Some examples.

Salesforce.com Community front page.  Look at their great use of padding.  The search box is enormous.  No one is going to miss that.  ”Post a Question” stands out wonderfully.  This site is fun and usable at the same time.  The tabs have plenty of padding too.  Excellent.

Designers have to come to reality on this.  Big fonts work, and they work very well.  They are fun and functional.  Don’t let the opportunity for a big font pass you by.  Find the right place and do it.  Make it bigger.  BIGGER!

Bigger!

Do you look at how other people do it and comb over the details, critiquing or praising each element?  Do you consider yourself a student of the game?  Someone who is striving to get better each day?  Do you read blogs and books on your job subject matter?  Do you attend conferences or participate in the community of people also doing that job?

Or are you just phoning it in?  Are you focused on friends and family and not worrying so much about the job?  When you do a part of your job, are you OK with mistakes or sub-optimal outcomes?  Do you think people who have a “philosophy” about the job are taking it too seriously?  Is “doing it right” a subjective statement to you?

Possible uncomfortable truth: Most people would characterize themselves as craftsman, but in reality are hacks just trying to make it through the day.

There is a contractor I recently worked with who made this page that had every possible error in the book.  It was a horrible piece of work that literally wasted the time of the entire team and needs to be redone from scratch.  It really pissed me off how sloppy and unprofessional the work was.  It made me think of the great people I have worked with and the difference in outcome.

Great things come from craftsmanship.  Without it, you get unpleasant UI, poor maintainability, unhappy customers, uninspired coworkers and a host of other plagues.  I salute the people who go the extra mile in their craft.  I will be loyal and praising of you for as long as you practice your art.  For those who just slap things together, I want you to know that I (we) hate the products and services you produce.

• Kevin, a guy who used to work for me, said “Essentially” about 20 times per sentence.  Another variant was “Basically” which several people I know say in every sentence.
• At least 1 in 40 people in the technology industry say “Shits and Giggles” or “Shits and Grins” on a daily basis.  This is a horrible phrase.  I want to start a foundation to stop it.
• Chetan sits near me and says “Whatnot” in every other sentence.  ”We have to fix the data and whatnot.”
• Scott says “Heart of Hearts” and “Dream of Dreams” way more than is advisable.
• It’s not a phrase, but I use “air quotes” way more than a normal person.
• Some people fucking curse alot.
• Of course, the ubiquitous, “Umm“.

There is no way to stop these habits.  They don’t even realize they are doing it.  This is the subconscious messing with our tongues.  Years ago, in college, I took a public speaking class.  The teacher told me that short pauses in your speech are not nearly as noticeable as you might think.  Saying “Umm”, is way worse than pausing your sentence.  Saying “Essentially” or “Basically” doesn’t actually help you get to the heart of the issue.

I definitely try not to say Umm, but I know stopping using “Air Quotes” will be a very difficult task.

Sarah, who sites next to me, speaks Chinese.  She says the results made no sense.  Pavel, across from me, speaks Russian.  He was also baffled by the results.  It’s really neat when the character set changes so quickly, but if the sentence is mangled in translation, then it’s ultimately worthless.

I thought by 2010, that we would have flying cars and free energy.  I figured we would have computers that translate in real time and get it closer than this.  Where are my flying cars?!?

The whole system is so close.  So very close to being amazing.  But right now, it’s just broken.  As a UX feature, the ability to speak the native language of the user is wonderful.  However, if we sound like idiots, we are doing more harm than good.

The user is always looking for signs of life in your application.  One glimmer of humanity and humor will enhance their mood a hundred fold.

The original url was http://srv-dfw-1.domain.com.  This worked perfectly for the system administrators to know that the url was for a server (duh) in Dallas-Ft. Worth and it was the first one.  However, the user would interpret this as a robotic unfriendly name devised by robotic unfriendly people.

So I started coming up with names.  Silly names, inspiring names, serious names, Elements, planets, scientists, rock bands of the 80′s.  All of the sudden everyone in the office was participating with tremendous energy.  They were screaming out names and laughing uproariously.  They were enthusiastically and totally engaged in the name of something they scoffed at 2 hours ago.

We ended up with http://daisy1.domain.com.  It starts with D, which is good enough to know the city and still has a number.  Yet, it also has life.  It is more geared towards women than men, but it makes sense for the user base.  It has flair and personality.

Everything you do, even down to the URL of your application is indicating your personality and philosophy.  Use those opportunities to communicate wisely.  Communicate with life and don’t let your system administrators name (or design) your application.

Software as a Service (SaaS) products do not require executables or CDs to deliver their upgrades.  They don’t have to worry about who is on what version.  They just update the web application and the next day, everyone is on the new thing, like it or not.  This solves all kinds of problems (and introduces other problems).

When you can update the product without worrying about burning millions of CDs and shelf space, you can release at will.  Literally, you can patch the site whenever you want, even mid-day.  This raises a critical question about the frequency of upgrades that are desirable from a UX standpoint.

