Thanks for being patient everyone… the time has finally arrived. The new blog design is done, and is ready for the unveiling. Without further ado, I’m pleased to present Zaissian Logic. Check out the first post on the new blog today and let me know what you think. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed!
Yeah, different look for the old blog…
First of all, this is not the redesign I’ve been alluding to for the past few months, rest assured. However, as part of the redesign (that I’ve been working on over this weekend), I needed to upgrade the current blog to transfer all my posts over. The upgrade broke the old theme, hence the visual changes.
Bigger changes coming soon, the new blog is looking great (if I do say so myself). Stay tuned!
Reality for designers who work in Microsoft shops has changed in the past year, mostly due to the fact that the Microsoft Marketing Machine has worked exceedingly well. The message - targeted primarily to developers, mind you - is that the Expression suite of products solves all your developers’ woes around translating designs into functioning code. The pain point is legitimate, and so the message has sunk in. It’s best exemplified in Wildermuth’s point #6:
Having previously worked for Microsoft (in the Developer Division, no less), I’m a pretty staunch advocate of alleviating this pain point. I’ve seen it break down efficiency in numerous organizations. So when I began a new job three months ago, I set out to make Microsoft’s vision of a smoother design-developer workflow a reality. Below are some lessons that I picked up that I think developers, designers, and managers should be aware of.
Two caveats before I rattle off the list. First, my current job involves working on a web application, and the application will be primarily in ASP.NET, not Silverlight. However, having worked with WPF and XAML quite a bit during my time at Microsoft, I think these points still do apply across the board, but if they sound web-specific, you know why.
Second, my job is a hybrid of program management and design, so I specify functionality along with the design. This might be more responsibility than a traditional design role, so my focus on efficiency might not be relevant to everyone.
On to the list…
1. It’s not “business as usual” for your designers.
When I see a sentence as simple as, “Using Blend is like Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop,” it makes me cringe.
I’m very positive on the Expression tools, but developers should be aware that Wildermuth’s statement is equivalent to saying, “Using Visual Studio is like Eclipse.” Technically accurate: You can write and publish code with both. But if you love Visual Studio and a non-technical manager told you, “Right, we’re all using Eclipse now!” you wouldn’t be thrilled. And when the same non-technical manager said, “But I read somewhere that using Visual Studio is the same thing as Eclipse,” that would likely further escalate the discussion.
The issue isn’t one of what can and can’t be done in different products, it’s one of efficiency. Nothing can change the fact that Adobe has been in the designer tool market for longer than Microsoft: Designers are naturally more efficient (and more comfortable) with Adobe products. From my standpoint, the way to get designers jazzed about Expression is to actually market to designers, not to their developer colleagues.
2. Designers will be writing code.
And I’m not just talking about markup or stylesheets. This is more an issue with an ASP.NET application than with XAML and Silverlight, since XAML is powerful enough to express almost anything visual that designers can envision.
If you aren’t living in the Silverlight world, however, things get trickier. Take drag and drop on the web, for example. Without Silverlight or Flash, that’s a JavaScript problem. One that technically exists in the UI space. Is this now a job for your designers?
And what about data access? I notice that Expression Web is fully equipped with all of the standard ASP.NET query capabilities. Technically, deciding what data is displayed is a UI problem, but in my case, designers would never be allowed to write queries.
I suppose the benefit is that Expression is flexible enough that, no matter where a shop chooses to draw the line between design work and development work, that setup will be supported. But there’s still a need for designers to play in development space.
3. Designers will be making development decisions.
Quiz time: What is the object below?
Designers might consider it a table, or a grid. But in the ASP.NET development world, it can be any of a number of controls for showing data: GridView, DataList, Repeater, or a ListView. All of these controls are available for use in Expression Web, but what will a designer choose? A simple HTML table? Maybe a Repeater, or a GridView? How about a ListView? (The last one’s rhetorical… as the facilitator of the ListView usability test, I can attest that designers are not the target audience for using a ListView.)
In the Expression world, when I propose a design, it comes with development decisions. For example, how do I design an Amazon-style drop-down panel? In order to complete the design I’m now blocked by development questions. In my case, I’m technically inclined enough to arrive at some answers - but that doesn’t save me from a long discussion (and some redesign work) when I toss the spec over the wall. For designers who aren’t as technically inclined, how do they proceed in expressing their vision?
