Dexo Design

Intuitive vs. Conventional

Russell Wilson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:12:01 +0000

Thoughts?

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Is software design a luxury?

Russell Wilson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 03:39:24 +0000

In a team meeting recently, someone said “Isn’t it great that we have a software design team? Very few companies our size have that luxury!” The individual meant it as a positive compliment, but every time I hear someone say something like this, I’m reminded that while we are making great advances in software development, we still have a long way to go.

Definition of Luxury [Source: wordnetweb.princeton.edu]:

something that is an indulgence rather than a necessity
lavishness: the quality possessed by something that is excessively expensive

Software design is an indulgence and not a necessity? Software design is excessively expensive? If this is true then most certainly software architects, testers, and tech-docs are all luxuries as well. The only necessity is someone who can write code, and if you have more than one, a manager (maybe). The coder can just throw some standard widgets on a canvas, link them to database queries, test his code using some scenarios, and then write some simple guides using Google Docs. Done.

And as long as you just created some incredible innovation, you’ll be fine for a very short time until the competition catches on. Then you’re screwed.

Design happens, and it can happen well or it can happen poorly. It’s not whether you design the user interface of your product, it’s how you design it. We are past the days of users accepting horribly designed software products because they have been exposed to good design on the web and they expect more.

So are user interface designers necessary? Only if you want to create great products. Is user interface design expensive? Are programmers expensive? Is testing expensive? It’s called “cost of goods sold” (COGS).

User interface design is not a luxury… it’s a competitive advantage.

Design Process at Facebook

Russell Wilson — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:03:31 +0000

Caught this writeup from Luke Wroblewski on how Facebook designs their software. Key takeaways for me:

design team delivers front-end code
share early and often; design is involved start to finish
design team size = 25 (out of 1000 employees)
design is iterative – know from the start that your designs are “experiments” (my words) and may/will change

See the whole article here.

UI Design Guiding Principles

Russell Wilson — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:32:39 +0000

Just as my team and I began working on establishing a set of core guiding principles, I came across a post from John Schrag and his team at Autodesk describing their core design values. Based on their list and our own brainstorming, we have developed our own list of UI Design Guiding Principles:

Understand the problem before solving it (and avoid “design on the spot”)

Sketch before making it pretty (and discuss abstractions versus specifics — “selection” vs. “combo-box”)

Validate designs before investing in (production) code

Well designed key features & workflows over quantity

Ease of use over ease of coding

Validated designs over expert opinion

Don’t make things “consistently” wrong

Don’t let users shoot themselves in the foot

Context is important (Where am I? How did I get here? Where can I go next? What is my current state?)

Whitespace is good (… the more you add, the more you detract from what is there. … every element added to a page detracts from the rest. (Paul Boag)

This is a living list – I expect to tweak it over time, adding, deleting, editing…

Design Guiding Principles

Russell Wilson — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:47:53 +0000

John Schrag has just written a post titled Values in Software Design Practice.
To summarize, John and his team came up with two lists:

Appropriate order of actions:

Setting Goals before Taking Action
Understand Problems before Generating Solutions
Designing before Writing Design Documents
Validating Designs before Investing in Code
Steak before Sizzle

Values:

Validated Data over Expert Opinion
Quality of Data over Ease of Data Collection
Complete Workflows over Long Feature Lists
Achieving Results over Writing Reports
Collaborative Design over Design by Referendum or Design by Fiat
Ease of Use over Ease of Coding
Well-designed Critical and Common Workflows over Complete Coverage of Every Possible Workflow

Ironically, I was just about to begin an almost identical process with my team next week. We are having our first “UI Roundtable” with development and “Design Guiding Principles” is one of the topics. I plan to take John’s team’s list into consideration when developing ours.

