Kevin Wick has posted a very nice sketchy-styled Axure library.  I highly recommend it!

Prototyping in a very low-fidelity visual style generally helps your stakeholders provide feedback at the right level, as discussed in this article, and has been adopted by many other design tools, notably Balsamiq.

I recently joined a wave of about seven user experience professionals, with all of us participating and discussing, in real-time, the merits of Wave. In fairness, if you send seven UX snobs to review almost any interface, you can expect some berating. And this is a closed “preview” (read: beta) version. But what occurred was an absolute evisceration. In this post I attempt to distill the feedback by providing three criticisms and three suggestions about how Google Wave can be improved.

Criticism 1: An Identity Crisis – What is Google Wave?

“Google Wave is all this interesting stuff on the screen, all around me. A wave is a shared space, where you can discuss, and work, and communicate, with friends and colleagues, using text, and videos, and photos, and maps, and all sorts of interesting stuff.” - Doctor Wave

Holy crap! It’s everything! In the instructional video that Google expects the user to discover floating in their inbox, the Google-PM-turned-mad-scientist “Doctor Wave” point out that, really, they aren’t too clear on what it’s for either. Herein lies the first problem with using Wave: it has no idea what need to fulfill.

Criticism 2: Out of Context – Why am I here?

Upon receiving the invite to use Wave and signing in, I found myself staring at a bunch of functionality. The internal conversation went something like this:

“Why am I here?”
“To check out Google Wave”
“Yeah. It’s pretty crazy.”
“… What now?”

This highlights the second problem with Wave: many people arrive in the software with no context. Because it’s not marketed or designed as an application to solve a specific need, it’s up to the community to discover what problems can be solved in a better way by using a wave. You have to come at it with a goal: to plan a trip, to organize a project. If your goal reads vaguely, like “figure out how Wave can be useful to me”, you will probably walk away frustrated. Unfortunately, you can’t help but enter the application with this goal at the moment.

Criticism 3: Do I make you nervous?

As you type in a wave, other participants can see you typing in real time. (There is a feature to disable this, but it’s not implemented yet). Imagine yourself sweating, nervous, your hands shaking as you mash out typo after typo in front of a conference chat. You type something which you decide you don’t want to say, but by the time you erase it, everyone has read it anyway.

Furthermore, when a few people are typing and clicking around at once all the “blips” (messages) in the wave start jumping all over the place. Text appears and disappears everywhere, things move around, the other parts of Wave ping you with chat messages and unread inbox items, and you can’t see the screen because it’s covered in the remnants of your brain, which has just exploded in protest. Imagine everyone in a big room, standing in their own spots and just yelling in all directions at the same time.

Finally, and this just confounds me, anyone can edit anyone else’s messages, even while they’re typing them. Imagine the disaster that happens when four people start editing the same content at once.

So what should Google do?

Suggestion 1: They should start small.

Instead of telling people that Wave will solve all their problems, if only they could figure out how, Wave should introduce itself to solve a single problem. This could be something like.. Plan a party. Google Wave is your new party-planning software. Give people a reason to be there, and a goal to work towards as they navigate and discover Wave’s features. People will naturally discover new and interesting applications of their software, and the use will broaden over time. But people have to use it first, and right now they have no clear reason to do that.

Suggestion 2: They should end the closed beta.

I cannot imagine what made Google think that it was a good idea to give out limited invitations to a closed space that is fundamentally social. Many of us arrived in Wave staring at an empty contacts list and no idea who else was using it. Furthermore, the invites tend to spread to the ultra-connected early adopters. But most of my real friends aren’t that person. How do I plan a camping trip on Wave when none of my friends use it? It will open up someday soon, but the taste is already bitter. Google should open things up now, so that we can begin to contact the people we actually need to communicate with.

Suggestion 3: The real-timeyness needs changing.

But I don’t know what. Moderation? Guidelines? Established etiquette? Outright deletion? Currently, any lively real-time conversation between more than two people evolves into mayhem. Either some sort of social rules that keep things in order will arise from the user base, or Google needs to change how this feature works. They can start by turning the real-time typing off by default.

Google Wave may turn out to change how we communicate after all, but they need to build a lot of bridges. The large gap between novice and effective use of the system, in its current form, will stifle its success.

I’ll be presenting two panels: Variables and Conditional Logic; Raised Events, and Axure Tips and Tricks. There are a bunch of other great panels hosted by Axure ninjas: Fred Beecher, Jeff Harrison, Luke Perman, Mark Johnston, Dhawal Shah, and a Q&A session with the Axure folks themselves.

And a huge thanks to Ezra Schwartz for organizing the whole thing.

Web applications and sites these days are using many social features. This library, compatible with Axure versions 5.5 and up, contains many of the standard widgets you will need to prototype basic social functionality.

You’ll find a lot more than nice looking stencils – these widgets have polished interactivity, for your prototyping and usability testing needs. And always feel free to contact me if you have any requests or additions!