4. Designers will start accruing UI development bugs.
So I’ve already written some code and made some decisions about which controls to use. The project goes over to the developers, who realize two days later that something isn’t displaying correctly, and it’s not the fault of code they’ve written. Now what? Do we keep up the pretense that developers will do no UI work to improve their productivity, and ship it back to the designer with bugs? Or do we let the developers make the changes, only to leave the project in a state that designers no longer recognize when they decide to redesign the product?
We opted for the former. And our developers got upset. While we had every intention of improving their productivity, instead we took a chunk of their traditional territory out of their control. Can you imagine seeing something wrong with your work and not being able to fix it? If you’re passionate about your job, that’d be pretty tough to do, and our developers are all passionate folks.
But the developers played along, and filed bugs instead of doing the work themselves. So that same work passed on to the designers, and that same work got done on designer time instead of designing new screens and moving the product forward.
5. Designers still aren’t producing the right artifacts.
This point might be contentious, but in the two projects I’ve worked on that were Expression-relevant, it held true. In these two projects, what was needed from the designers was a theme - something that could be generically applied - not just the design of one static page.
Expression can be used to create theme files, but there’s no visual way to do it. With themes, you’re not designing anything in particular; rather, you’re saying what something should look like once it’s implemented. When that story can be told with, “and it’s like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop,” appended to the statement, I think someone will really have a home run on their hands. For now, though, it’s adding design-to-code translation work to someone’s plate.
6. Developers outnumber designers at your job.
Please share if you have a counter-example. I’m willing to learn. But with the exception of all-design shops, I have yet to see an organization that has more designers than developers. Despite usability’s recent upswing in popularity, there is still an extremely heavy priority toward building something than deciding what to build.
Put that in context with the first 5 points. Taken alone, none of those points may seem extreme, but when you envision your already-taxed designers taking on development responsibilities, the improved design-developer workflow loses its luster. In my case, I started three months ago with a company full of people universally eager to adopt Expression in order to make development easier. The consequences have had time to show, and now we’re going back to the old way - not because the workflow broke down, but it took up too much design time doing tasks that were traditionally oriented to developers.
What I think would be more compelling would be to focus on the other end of the designer-developer workfllow: How can you take a designer-made image and break it down into pieces that a UI control can consume and render? Admittedly that puts the onus back on the developer to do the translation work, but I’d contend that the larger numbers would absorb the productivity bounce a lot faster.
I’ve been semi-addicted to Scrabulous lately - basically, it’s a Facebook application that allows you to play Scrabble with your Facebook friends. While I’m trying to limit the games I play, it’s a great chance to play games with people I don’t see every day. I’m not into MMOs, and Scrabble can be a casual game - check when you want, play a word, come back in a couple days.
I had been playing a game with Vince (Japan), Eric (Lincoln, NE) and Jason (Omaha, NE). Vince and I were neck and neck for most of the game, and at the end it looked like he was going to win. In fact, the word-by-word score showed Vince winning, yet somehow the win went to me:
Vince, determined to have an untarnished Scrabble record, encouraged me to investigate the discrepancy. I’m nice, so I did. I opened the “Contact Us” page on Scrabulous, and found there was an FAQ about scoring already:
Now, it turns out that the rules do, in fact, explain the discrepancy: The player to run out of tiles first ends the game and gets the point value of everyone else’s remaining tiles, while the other players lose the value of their own tiles. So, indeed, the scoring seems to be accurate.
But I have a hard time believing the tone that these guys are taking with their users. Saying “please” a couple times doesn’t take away from the fact that the FAQ question is essentially saying, “We’re perfect, you’re wrong, go away.” Furthermore, this particular case had very little to do with word scoring; rather, it had to do with an end-of-game rule that nobody was familiar with - the end score clearly conflicts with the word-by-word totals. Instead of getting me straight to the rules, the tone of the FAQ makes me want to email them out of spite since they’re treating me like a stupid user.
Early on in the MHCI curriculum, professors emphasized that Help is one of the four pillars of UI development. (Unfortunately, they didn’t emphasize the other 3 so I can’t remember them to save my life.) It’s clear that scoring is difficult for people to figure out, and it would improve users’ experience to add a little something to help them understand scoring inside the game.
In this case, the tone is just inappropriate. Users aren’t being mean, or attacking the developers’ ability to program when they have scoring questions. They’re trying to figure out how the game is played. A contextual link next to the scores (”How are my scores calculated?”) might fix the issue all together, and obviate the need for rude FAQs.
Adobe, Adobe, Adobe…
A couple years ago, I wrote about Windows XP’s habit of updating overnight and restarting the computer without user input. This caused its share of problems, but today Adobe topped it.
