Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Carlos Abler

Carlos Abler — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:50:21 GMT

the only issue I have with “de-mythifying” the scroll pronouncements, is not stating when it does matter. What will happen is that deigners that suck at optimizing layout will point to your article as proof that it just never matters.

If I own a business and I have primary call to action driving my profits and it is buried below the fold because some designer put a billboard sized photo in the header, I don’t care that 76% of people in some study happened to scroll. I care that a 100% of my site visitors see the call to action. That other 24% means I lost a lot of leads.

And that 76% does not account for the bounce rate people who did not see the call to action.

Or if an action in one part of the interface changes the state in another but I don’t see it, that is also a problem.

Whenever I see people bust fold myths, they tend to point to content pages. Not landing or home pages. And I have never seen anyone point to a study indicating a benefit to a metrics goal benefitting by being below the fold. Metrics are improved by improved clarity and visibility for obvious reasons.

Unfortunately these reasons are not so obvious to many designers who are frustrated by fold and other optimization issues and point to articles like this as coclusive proof that the fold does not matter anymore.

It is true that there are cases where fold hysteria is overblown and I think that is the general point of the article. But I do wish these articles would reiterate scenarios where the fold does matter. It would help in dealing with lazy designers.

Carlos Abler — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:46:27 GMT

Awesome stuff.

I think organizations that try to make these things proprietary is a waste of time. Extending what was said in the interview, this is definitely one genre of knowledge that will become highly refined in the discourse field of general practice.

What organizations should be focused on is not reinventing the wheel or trying to create a walled garden in a jungle, (I love mixing metaphors), but they should be focused on how to educate their staff about them. They should create/aggregate handy reference tools and provide training so that staff knows where to look and when.

The competitive problem—for those who care to be competitive—is not who has the best interaction design pattern library, it is which organization is the best at implementing the right patterns for the right solutions.

Carlos

Carlos Abler — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:19:10 GMT

Random musings.

I wonder if there is not something Holy Grail-ish about the idea of a single monolithic out-of-the-box piece of software that can elegantly answer all of process collaborations actual forms. It may be like enlightenment or perfection; something we are always moving toward but will never absolutely reach.

There is so much that is unique to the way that 1) different kinds of projects are structured, 2) to how different types of teams work, 3) how different teams are configured re: whether responsibilities and skill-sets are combined or fragmented among more or less people, 4) how individuals actually use tools (for purposes intended, un-itentended, or using one tool for a task for which another tool is designed), 5) how custom meta-associations could iterate on the needs of even a well thought our modularity … etc. Achieving an infinite range of custom flexibility in a modular suite is one challenge; then what about flexibility within a project configuration that accommodates the individual team member while still being operable in a common world of exchangeability with others on the team.

There are so many directions of flexibility to accommodate every last possible variation in such a totalistic system. It seems like we would need to inventory every last feature of all collaboration software, break them into a zillion modular components, and use a host of wizards, maps, and other planning tools to help users configure the work-space of their dreams. Big learning/effort curve here for sure. Many prefer simple out-of-the-box tools because they don’t want to roll their own. Perhaps an answer to this is to have a community of configurations, rather than (or in addition to) a free form community of modular developers. Imagine a case where I am a large scale multi-media theater director and I have created a set of modules and meta-associations that work great for me. Well my configuration should be findable by someone doing a particular project. Is the big problem always that software does not have what we need, or that we just don’t know how to make it do what we need it to do? Well a browseable library of project-type configurations could help someone through the weeds of a monolithic collaboration tool like this.

I think open source development would have to be heavily curated. It seems like there would need to be a dominant controller who would need to keep up with everything going on in the community of development. Imagine a case of managing “Enterprise Modularity”. How do you keep people from developing redundant tools? It could end up like at RecipeZaar.com where you have the option to select between 1,229 recipes for “chocolate chip cookies”. Where do you start?

Carlos Abler — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:39:32 GMT

@Laura

I could not disagree more.

Managing client expectations about misinterpreting wireframe “design” is one of the easiest things in the world. I have navigated a zillion client relationships in these murky waters and have NEVER had a hard time doing it. The people who have a hard time doing it, are account reps and designers and dot com era, old-school IA’s. These are the wrong people to be interfacing with the client in the first place.

There are MANY things that need to be communicated with any prototypical documents. Jumping the hurdles of the client (and the design team for that matter) to understand all of these things is FAR more daunting than managing the clients misperception about design elements. The client needs input on aspects of communications design that should be worked out prior to aesthetic application. Content and communication should precede design. The fact that most agencies do this backwards, is not the fault of those of us who put things in the right order. Content and interaction goals should precede design always, but often in reality they don’t.

