and point out that we didn’t have an internet connection in those days. That means that in learning to use Director, I was truly on my own. I had the manual that shipped in the box and the tutorial files that came on the CD. I had to create everything from scratch. I couldn’t go online to find pre-built slide shows, light boxes, or nifty, 3-D effects. I had to learn Lingo, Director’s scripting language. If I wanted an image to zoom in and let the user pan it around, I had to figure out how to do that. It was painful and time-consuming and frustrating and very rewarding in the end. It was empowering.

I feel somewhat disappointed in some of my students’ websites. How do you grade a student’s work when it involves so much stuff done by other people? Where is the creativity and originality in a project that is cobbled together from free Flash scripts? How can I even tell what parts the student created?

Even worse, what are they learning when they can so quickly and easily (they would laugh at me calling it easy, but little do they know how easy they have it) assemble a site that doesn’t look half bad? Do they understand how their ideas have been hamstrung, enslaved by the variables that they might figure out how to alter? As I provide feedback during the critique, I am all too aware that they don’t understand how the code is doing what it is doing and have no clue how to make it do anything else. I wasn’t prepared for this. What are they prepared for?

It is not enough to assemble. Designers must be makers!

Skip

Any page that has a “skip” link shouldn’t be there!

If the content you are presenting is so unimportant that you expect people to want the ability to skip it, why are you even bothering putting it there? A skip link is shorthand for

“You don’t need to waste your time watching this. I just did it because I thought it would be cool and didn’t have any better ideas for how to get your attention. The content is superfluous and I don’t care whether or not you actually see it. In fact, it will probably annoy you to sit through the whole thing, especially on repeat visits, so you may as well move on to the important stuff.”

Poor Rating

The Time 100 poll for 2009 is up, but I don’t know how much stock I want to put in their rating UI. As you can see here, there is a slider that starts at 50 on a scale of 1 to 100.

It says to use the slider to rank influence, but it doesn’t give any indication as to which side of the scale is good or bad. It is a ranking of the 100 most influential people, so am I supposed to rank Steve at 1 if I think he is the most influential? Or, is a higher number a better rating? Perhaps 100 is 100% influential? How many people are going to misinterpret it and thereby enter a rating exactly opposite of their intention?

It’s such a simple UI, one would think it would be trivial to get right, yet it fails miserably.

By the way, a higher number is, in fact, a better rating.

In Comparison: Music Search Results

There are a number of differences between Amazon’s MP3 store and Apple’s iTunes Store, but the one that makes iTunes far and away the best experience is the way search results are presented.

I was looking for a particular song that has been performed by multiple artists. When I performed the search on Amazon, I was presented with the first 24 results ranked by…well, I’m not sure what they were ranked by. Amazon says they are ranked by relevance, but I don’t know what their criteria are for determining that. So, for all intents and purposes, I received a random assortment of tracks that contained the words i searched for in either the song title, artist name, or album title.

So, I sorted by song title. I was presented with the first 24 results beginning with “Thirteen Better Be Good To Me” and going on to titles beginning with the letter A. The track I was search for starts with “Good”. I scrolled to the bottom and pressed the link that said “See all 1,490 MP3 song results”. Then I was looking at that same 24 plus another 26 that got me into the Ba’s. I was able to skip forward to page 3. That made it to the beginning of the C’s. From that point on, I could only go forward one page at a time, scrolling all the way to the bottom each time to reach the page navigation. I finally found tracks with the title I was looking for on page 9, but they continued across another two pages.

This experience was all kinds of bad.

Put the navigation at the top of the page. Let me jump ahead multiple pages, or better yet, jump to a particular letter of the alphabet. Let me filter the list so that I can get rid of the results that are obviously not what I was looking for.

In iTunes, the search returned all of the results in a single list. There were only 150 results. I was able to sort the list by song title and easily find all of the tracks that were relevant. Boom!

Designer’s Toolbelt: What the Font?!

What the Font?! is a great little web application provided by MyFonts.com. You can upload an image file or point to one on the web by URL, and it will analyze the image looking for glyphs. It then renders multiple copies of the image, each with what it perceives to be a glyph highlighted. Beside each image is a field containing the glyph it recognizes in the image. You can make corrections to the ones it has gotten wrong. Then you tell it to identify the font. The application returns a list of fonts that it believes to be similar, with the most likely match at the top. Links take you to the foundries that sell the fonts.

It isn’t perfect, and you do need a sizable image to get good results, but it is extremely useful. Why, just yesterday I was working on my halloween costume. My wife and I are going to dress up as the Mythbusters, and as part of the costumes, we’ll be holding signs that say “Busted” and “Confirmed”. I wanted to know what font they used to make those signs on the show. What The Font?! flawlessly pointed me to Just van Rossum’s FF Confidential.

Every designer should have MyFonts.com bookmarked.

CONFIRMED