Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

The deeper I go into user experience design, the more I realize how broad the topic is, and also how difficult it can be to explain to someone for whom the idea or term is new. I appreciate Thomas Gläser‘s Venn diagram of the discipline and how it relates to many other disciplines. On various sites where the diagram has been posted commenters are quick to point out what’s missing, e.g. why doesn’t sound design overlap with interaction design?  But, as Mark Wilson points out on fastcodescign.com,

…to critique a piece like this is to ungratefully overlook its utility: Don’t see this as the only road map for the entire UX design industry, but a postulation as to why it’s so darned complicated to nail good UX. To think anyone could be an expert in each of these circles is sheer absurdity. Scratch that: To think any designer could be an expert in each of these circles is sheer absurdity, but to recognize that every end user is an expert in each of these circles is highly important. As humans and end users, we might not know what makes an experience right, but we certainly know when it’s wrong.

Yup.

The latest Nielsen Alertbox posting inspired me to write. It’s Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility and it makes no bones about the uselessness of what at first glance seems like a good idea. Auto-forwaring carousels have become standard issue on websites where the urge is to “tell our story” but the client has a hard time condensing that story down to a few words. So a carousel is set up where the story is told over several slides, each typically featuring a large photo or graphic with a short paragraph of text. But the fear (on the part of the client and the designer) is that most users will not ever see beyond the first slide in the carousel, so the carousel is programmed to automatically rotate through the slides.

To the client and to the designer, copywriter, programmer, and others who have worked on the site, all seems fine because we’ve been knee-deep in developing the content for months and the carousel slides are familiar to us. But what about the new visitor? I know the frustration of having a carousel slide on a new-to-me site disappear before I’ve finished reading the contents, and the fumbling to find my way back (Where’s the navigation? At the bottom? Top right? Under the text?).

I have designed rotating carousels on many a website, often at the request of clients who have come to expect them. But I wonder if they are a fad that will pass. Maybe by 2014 or 2015 we’ll look back on carousels and wonder why we tried to cram so much into our home pages.

Oh, and I also love Nielsen’s comment about “content-free content”. Of the tagline on the Siemens website, “Rewarding.Life.Style.” he says, “This is content-free content to at least 99% of humans outside Siemens’ marketing department.” So true!

This is one of the reasons I like to perform a focus group on a website after it has been built but before it is launched to the public. Real-world users catch the BS-y things that can easily slip into a website during the design and build, and they’ll call you on it.

As I always say, your website is not for you, it’s for your audiences, and making sure their needs are met is highest priority.

Blue Mouse Monkey’s Julia Stoops and and Shelise Gieseke presented a talk yesterday about User Experience Design called “Website Hotseat: Do you know what your visitors are feeling?” at the WVDO (Willamette Valley Development Officers) annual conference.

After a brief overview of what User Experience Design actually means and why it’s important, Julia critiqued several websites point-by-point on their level of user-friendliess. Which, unfortunately, was generally low.

The presentation seemed to have struck a chord with many attendees and Julia and Shelise received lots of good feedback. Julia’s personal mission is to beautify the Internet one website at a time, and today’s talk was a reminder of how much work there is to be done in that regard.

Blue Mouse Monkey is pleased to announce the launch of  SHnibbins dog snacks — the website and the product itself. We provided full branding and design services to enable SHnibbins to bring their new line of heart-shaped dog snacks to the market. From logo, letterhead and package designs, through to content creation, audio, website and social media, we created a new brand that focuses on the simple joy of doggie love. Get SHnibbified!

You can never go back to the way you were.

Randall Munroe, xkcd.com

I was one of the first visual artists I know to get an art portfolio website. A student at PNCA did it for me as a project back in 1998. And he did a nice job, for what was available in web technologies in 1998. Then I learned how to make websites myself, and took charge of remaking my portfolio site. The second iteration used Frames (!) and what I thought at the time was an innovative horizontal scrolling navigation. Silly me. (This was before jQuery and all that good stuff, of course.) Then I did iteration #3 in Flash. Which was nice for a few years, but I won’t waste space on why Flash is no longer a good choice for making websites. Besides, the background was black (remember when that was sorta cool on a website?) and the images were small (remember when you had to take dialup users into account?). After a while I stopped mentioning my art portfolio site because it was getting a little embarrassing.