Back story: Apparently it was a big update day for Adobe, because I had almost 200 MB of updates to download and install. This process was taking a couple hours, so I went into a meeting with my coworkers. The meeting ends and I return to my computer. After a couple minutes, an unnerving dialog appears:
And here I am with Visual Studio open, an unsaved mock-up in Illustrator, two functional specs, and a half-written email. Freaking out, I desperately try to decide what to save first (meanwhile my boss is asking me what’s wrong since I’m making such a spectacle). After 15 seconds (much less than a minute!), my applications start closing. Despite my best efforts, the applications shut down before I could save any of them, losing a fair chunk of code and design in the process.
How did we go backwards in restart usability? The tradition from the 90s tended to be, “Your computer will restart now. Please close all open applications and click OK.” I have my gripes with that, but at least that didn’t give you a time limit!! I’ve watched a lot of web designers and developers work, and the one common thread is that they have many applications open at once. No matter how critical the restart is to the updating process, the decision to put a timer on the restart was an awful one.
Complaints abound over the… enthusiastic nature with which some Facebook applications try to get you to sign up. I guess it’s all about the numbers. But as I watched my notifications over the course of a week, I was intrigued by what I saw. At the start of the week, I was being notified about these items:
The items under “Other Applications” aren’t applications that I added to my profile. In fact, I don’t know where they came from at all, or why Live Blog is checked but others aren’t.
Two days later, and Entourage gets the boot, though the Neighborhoods app is lingering and unchecked:
Three more days go by, and I’m suddenly no longer getting Photo notifications:
Now, hang on a second! I actually wanted those (hence the fact that they were checked earlier). As if sensing my dissatisfaction, Facebook offers a replacement by the end of the week:
I suppose Notes are better than Photos anyway.
All I did over the course of the week was take screen shots – I didn’t adjust any settings (nor did I find anywhere that I could adjust them). So what’s with the revolving notifications?
Digg’s buzzing today about a prototype for disappearing car doors; basically, doors that slide into the car instead of opening up like normal car doors.
Neat idea. And it may even be adopted by a car company or two. But it’s wasted money for an unusable idea.
When I was little, my mom and I used to give an elderly woman a ride home from church. She had a hard time getting around, and needed help getting into and out of the car. She’d grab on to my arm with her one hand and the passenger door with the other. This invention neglects a secondary function that car doors have - they support people as they get into and out of the car. Watch the video… do you get out of the car that smoothly? Turn, stand, and go? Car seats are designed to hold people comfortably and securely so they can focus on driving, but for some people, getting in and out isn’t as simple as that.
Of all the different car design elements, how the car door opens seems to be the least compelling as a candidate for redesign. Yet I’m sure plenty of money was spent to develop the prototype. I’m going to be one unhappy consumer if my next car has disappearing doors and the same gas mileage.
When MoveOn.org created a Facebook petition group to protest Facebook’s Beacon, I joined because I agreed with the principle. Like I said the last time Facebook rolled out a feature that disregarded users’ privacy, what user’s want and what they’ll react negatively to isn’t intuitive. Last time, users rallied together of their own accord to get privacy enhancements ushered in. This time, MoveOn.org led the charge. I’m just glad that Facebook left out the “Awesome!” button this time. -shudder-
Fast forward 3 weeks. Facebook Beacon has been completely overhauled with privacy features, and for most people, Beacon isn’t broadcasting any information for them. In fact, the owners of the petition group declared victory over a week ago:
Yet MoveOn.org’s Facebook Privacy group is at 77,000+ members and climbing, by over 1,000 people each day!
So what does this mean to MoveOn.org? Apparently, they have a new means of petitioning…
…both in the last week. It will be interesting to see which facebook groups will take off, and which will see minimal interest. The protest against war in Iran has only seen 5,200 members in a week, whereas a petition to bring back the Daily Show and end the Writers’ Strike has drawn 1,000 interested members within an hour of the email being sent out.
Are Facebook petitions a gold mine for MoveOn? Sure, getting 77,000 supporters to petition Facebook’s Beacon is nothing to sneeze at: It worked, after all. But compare it to Stephen Colbert getting over 1 million supporters for his Presidential campaign in one week, and it’s a drop in the bucket (and only 1/10 of 1% of Facebookers, given estimates that Facebook is approaching 60 million users).