Preview | Download the Widget Library

(place the .rplib file in \My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\ for it to load automatically when you start Axure)

Widgets in this library

• Add Friend
• Email This
• Favorite
• Flag
• Follow
• Leave a Comment (single and multi)
• Loading GIF (big and small)
• Post Status
• Rating (plus/minus)
• Rating (thumbs up/down)
• Rating (stars, with and without label)
• RSS
• Save
• Share This

Screenshots

Add to Friends Widget

Rating Widget

Email This Widget

Notes

Although they were developed separately, there’s a bit of an overlap with another neat widget library by Roslyn Zolandor.

Most of the icons in this library are from the awesome Silk Icons pack.

Axure Social Widgets Library by Loren Baxter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

When you’re building a football stadium, put football players in it and let them play. This also shows why user testing your own designs isn’t sufficient: I doubt Jerry Jones can punt a ball high enough to hit that screen.

Engagebig.com v2 Prototype

This redesign was not too complicated – we wanted to present a more professional, modern site, focused on delivering a single point at a time, while keeping it all relatively simple. The small video clips of us were inspired by (and use an API to) robo.to. They are a fun way to get a better idea of who we are.

The main Axure lesson I’ve taken from this prototype is that we can use opacity gradients to “fade” scrolling elements in and out of the screen. Note the left and right sides of the carousel animation in the prototype. This effect didn’t go into the final design, but it was fun to develop.

Also note the nice browser chrome. Unfortunately I can’t redistribute the .rp file itself because it uses the very-awesome but for-pay Konigi icons.

I invite you to check out some new content and some reorganized content at the work and projects pages, a better footer, and one miserable defeat to Internet Explorer’s vicious bug engine (can you find it?). I should also mention that IE6 is dead to me.

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments, expect more good content to follow.

Let me make it clear to Last.fm and every other website in existence: I haven’t the foggiest clue what your specific username requirements were when I registered, or whether I decided to use my first name, full name, moniker, or favorite Steinbeck character.  But I do remember something very well – the same email that I’ve used for the last 6 years.  Ask me for that for login credentials, and we’ll get along just fine.

Interaction Designers – I’m looking squarely at you.  This is our job.  In my opinion, a username is a completely invalid login requirement for all but the most fundamental credentials, such as your OS account, or for bank accounts (which can claim the “higher security” excuse).  What do you think?

— Update —

@salConigliaro points out, “At the very least let me use my email address as my username.”  While I agree, this also means that your publicly displayed username, assuming that’s why the user name exists in the first place, has to be your email address.  For both privacy and formatting concerns, this may be less than ideal.

About a month ago, the folks at Zurb published a nice article about sketching wireframes.  I went ahead and purchased some new sketching items including a nice thick sharpie and a cool gray “dropshadow” pen.

The difference in my sketches is incredible.  Zurb hits the nail on the head, saying, “Although we advocate keeping things as simple as possible, presentation is everything.”  I wholeheartedly agree.  While it’s important to stay in a sketchy, mostly grayscale environment while doing early prototyping, there is nothing wrong with keeping your deliverables professional looking.

In that sense, and through deep offense at the default White, Black, and Blue widgets offered with Axure, I’ve created a small library of widgets that are just a little more aesthetic.

This is for version 5.5 and above.  Put the file in your “My Documents\My Axure RP Libraries\” folder.
Download the Widget Library

It’s easier than I thought

By far, the most difficult part of making these lifestyle changes was committing to them and making the jump.  Once the decision was set in motion, the steps to making it all work appeared naturally.  Some were harder than others, but with a clear path came simple decisions.  I started working freelance with Rod Ebrahimi, forming BIG.  I began using Twitter and blogging, interacting with the community to meet great people, forward thinkers, and potential clients.

Then it was a matter of grabbing my Macbook, making sure most of my documents lived in the cloud, preparing clients for the time change, setting up the trip, and hopping on a plane.

It’s harder than I thought

That isn’t to say that everything has been easy.  There are challenges to working abroad.  The internet is run by a hamster in a wheel here in Argentina.  My workspace environment, at the moment, leaves a lot to be desired.  Tossing out my established routine has until recently disrupted the zen-like days and weeks where I could achieve great productivity.  The side trips, exploration, restaurants, bars, nightclubs, plays, revoluciones, tango, and all that there is to a new country certainly cut into what otherwise would be career time.

But every minute is worth it.  You can’t make up for this type of life experience.

It won’t last

My final, and personal, opinion on the matter is that it won’t last.  Not for me.  Although many of the barriers to working across the world have fallen, some still exist.  Skype has failed me far too many times during client meetings.  I miss all the conferences.  Face time with clients and coworkers is non-existant.  My experience in South America has been an absolute blast, and I’m thankful for the opportunity to take such an extended trip while working.  But I will be returning to the USA on my scheduled date later this year, and will be excited to get closer to the action.