The Ultimate Mac Setup for Web Designers (60 Apps)

Russell Wilson — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:23:12 +0000

http://tinyurl.com/dg7yga

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The Bitter Truth for Critics

Russell Wilson — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:32:37 +0000

It is so easy to criticize someone else’s work. Give me any website and I can find ways to improve it. But critics need to acknowledge and respect what the creators have done regardless of whether or not it’s perfect. I was reminded of this while watching Ratatouille with my children on the 4th of July.

Anton Ego, Ratatouille (2007)

In many ways the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and themselves to our judgement. We thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

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In 10 words or less, what is software design to you?

Russell Wilson — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:04:42 +0000

At the end of a recent interview, the candidate asked me “What is software design to you?” I can probably come up with a thousand different answers but the one that popped into my mind immediately that day was “software design is making the ordinary extraordinary.”

Okay, so maybe it won’t get me a mention in Businessweek, but what I was trying to capture and communicate was that software design in particular is largely about taking unglamorous tools and making them functionally robust and efficient, rewarding to use, and aesthetically pleasing. We aren’t artists, but we are creatives. We aren’t rocket scientists, but we’re smart and talented. And every day we have to use our creativity, smarts and talent to design the best tools for people to use.

So I’m interested… in 10 words or less, what is software design to you? Enter more than one if you like (as separate comments).

Where is the Sign In on Amazon.com?

Russell Wilson — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 04:27:27 +0000

Is it just me or does it seem strange that there is no Sign In on Amazon.com’s homepage?

Each time I visit amazon.com, and I visit too often, if I’m not already logged in, I stumble looking for the Sign In link. I would expect the “Sign In” text at the top of the page to be a link taking me to a Sign In form. Or even better to automatically display a Sign In form on the homepage. But instead you are required to click on something that would only be available to you once you ARE signed in – e.g. “personalized recommendations”, “Your Lists”, “Your Account”, etc.

This seems like such a fundamental flaw that it had to be done on purpose. But why? Why break with convention and force people to take an extra cognitive step? Did they conduct usability studies and find that this was superior somehow? I’m very curious…

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How to display the number of subscribers and unique visitors on your Wordpress blog as text strings

Russell Wilson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:53:09 +0000

I’ve been wanting to display the number of subscribers to my blog and the number of unique visitors (for a particular timeframe) as simple text strings, without images, icons, etc. Turns out this is not as straightforward as I hoped. But it can be done.

If you burn your feed through Feedburner (like I do), you can display the number of subscribers (i.e. FeedCount) by inserting some Javascript anywhere on your site. The catch is that you have to accept their presentation with very few styling options:

Francesco Mapelli created a Wordpress plugin called Feedcount 1.2 to do just what I was looking for – extract the Feedcount number and let me style it however I like. But when Feedburner moved over to Google, it broke his plugin (the feedcount always reports “0″). Fortunately, Adam Mclane changed some links in the plugins files and fixed the problem and republished the plugin as version 1.2.1.

To get the number of unique visitors out of Google Analytics I found a plugin from Spiral Web Consulting called Google Analyticator. The plugin inserts Google Analytics code on all of your Wordpress pages and also provides a widget that you can insert in your sidebar or place anywhere you like. You have to enter your Google Analytics UID and Profile ID and a few other options. The Profile ID was difficult for me because the instructions seemed to be wrong and I didn’t understand the difference. In case you don’t know, the Profile ID can easily be found by clicking “Edit” on the profile for any site you follow – far right hand side of the screen – and then it appears in the upper left of the screen right beneath “Profile Settings”.

The difficulty with Google Analyticator is that if you want to change the styles (except for a few color changes which can be made through the Settings interface in Wordpress), you have to modify the PHP directly. Again, I didn’t want to be limited to their way of presenting the data.

But with some direct edits to the inline styles in their PHP, I was able to achieve what I wanted.

So there you have it, Feedcount 1.2.1 plus Google Analyticator 4.3.1 and some styling hacks and it can be done! You can see the (currrent) result by looking at the bottom left corner of my site:

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