But this winter has seen the great makeover, and now I’m proud to announce the launch of iteration #4 of my art portfolio website, built in HTML5, and all clean and nice looking.

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

The Obama presidential campaign is sponsoring “Art Works: A Poster Contest to Support American Jobs.”

A poster contest. Where designers create designs for free (“spec work”) and submit them, hoping theirs will be picked. This from an organization that expects to raise a billion dollars in donations.

This kind of “volunteer your creativity!” attitude towards design undermines the entire design industry and the value of designers’ work. It’s a common attitude, the idea that designers somehow shouldn’t expect to be paid for their skills (unlike, say, plumbers, nurses, landscapers, programmers, urban planners, film makers, or any other skilled profession), and it drives me crazy. The attitude often goes hand in hand with another patronizing attitude, that designers are so desperate for “exposure” that they will give away their expertise in exchange for a mere chance of being noticed.

Can you imagine, say, plumbers being asked to donate their plumbing skills to a new wing of the White House, in exchange for a chance that their plumbing design will be chosen among all the others to transport water to and from that wing? Of course not. A plumber would be chosen via a traditional bid system, and they would be compensated for their work.

AIGA  (American Institute of Graphic Arts) executive director Richard Grefé wrote an excellent letter demanding the Obama campaign cancel the contest and consider other ways to bring the power of design into the reelection campaign. The text of the letter follows. Emphases mine.

October 21, 2011

Jim Messina
Campaign Manager
Obama for America
130 E. Randolph Street
Chicago, IL 60601

Dear Mr. Messina:

AIGA, the most established and largest professional association for communication design in the world, urges the Obama campaign to immediately:

• Cancel the Art Works poster contest that trivializes the value of design by failing to compensate for it and assuming ownership of intellectual property rights, against standard professional principles, and
• Consider the role of design in creating social and economic capital as well as innovation and growth, treating it as an economic driver instead of a creative indulgence, and involve the design community in integrating design into an economic strategy for strengthening U.S. competitiveness.

The recent “Art Works: A Poster Contest to Support American Jobs” demonstrates a lack of respect for the design profession, violates global principles and standards for professional design practice, contradicts the intent of creating jobs for American workers and asks designers to give up intellectual and creative property rights.

As executive director of the oldest and largest professional association for communication designers in the country, I speak on behalf of a profession that is central to innovation and creative value in the U.S. economy. We urge you to cancel the poster contest and consider alternative, appropriate approaches to achieving your need for great design that communicates effectively. No creative community in the world is as talented as American designers and as eager to be engaged on challenging assignments to enhance understanding of complex issues. For instance, over the past decade, AIGA and its members have been active participants in enhancing the citizen experience and clarity in the election process through the Design for Democracy initiative.

The Art Works poster contest asks designers to work speculatively, creating designs without compensation for an activity that has value to a potential client, against established global principles in communication design. We are quite certain that public relations consultants, political consultants, networks, telecommunication providers and advertising media are not asked to donate their services and turn their ideas, research and work over to a campaign that is poised to raise $1 billion without compensation. This demonstrated lack of respect for the value of creative endeavors is exacerbated by the stipulation that ownership of all the creative property submitted, whether or not selected, is transferred to the campaign. And it is particularly contemptuous to ask the creative community to donate their services in support of a jobs program for other American workers.

There are ways in which you can seek proposals from designers that do not violate the integrity of the profession (and the client) and we would be willing to work with you in developing a process to solicit ideas leading to retaining a designer to develop an effective design and program to advocate your messages.

