Vertical = Print, Horizontal = Screen

(It’s been a long time, blah blah blah.)

If you are a designer of paper or screens, here is an easy UX issue: vertical pages suggest (or encourage) printing while horizontal pages suggest on-screen reading. (This is a generality, not an absolute truth.) Early in the process, ask the question “what would we like our audience to do?” (You might also ask “what can we realistically expect our audience to do?”)

People still print things. So if you are designing a piece that you really don’t want people to print, try starting with a page size that better fits the screens they are likely to see it on.

Clever computer trickery, such as online “flip books” (those clever things that look like books and even make noise when you “turn” the page) may be sexy, but they get in the way of ordinary people trying to get to real information. The same is true of PDF files that use security features to prohibit people from doing almost anything but reading the file online. By taking control away from the audience, you are effectively saying “I don’t trust you.”

And speaking of PDF fails, PDFs with “reader spread” pages are also part of the “I don’t trust my audience” family (or worse, “I don’t really understand how this will be viewed”). If you are designing a booklet that benefits from people seeing facing pages, use the Acrobat Initial View feature to set the file so that page layout and magnification display what you want. That way, if (or when) your audience goes to print your booklet, they won’t be printing 11x17 (or A3) pages reduced to letter size, then struggling to ready the tiny type. Alternatively, if you think most readers will be viewing your publication on a screen, design for that, not print.

Compared to the structured content and flexible layout required for e-books and responsive design, choosing the right page shape is pretty simple, but it reflects the same user-focused perspective that designers are well-suited to help clients think through. Separating content from form while maintaining some control and influence over the style and presentation of information is a change that many designers and clients are struggling with. Starting with the right page shape is a place to start.

Corporate Templates Still Don’t Work

Since my original post, I’ve received good feedback on this (thanks) and had 22 months of additional insights and frustrations. I am changing some of my original recommendations, but in general most corporate Powerpoint templates still have a long way to go to become useful and usable tools for their intended users. (I’ll consider corporate Word templates in another post.)

Why? There are many reasons, but I think they all have a common root cause: developers (those who make the templates) do not fully understand or appreciate their customers’ world (customers = users: people who use the templates). Some broad issues to consider:

• Too many cooks. Between Corporate Communications, marketing, IT, operations, HR/ training, and senior management, many enterprise-level template initiatives have way too many well-meaning but unnecessary people involved. It’s understandable, particularly in large organizations, but it has two unhelpful consequences: 1) templates designed by committee (see camel) where, 2) the committee is usually made up of staff people with little or no experience in the organization’s real product development, sales, or service delivery – that is, they don’t do what the company does.

• One size does not fit all. In many organizations, Powerpoint is used to produce lots of different types of outputs. At the least, most organizations would benefit by having one version for ballroom-style presentations and another for boardroom-style documents. When you also consider people’s individual skill level (e.g., ordinary vs expert), you could easily imagine a simple 2x2 (below). This suggests at least 4 different “base” templates.

	Ballroom	Boardroom
Expert user
Ordinary user

• Built as a tool, not as a system. To be effective, good template files need to be part of a larger system that supports your organizations’ visual identity and brand. Depending on the size and culture of your organization, this might include: training and support materials (e.g., video how-to’s, reference documents, central repository/ website, etc.), a network of trusted internal advisers/ experts, and a change management plan (i.e., keeping up with customer and technology changes).

• Application development, not design. Today, templates are as much dynamic software as a branding tool, yet few marketing, communications, or even IT groups are comfortable with the rapid and continued iteration necessary to develop and maintain useful apps. A useful enterprise template cannot be a static file (or group of files) that doesn’t evolve or continue to change based on feedback from its user community and their needs, including those who represent the organization and its evolving needs.

• Not meeting people where they are. Many corporate templates that I come across are either too complicated or too simple for their audience. Too complicated: people ignore all the embedded wisdom or maybe avoid using the template altogether. Too simple: people make up their own rules about what to do under every circumstance, undermining one of the reasons for having a template. This is the audience/ user side of “one size does not fit all” – developers of effective templates really need to understand their audience (i.e., “customers”) and the everyday worlds they live in. Even in small organizations it’s worthwhile to map the various users and uses.

Designing for the organization or enterprise is a complex and artful process, no wonder we see so few successes.

Design Victory: Type for Dyslectics

Great short article on Fast Company’s Co.Design about a typeface designed for people with dyslexia designed by someone with dyslexia. Talk about user-centered design.