Is it just that there are more people interested in seeing Stephen Colbert in the White House than in protecting their privacy? Or is it an awareness issue - do people simply not know about everything that’s out there on Facebook? The folks at Facebook probably have access to all of the adoption rates of various groups and applications. I wonder if they have information about critcial Facebook networks - groups of users who, if they adopt something, will cause an explosion of interest. Even if they do, we’ll probably never see it. MoveOn would probably petition that privacy violation with another Facebook group.
It may have taken a couple months, but I can finally say I’ve settled in on the east coast. I’m down to two boxes (OK, I’ve been down to two boxes for a month now… which makes me wonder if I actually need whatever is in those two boxes), and I’ve got my apartment arranged more or less the way I want it.
Settling in has come with it’s share of interesting moments. My apartment is half of a 2-story duplex that used to be occupied by the landlords for the complex. The benefit is that they completely repainted and remodeled everything before I moved in! The downside is that nobody got the memo that the landlords moved out.
Comcast was probably the most frustrating to deal with. I called to order service, and of course the salespeople were very happy to help me out. But, wait… they showed the address I gave them as commercial, not a residence. “Is there an apartment number?” “Nope… just me here. It used to be the landlord, but they moved down the street.” The first representative assured me that it was no big deal. They just needed to flip the “commercial-residence” toggle button (much easier than in SimCity, where you had to bulldoze the commercial building to make room for the residence).
Two days later, I hadn’t heard from the representative, and he was dodging my calls. So I called again. “Is there an apartment number?” “Nope… just me here. It used to be the landlord, but they moved down the street.” “Well, it’s trivial to have it changed. I’ll set it up in the system and call you back.” “…Are you sure? That’s what the last guy said, and he seems to have fallen off the map.” He assured me that it was no big deal and said he’d call me back.
Two days pass, and representative two is MIA. So I called Comcast a third time. “Is there an apartment number?” “YES. It’s apartment 1. I live above the commercial property.”
OK, so I didn’t come out swinging with that line. I explained the situation to him, offered to be listed as apartment 1 if it meant I could get service faster, but he assured me not only that it was a trivial process, but that he’d done it before and had instantaneous results. And indeed - he called me back two minutes later saying it had been done. I can only assume that the first two representatives trembled in fear at the sight of some massive “Commercial — Residence” toggle button and ran crying from their posts.
Fast forward a week, and the Comcast guy is at my apartment to set up my service. I’m walking him through my apartment to show him my TV (downstairs) and my computer (upstairs). As we’re coming downstairs… there’s a woman standing in my apartment, looking quite confused.
It turns out that it wasn’t just Comcast who had missed the memo: It was everyone in the 500-unit community. Swell. Nothing left to do but use my experience in Designing for Service to create a touch point for the landlord’s office:
Apparently the landlord saw it (or heard about it), and a memo did go out to residents, because I haven’t had any strangers wander into my apartment for a few weeks. That leaves me more time to head to the nearby shopping center to try some of Boston’s yummy fare. Everyone recommended JP Licks, so I wandered over there with my boss after he helped me move in. My eyes drifted immediately to one of their specials.
“Um… is the Pad Thai ice cream any good?”
“Ha. No. They actually put peanuts, green onions, and noodles in there. You don’t want that.”
Noodles in ice cream? Apparently JP Licks didn’t get the memo that nobody would go for that.
Wow… long time no blog. Things have been extremely busy in the last month, and only now are things finally starting to settle down. An update is definitely in order.
First of all, I’ve taken a new job, which means I’m no longer at Microsoft. It was really a tough decision to make - there are lots of really exciting things going on at the Developer Division, including I’m sure no fewer than 50 new initiatives that have been launched in the 3 weeks that I’ve been gone. Ultimately it came down to the new job aligning more with my interests and goals, so I decided to shake things up a little bit.
In my new position, I’ll be doing a lot of design & project management work for a small e-learning company called WorldLearn. Not much info to offer regarding the work since we really are just starting out. However, an interesting tidbit about the company itself is that it’s in the Boston area.
Yup, which means that in the past three weeks, I’ve packed up my stuff and driven clear across the country… but not before spending a week with my friend Shipra in Spain. For those of you itching for pictures, Shipra has already beaten me to posting a few. But the next few blog entries will be some fun retrospectives about our time there, including some fun pictures to peruse. And yes, I promise to get them on Flickr as well.
So, that’s the story. Since arriving in the Boston area a week ago, I’ve started work, found a place to live (in Chestnut Hill), attended an awesome Boston UPA meeting, met up with a couple friends, and eaten Whole Foods sushi far too frequently. Now that I’m three days from having an address again, normalcy should start to set in any time now. Or at least as normal as you get with me.
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