Delivering too many updates will lose the Christmas Morning effect. Delivering too few updates means you are rolling up a ton of changes and it can become overwhelming. Clearly, a Goldilocks amount is required.  Not to frequent, not too seldom.  Just right.

I believe monthly releases are the right size for companies that are less than 500 people big.  There is a natural calendar in people’s brains that maps to the Gregorian calendar.  It’s easy to remember the May release rather than the 2.1.4 release.  Time is an important factor in software.  How much are you delivering in what time frame?  These are measures of agility and productivity that play into whether your customers think you are a good partner or not.

Going quarterly is a good idea for a bigger company that just can’t get all its ducks in a row in a month time span.  However, for any startup, this should be a problem.  Going shorter (2 weeks) works for the early stages of a startup and even beyond, but the user will lose some context around the updates.

Whenever you can use existing psychological anchors in your UX design, you should.  Why fight the human brain when you can leverage it?

Satisficing requires that you accept the first answer that meets the criteria for acceptance.  Sometimes, this is the right approach, but for a key feature or employee (or spouse), you sometimes need to raise the bar higher.  Maximizing isn’t fun either.  So how do you know?

Personally, I went through this in the last few days with a design challenge.  I had a design that felt “acceptable” but didn’t feel great.  It felt slightly awkward, like an ill-fitting suit.  It satisfied the requirements, but that was all.  Should I have accepted that design?  It was like an itch in my mind that wouldn’t go away unless I kept designing through it.

I found another solution, which felt better.  Yet, still I had this itch.  I changed course again.  Each try was a wild departure from the previous.  All were acceptable, yet none were satisfying the itch.  Finally, on the 4th or 5th rev, I stumbled upon the right idea.  My brain suddenly switched gears and said, “Ahhhh, that feels good”.  No more itch.

You have to trust your instincts when things aren’t right.  Keep iterating or switching to new strategies until your unconscious gives you the green light.  Sometimes this takes a little longer, but the end result will be much better for your users.

You can see all the traffic in the middle was when my posts on Windows 7 and Office 2010 were driving a huge amount of traffic.  I removed the pages from Google and the traffic dropped.  Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.  Maybe I should have just laden those pages heavily with Google Adwords.

Now on the right, you see that big spike?  It’s for a search query called “The Alphabet Trick”.  I had written a post on helping people remember names or words when they are on the tip of your tongue.  Apparently, the urban dictionary also defines this as “When you draw letters with your tongue while making out with someone or eating a girl out”.  This was originally proposed by Sam Kinnison in a comedy bit.

That post is 8 months old.  Why did they increase the rankings of it yesterday?  What was special about yesterday that Google would bump this up?  How the heck does Google work anyway?

What should I do?  It’s not my fault “lick the alphabet” morphed into “the alphabet trick”.  That traffic is bizarre.  Putting Google Adwords on it is not quite right.  Maybe I could ask Google to de-index that page?  Why am I stressing about the traffic to my site?  Why can’t I just ignore it?  I’m becoming a traffic-neurotic.

He is just getting better and better. Soon, I will have a video of Ethan playing ukulele, which he is becoming pretty good at. Still very excited for Rock Band 3.

However, I do have one major problem StackOverflow.  When you ask a question there is this text on the right side of the screen:

We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.

I hate this. Especially on forums that are dedicated to user experience.  I want to discuss the topics and let the best ideas rise to the top.  The fact that the ideas get out of order because of voting is GOOD.  It forces each person to come up with a self-contained single answer that stands on its own.  Typically people do not answer more than once.  There are comments for talking about a single answer, which provides an extra outlet for conversation. This is much better than an opened ended threaded discussion.  There is a limiting force based on the structure which makes each answer more potent.  You have one shot, you better make it good.

I love StackOverflow for discussion AS IS, yet they actively shun this type of activity.  They will literally shut the question down.  People are hard-core getting pissed that people like me want to have discussions.  I think it is actually ruining the overall user experience to not have the option of discussing in the same context as answering.  The UI works for it perfectly.  It would be smart to mark or tag the question as open-ended.  That way, people who are annoyed by it can skip those questions.  However, to eliminate them completely makes it impossible for the rest of us to have satisfaction.

This issue is like Gay Marriage.  If you say it can only be one way (Man/Woman), then you are happy with your one way.  If someone else LIKES MARRIAGE but wants it another way (Man/Man or Woman/Woman) then they are S.O.L.  They don’t want some messed up “third way”, they want to be married!  Stop being control freaks and let people do what they want to do!

StackOverflow has suggested a “third place” to deal with this problem.  (Civil Union?) They created a totally different UI that truthfully doesn’t work for me at all.  Their whole approach to the problem is just missing the point.  We like the regular Stackoverflow UI for discussion, not some bizarre other thing.  Their new UI is not useful at all and I wouldn’t be tempted to use it.

Why is this so hard for people?  Jeff Atwood, please come over to the good side of the force.  Add a flag for open-ended questions and leave the UI alone.  We like it very much.