The face is awkward-looking by traditional visual typographic criteria, but using Louis Sullivan’s Form Follows Function criteria, it seems like a masterpiece. The article said it best:

If it works, it works. And according to an independent study by the University of Twente in Boer’s native Netherlands, it does work.

Amen.

For your next presentation: if, for any given population, approximately 5–10% have some sort of dyslexia and another 7–10% have some sort of color deficiency; that’s potentially 20% of your audience that doesn’t see things the way you do, literally. I’m exaggerating a bit, but try to consider all the ways your audience is different from you and your worldview.

The Microsoft Ribbon, what’s up with that?

Microsoft has created some great tools over the years, but the ribbon isn’t one of them.

Two trends make me wonder if the good people at Microsoft have been paying much attention when it comes to user interface:

• Over the last ten years, the proliferation of LCD screens that are generally wider than they used to be.
• HD TV has made the 9:16 aspect ratio much more common for lots of people.

Enter the ribbon. Putting aside the task-centric structure for a moment, the ribbon takes up valuable screen real estate and cannot be moved. On a laptop, the result is a smaller effective work area that is cluttered, visually noisy, very short and very wide. This is not useful for most work.

Other companies, like Adobe, have figured this out. These companies seem to realize that people have work to do, and that those people may want to customize the software interface to more effectively do their work. For these crazy need-to-get-work-done people (aka “users” or “customers”), these companies have built “palettes” into their software, allowing people to move and resize those palettes in a way that makes sense based on their needs.

Heck, Microsoft has done this before. Office Mac 2008 had (wait for it) a “Format Palatte.” It wasn’t perfect, but it was on the side, and you could move it. I guess that camp lost the UI Battle of Redmond. Pity.

The ribbon does reveal additional functions, as it was designed. But it does an equally good job of hiding existing functions from people that regularly use them. I’d argue the net effect is neutral at best (gain some things, loose others).

So now the ribbon infects everything and appears to be here to stay. I wonder how much productivity in business has been and continues to be lost because of the ribbon?

Social media responsibility

Just got about 30 RTs on my Facebook page from a business I like. Well, I did like them until they discovered they can automatically cross-post everything from Twitter to FB. We'll see if they figure out that just because you can do something doesn't always mean you should (the people who have posted variations of "please stop" on the business's wall might be an indication).

Of Mice and Hotels

My wife was online the other night and started laughing uncontrollably. I asked what was so funny, and she brought her laptop over and pointed me to a hotel’s homepage, asking if I noticed anything unusual. I looked, and I really couldn’t find anything unusual until she pointed to the dropdown menu list:



Mice?

It turns out that mice is an acronym (Meetings, Incentives, Conferencing, Exhibitions). Who knew? Still, with bedbugs in the news, I wouldn’t expect to see mice on the homepage of a hotel.

I guess for people who know what mice means, this is fine. But I wonder how many people who visit this site are not mice-aware? And then there are OCD visitors like me that start investigating the mice section and forget about the rest of the site.

Just an amusing manifestation of the curse of knowledge.

Most US students think Beethoven is a dog

This year’s Mindset list is out:

http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php

In addition to being humorous and potentially depressing, it’s also a great list for presenters (or any author, really), reminding us about the continually changing nature of audiences and the assumptions one makes. Of course, this was the point of the original list. And though it was originally developed by professors for professors, it’s a useful touchpoint for anyone who is trying to communicate with people who are not you (see implicit assumptions).

It also helps demonstrate the fine art of headline writing. This blog post’s title is from rawstory (who may have lifted it from somewhere else). Others:

• Class of 2014 Can’t Write in Cursive, Considers Nirvana ‘Classic Rock’ (Wall Street Journal blog)
• Email is too slow and wristwatches are pointless for college freshmen (CNN)
• The College Mindset List: No Cursive Skills or Cold War Fears (PBS Newshour)

Imagine having a similar headline in big type to open your next presentation.

(Interestingly, as I look through other headlines from Google News, there are lots of less-than-compelling headlines about the list – what a great opportunity for you to perfect your headline-writing skills, your great opening.)

Thinking like a customer

A request. If you are a business owner and you own a website, and you sell products or services directly to consumers through a physical place (a store, a garage, a car wash, etc.):

Please post your hours of operation.

I am your customer. I like your service. In fact, I like it so much I will travel out of my way to patronize you (maybe a long way out of my way). You have done all the right things: you have enthusiastic employees, you fulfill you brand promise every time I interact with you, your service is outstanding, you have earned my trust and I am an advocate for your business among my friends and social network.