The Obama for America campaign would also be well served to shift to a strategic perspective in involving the design profession by exploring with us the means to develop policy proposals to enhance the support of design as a key driver of innovation and economic growth in the U.S. economy. The government, in aggregate, is undoubtedly the largest single client for design services in the economy. Design provides a highly leveraged, relatively low cost means of enhancing the competitiveness of the nation’s products and services as well as a critical element in enhancing effective and efficient citizen-based government services. Recognizing this would follow the example of countries like Korea, China, Singapore and the UK in advancing productivity relevant to the 21st century.

If you choose to proceed with this contest, we will feel compelled to single it out as a reflection of your lack of respect for designers and your perception that design has little value, even while you are encouraging creating work for other workers and professions. Incidentally, it is also undoubtedly injudicious to seem to politicize the current NEA initiative entitled Art Works that is a well-conceived effort to demonstrate the value of art to communities.

Yours truly,

Richard Grefé
AIGA executive director

cc: David Axelrod

Bravo, Mr. Grefé. Thank your for standing up on behalf of all of us designers. Little do some non-designers realize how ugly and non-functional the world would be without us. Our work is not just decorative afterthoughts. It is essential to high quality communication.

NOTE: Blue Mouse Monkey did not make this website! In case you were wondering, since this is how I format images of our sites when I showcase them on this blog.

It looks like a real online scientific journal, with the bland, conservative layout, the excessive line length, the pre-digital font (probably Didot), and that blue bar down the side! Hilarious! (Both the straight-from-the-tube color and the pathetic attempt at adding a decorative element). Not that I don’t like Didot or pure deep blues, but the combination works uncomfortably well in this parody.

Then there’s the journal’s policy: “The founding principle of the Journal of Universal Rejection (JofUR) is rejection. Universal rejection. That is to say, all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected.” There’s an editorial board of over 20 academics from institutions around the world to do that heavy lifting.

According to the Instructions to Authors, “The JofUR solicits any and all types of manuscript: poetry, prose, visual art, and research articles. You name it, we take it, and reject it. Your manuscript may be formatted however you wish. Frankly, we don’t care.”

You can subscribe to the JofUR for £120 per year. I’m guessing it’s pounds and not dollars because pounds look more exotic and academic and fancy.

The quarterly online archive goes back a couple of years, and each volume is labeled (empty). Except December 2010 (Vol 2, No 4), which is labeled (lost when server crashed – presumed empty).

But really, the best part is the Reprobatia Certa blog. JofUR  likes to share rejection letters. The reasons for rejection are numerous and unpredictable, and often quite funny, especially when the submitter replies:

Editor’s note: We received a submission from Noam Shabtai, The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel.

Dear Noam,

We are rejecting your submission on the following grounds: (A) you are not Noam Chomsky, and (B) you live in Beer Sheva, but did not include any beer in your submission. I hope you can see how thorough and agonizing our decision process was.

Best regards,
Caleb

–
Caleb Emmons, PhD
Editor-in-Chief
Journal of Universal Rejection

Dear Caleb,
I would like to thank you for the thorough review process, and for teaching me how to differ between right and wrong.
After revising the paper, it was submitted and accepted to the journal of universal acception (it is also known as the broadcast news on TV, in case you were wondering).

Best Regards,
Noam.

I think I’ll send them some drawings. They probably don’t get much visual art. It might be refreshing for them to reject it.

Data-visualization virtuosos Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg create a hybrid “artform” (for lack of a more inclusive term) out of data sets. Straddling the realms of science, design, art, and exploration, these graphics reveal interesting patterns in data.

“Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based visualizations–ranging from political art projects to news stories–have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways to create them.

To “democratize” visualization, and experiment with new collaborative techniques, we built Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to spur discussion and collaboration.”

Carbon footprint of a Big Mac, by Tim Fiddaman

Visualizing data that isn’t normally visualized, or is presented in a new way, tells us different stories about the world. From a kid counting all the socks in his household, to trends in editing wikipedia, to a “social network” of the characters in the bible, Many Eyes shows us new patterns that hadn’t been noticed before.

Wattenberg and Viegas now work with Google on a project called the Big Picture Visualization Group in Cambridge, MA, with the goal of making visualizations available to regular  people via Google.