Today’ advanced UXP/IA/IxD-types (often) have to communicate interaction design best practices (the right design pattern for the given problem), information design elements, communication design, orientation, etc.

There are many cases where today’s progressing UXP-types will be the only person on a given team who has any training in interaction design best practices, advanced user centered design methodologies and so on. You can’t realy on a designer working with a blank slate, with no training—and possible no interest in ever getting the training—to design the right solution.

Let’s face it, for a long time most designers are still print designers working on interactive projects; they are not real interaction designers. Design schools are as a whole still way behind the pedagogical curve. So designers are still copying styles from interfaces, not understanding the underlying principles about what patterns are appropriate for solving complex interaction design problems. If you have a designer who is educated in the way I am talking about; double their salary now.

The days of designers whining about having their toes stepped on is (almost) over. The shelters for this archaic phenomena are still large agencies that allow for one-trick ponies and waterfall production. I am convinced that the hybrid UXP people will not stay in large agencies for long because they can’t generally pay them their market value. If you are a hot-shot UXP person you should start your own company now because the demand is endless and you will be the miracle worker who every client will love and you will peel business away from larger agencies who are holding their UXP experts back, killing the value of their deliverables, because they are either knuckling under to under-skilled emotional designers, or because their organization lacks the process and project management to integrate their designers ind IA’s into a more productive collaborative model so that everyone has the voice they should have, and not more voice than they should have.

Carlos Abler — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 12:18:50 GMT

Great Article Christopher

You are touching on what—from a process standpoint—is the most difficult issue in serious web development.

I think Christopher’s article is pointing out how some of this plays out in the work flow of early content-expertise involvement, and in how the interface development process goes. Re: that latter, it is hugely true that if you wait until launch or post launch for your proof of concept on whether the design frameworks you have implemented scale properly, you have done your client a terrific disservice. A lot of this has implications for the age old debate about fidelity of prototypes etc. Fidelity of prototypes are often argued about from a design perspective, and not a content scalability, or communication design and efficacy standpoint. Communication design and content scalability place very different demands on the use of prototyping in all of its forms.

What is kind of insane when you look at it, is there are really two major things that shape the material effort of producing websites. Content and infrastructure. By content I mean broadly what ever is being interfaced through the technical medium of the website and all the functionality therein. Considering that content, and how it is to be used, experienced, accessed and manipulated are what shapes the nature of interface and functional implementation, it is beyond idiotic that so many web development shops have no clue how to handle, service, create, manage or translate content through the infrastructure they are creating. That is why I think that interactive shops that have content development as a core discipline in planning and project architecture will kick the crap out of shops that don’t get it. I know from experience because I have produced a number of super content intensive projects for content demanding clients (like the Smithsonian and History Channel) for under 100k. Any of these projects would have taken 250k to 500k to pull off in any other agency I have seen the process of. And that is a decent number. When you know how to do serious content design and development, the smaller projects—like marketing and business sites—are a piece of cake. But you have to have some pretty solid work-flow methods in place to do it, and you have to be practicing a very advanced form of contemporary interaction and experience design workflow to make all of the pieces come together. In other words, all of the efficiencies and best practices of our discipline have to be at play and well orchestrated to be able to step and repeat content intensive projects, and in fact on web projects in general. Because as I just indicated, mastering the art of serious content projects gives you skills to produce mid-size and smaller projects much more efficiently, because you develop work-flow and practices that you can’t get in any other way.

I came out of a film, theater and academic background before getting into interactive. Something from the film and theater background had informed a perspective that I have that web development has been reinventing the wheel of other creating disciplines for some time. In this case two critical domains to point out are: 1) the role the director plays, 2) The problem of translating content through highly complex compositions in the shaping of experience.

These are two very related things as a good director balances out the objectives of content delivery (read “Content Development and Translation), understands the dynamics of audience centered experiential composition (read: “User Centered Design” and “Experience Design”), and can orchestrate the translation through the various art-production disciplines (read “Designer”, “Developers” etc.).

So one of the many big obstacles (to add to the long list here) is having the role of the director, is it is practiced (or should be practiced) in advanced theater and film production. This role, and the universe that comes with it, is something that, until it gets worked out, will continue to support a world where interactive products are tossed around—like a town whore—to the various disciplines that fight for control and discipline-centric reductionism. The war for the integrity of websites will be fought on the grounds of content and successful interaction outcomes.