But here’s the thing, your website doesn’t tell me when you’re open. I will drive 20 minutes out of my way to take advantage of your service, but I need to know if you close at 5 or 6 or 6:30 – it makes a difference.

Challenging one’s assumptions is hard. The more you “know” something, the harder it is to imagine that other people (like your customers) don’t. But it’s important, because even the best businesses (like a great car wash I go that’s 20 minutes away) need to continually look at themselves through their customers’ eyes.

Google News: design for democracy

Bruce Tognazzini has a great post on the bad redesign of Google News. He raises lots of good points on both the interface (which has gone very much backward) and the process (which seems to have ignored all sorts of user feedback and UI design theory), but his number one reason that the new Google News sucks is the one I find most interesting: political drift introduced.

He suggests that Google News has (prior to the redesign) helped Americans find the political center of any story because it has presented so many different sources in a reasonably un-biased way. He also points out something I have long believed: that while customizing news is seductive, it ultimately hurts one’s perspective by presenting narrower and narrower viewpoints.

It is disappointing that a company that has gotten so many design things right over the years got this one so, so wrong.

New media, newer media

Interesting post by Seth a few days ago, his last line stuck out:

I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys.

Whatever business you’re in, this applies to you. There may even be an inverse relationship between the strength of your disbelief or denial and the relevance to your job, business, industry.

We have met the enemy, and it is first-draft design

Excellent commentary by Nancy Duarte on the recent NYT article. (A more readable version of the original alarming graphic is also available.)

A few things about the graphic:

1) This is an example of a diagram that was probably developed by analysts to help them understand something. Think brainstorming. The presentation mistake here (aside from the general bullet bullet bullet approach) was trying to use the same diagram to explain things to people who were most likely not part of the original discussion. Of course it stinks for that purpose. To build on Nancy’s commentary on our first-draft culture, it’s easy to imagine the excited consultants transposing this diagram from a whiteboard into PP, then – confusing the effort that went into drawing it with its value – it subsequently showing up in every PP deck that discussed the topic for the next year. What appears to be missing was the second (or third) iteration: translating the understanding into a diagram that explains the important points.

2) As a consultant, and not knowing the full story, I am disappointed and embarrassed that this diagram ever made it out of the working group and onto the screen of a client. On the surface this seems like a pretty serious delivery failure. In my own experience I have often seen (and created) some pretty confusing diagrams and models in the course of trying to understand a complex problem or system. But those things usually end their life on a white board or as a scan, they rarely survive in their original form as a deliverable because they were never intended to be such. The final deliverable often bears no resemblance to the original because after we think we understand an issue, the focus changes to explaining it. And those questions are different (see Dan Roam), so the results are usually different. I have referred to this as iterative design but for it to work, you have to actually do the next iteration.

So the moral of the story is: do the second iteration, your audience will thank you.

The Kalashnikov as good design (and good story-telling)

A great post by Dave Gray, not only making the case for the AK-47 as a great example of good design (designed for the real world), but also explaining how talking about an assault rifle probably makes for a better presentation than some less-dramatic example.

One Little Thing

A little story about how one little thing makes a difference.

I am not a big TV tech guy. We watch TV, but are hopelessly non-digital, non-HD, non-Blu-Ray, etc. A month or two ago, our cable provider (a very large profitable company based nearby) sent us a nice note that said “if you’d like to keep watching your extended cable channels, you’ll need to get these little digital converter boxes for free, you luddites.” (Ok, they didn’t call us luddites.)

So I go online and get the boxes sent to us for self-installation. I’m fairly tech-savvy and figure that this will be pretty simple. The boxes came with good, clear instructions and setting them up was fairly straight-forward. So far so good.

I go online to activate the devices, and one out of three get turned on immediately. Still, no big deal, so I call the activation number and wait on hold for about 15 minutes. I’m ok with this – they let me know that their call volume is high, give me other options, so I’m patient and I wait. While I wait I look through their online FAQs and troubleshooting guide, but nothing about the situation at hand. I speak to a very friendly and helpful person who, after the requisite “is it turned on?” questions, activates both other boxes.

I think.

One of these boxes is larger and all the instructions clearly say “set your TV to channel 3” and “leave it be for 45 minutes while it loads your channels” and “it will turn itself off when it’s done.” So I eat, do some chores, come back. The box is still on, the TV is still nothing but static. I go online to see if this is normal. Back through the all FAQs etc., and find one that says: “if nothing happens after 45 minutes, try again.” So I do. And wait another hour. Still nothing but static. I call the support number again. This time I’m on hold for 30 minutes, maybe longer. When I finally get to a human being (also very nice), after I explain the situation (reset it 2 or 3 times, still no picture), the first thing she asks me is “is your TV on channel 3 or 4?” I switch to channel 4 and – wait for it – everything is working just fine. For all I know it was working just fine the first time, but in all my hunting I hadn’t seen one FAQ, instruction, troubleshooting answer, knowledgebase entry, or the like that said “try channel 4.”

I wondered if there had been something and I just overlooked it, so I went back to the site and hunted. Nope. I wondered if there was a hardware switch that I had overlooked. Nope. I looked back through all the simple instructions. Nothing there either.

This was not a huge big deal, just a minor annoyance. But my otherwise good experience (from getting the notice to ordering to setting up the hardware) was dramatically affected by one little thing (try channel 4). All the stuff I encountered was very helpful and explained very clearly what should happen and how do deal with certain known issues, but trying channel 4 wasn’t one of them.

If the company had included some additional tips online (the sort of thing I imagine is available to their call center staff), I could have been trying that at noon instead of 4:30, and my total experience would have been different.

One little thing.

Truth in labeling

I can’t remember where, but I once heard someone say that there were only two professions that called their customers “users.” It was not a compliment.

I am always sensitive about describing users in the abstract, as if they were one big class. Your website has visitors, some of them may be customers or clients, some may even be friends. Your application or tool is used (hopefully) by managers, or accounts, or marketers. A form or survey is filled in by your guests or employees. You get the idea.

For almost any given tool, process, communication, etc., the mass of different users have different experiences and expectations, so why lump them together using one ill-fitting term?

Having been on the application-design side, I know it’s tempting to describe people by the role they play in a flow chart or white board (the user does X, then Y happens) – I’ve done it myself – but that doesn’t mean it’s a good practice. The more abstract those people (users) become to the people designing tools (designers), the less likely it is that those tools will meet the expectations or needs of the intended audience.

I know, it’s only a word. But like so many words, the language we choose can:

• help clarify our thinking and help us make better decisions; or
• get in the way of exchanging ideas and confuse our decision-making.
  

And today, a lot more people design tools. If you’ve made a Powerpoint file that someone else is supposed to use, you’re a developer.

Not getting the whole “user in control” thing

I just had an interesting loop experience on a popular site.

1. The banner ad automatically popped up covering some of the content. Ok, this is annoying and obviously not respecting the site visitor, but it happens and I expect it will either a) close itself in a few seconds, or b) close when I find and click the Close link.
2. I find the Close link and click it.
3. The ad closes. But wait – it pops up again. What?
4. So I repeat step 2. And it happens again: it seems to close and then open right back. What is going on?

As it turns out, a clever combination of marketers and programmers have put a rollover action in the same spot as the Close link, so unless I move the mouse really quickly, the rollover action triggers the pop-up again. Clever eh?

But what is the real effect? I spent 10 seconds interacting with a company I didn’t want to pay attention to in the first place. Do you suppose I’m inclined to think better of them now that I have had to defeat their ad in order to read what I originally wanted?

Me either.

To be fair, maybe this was unintentional. Maybe this little endless loop was an accident. But wouldn’t that be even worse? That would imply the advertiser didn’t test their banner ad. Hmm, old advertising habits die hard. Good design puts users in control.

Weird Design: Hotels on Weather Sites

I like Weather.com. It always loads quickly, and I like that with two clicks I can get to a radar map of my area. This can be really useful information for planning things like: should I leave now or wait until a really bad storm passes? Should I mow the lawn or can I wait until later? Etc.

But I cannot figure out why, on Weather.com’s interactive radar map, Hampton Inn sponsors a little location finder (a little button you can click to show where the Hampton Inns are in the area). Think about it: why would someone come to this place on Weather.com? If I’m looking for local radar weather, on the web, what possible reason would I have for knowing where there are Hampton Inns? To get out of the rain? To seek shelter from a tornado? What? I just don’t get it.

Now, I’m all for advertising and sponsorship – it’s why Weather.com can provide cool tools like this – I just can’t figure out why someone at Hampton Inn thought “now this would be a good placement opportunity.” It just strikes me as weird, by which I mean: not necessarily well-designed.

(Of course, it did get me talking about Hampton Inn, didn’t it? Maybe not so weird. Nah, still weird.)