northtemple

Redesign of iTunes Store sign i...

Redesign of iTunes Store sign in screen by Nitin Garg. I enjoyed his commend: “It appears like they want me to forget my ID quite frequently!”

I have long wondered why those ...

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I have long wondered why those taking addresses require you to give your city and state. Whether it’s over the phone or through a web-form, why not just ask for the zip code, allow the computer to look up the city and state, and then simply confirm the result with the user?

I was pleased to experience such purchasing my new AppleTV a few minutes ago from apple.com.

I would like to comment on Deat...

I would like to comment on Death to Comments! But unfortunately, that is no longer possible…

Death to comments!

I just did a nice MySQL dump of about 10,000 spam comments, just from the last week here. Hundreds of them are getting through Akismet, and they’re dang smart, too.

So, we’ve axed ‘em. Went in and disabled all comments on all posts. I might have to build in a human check. Or we might leave comments off. We’ve loved interacting with all you people, but comments are a funny thing. I’m not sure any of us will miss them.

If you’d like to get in touch, find us on twitter, or shoot me an email at feedback@northtemple.com.

Some cool insight from Campaign...

Some cool insight from Campaign Monitor on their new office space. This part was particularly interesting:

“After software, the most important tool to a hacker is probably his office. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you’re a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.” —Paul Graham, Great Hackers

Every company I have ever worked for uses offices in conjunction with rank (which is fine) but I can definitely see how having a place to concentrate is important. But I’d trade an office for some open spaces with big whiteboards, lounges, games, and food. It’s no coincidence that nearly all my ideas that I would consider innovative have come when I wasn’t in the office (or even working).

Here's another teaser of some o...

Here’s another teaser of some of the new stuff coming for lds.org. This screen is part of the music section.

Love the idea of a signature de...

"Love the idea of a signature designer—wouldn’t even have to invoice you.
He can just sign the check himself." ~ Snippet from a conversation in 37Signals Campfire app, mentioned on their blog.

Edwin Land, inventor of the Pol...

"Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features." ~ Fred Brooks, in interview by Wired’s Magazine’s Kevin Kelly about his new book The Design of Design

Three Questions NOT to Ask

In helping a colleague prepare for a usability test, I found Jared Spool’s latest UIE Tips article timely and totally in synch with my own experience. Three questions NOT to ask during user research (paraphrased and embellished):

Don’t ask about the future. People don’t know what they would really do in hypothetical scenarios—even highly realistic ones.
Don’t ask how they’d design a feature. They either won’t know or won’t have good rationale. They know their process and to a degree they know their problems—focus on that, not their proposed solutions.
Don’t provide a (supposed) answer to your own question (“Did you do X because Y?”). Leading questions may be a staple of political pollsters, but they yield biased results. Don’t feed them reasons out of your own experience or assumptions—let them provide their own.

Thanks Jared—good reminders.

OXO's angled measuring cup, via...

OXO’s angled measuring cup, via an article on Good Experience: “Customers never said they wanted an angled measuring cup. In fact, users weren’t even aware that there was a problem to be solved. Consumers didn’t say, “I wish I could read the markings more easily.” They muddled through without complaint. And yet the innovation came directly from observing customers. How? Simply by observing the customer experience.”

(By the way—this brand appears to be sold at Kohl’s; Bed, Bath & Beyond; and Sears to name a few… so I might just drop in a buy there rather than pay shipping…)

It's no use spending time, mone...

"It’s no use spending time, money, or effort to entice people into a product or service if it just leads to a bad experience. Why? Because those people you carefully encouraged and nudged into your circle? They go right back into the cloud, spreading the news about their bad experience." ~ Hear hear!
Mark Hurst’s advice when clients want to spend time and money leveraging Facebook, Twitter, other social media, and advertising—before they have built a good experience for those masses they are trying to attract.

Check out FontShop's educationa...

Check out FontShop’s educational materials. Downloadable PDFs with tutorials and tips on typography.

For practicing User Experience ...

"For practicing User Experience Designers, one of the most important laws isn’t Fitts’s Law, which helps us understand how to design interactive elements. Nor is it Hick’s Law, which describes how long people take to make decisions.

It’s Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 99% of everything is crap." ~ The pull-no-punches opening to Jared Spool’s article today on
5 indispensible skills for UX mastery, which he lists as:
Sketching, Storytelling, Critiquing, Presenting, and Facilitating.
I like that list.

Having just just wrapped up a r...

Having just just wrapped up a re-design of the Church’s online store, which included much discussion of the importance of free shipping, I was interested in this article on The Power of FREE. We are all apparently irrational, “free thinkers”!

Clarification: Unlike traditional retailers, we’re not trying to “drive sales” by offering free shipping; we’re trying to remove barriers to people ordering materials that will help them learn and live the Gospel. If that includes leveraging this psychology, then fine!

I have long appreciated the abi...

I have long appreciated the ability to copy layer styles by option + dragging them from one layer to another. For those like me that have also longed for the ability to copy layer styles to multiple layers, you are in luck—there is a way. Dragging the style is a shortcut for the copy/paste layer style option in the layer contextual menu and allows for the application of styles to multiple selected layers.

Nice article on interviewing us...

Nice article on interviewing users by Jakob Nielsen—strengths and weaknesses, when and when not to interview. Fits in with what I’ve experienced with contextual inquiry, especially the importance of focusing interview questions on what users are doing right now.

Self Design only works in those...

"Self Design only works in those instances when you are the user and there’s a lot of users just like you." ~ Closing quote from an interesting article by Jared Spool on the pros and cons of designing for yourself, using 37signals as a prime case.
I find that most people believe—without any real evidence—that most people are
“just like them.”
There’s the rub, eh?

Working with a team of designer...

Working with a team of designers I’ve been getting this error a lot lately opening files in Photoshop. Digging through all the layers manually is a pain and on a few files I’ve not even been able to locate the offending text. Nic Johnson just made my day however pointing me towards the Replace All Missing Fonts feature under Type in the Layers menu.

The More Good Foundation, a non...

The More Good Foundation, a non-profit organization promoting utilizing the internet to share the gospel, has launched a redesign of their website.

New Mormon.org

In the next couple of days, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be releasing a new version of its missionary site, Mormon.org. This new site is meant to introduce the church to friends and family and to the world.

The new Mormon.org has been years in the making as I will share what has been our process and our experience. We hope that this post could benefit designers visiting our site. Honestly, this is motivation for me to record what has been done to make such a site.

A lot of these guys take themse...

"A lot of these guys take themselves a little bit too serious. Let’s see, a teacher, policeman, fireman, doctor, and somebody who’s in the service. I truly believe those are the only five real jobs in the world. Everybody else should just shut up and enjoy life. There’s five legitimate jobs in life." ~ Charles Barkley (slightly edited)
on LeBron James and the NBA in general

As I'm sitting here working on ...

As I’m sitting here working on a revision of the Church’s online catalog, I just perused a great summary of 10 reasons to not copy Amazon by GetElastic. Good advice for me, and just about everybody who’s not Amazon.

Design, stripped to its essence...

"Design, stripped to its essence, can be defined as the human capacity to make our environment in ways without precedent in nature, to serve our needs, and give us meaning in our lives." ~ Enjoyed this quote this morning by John Heskett in his book Toothpicks and Logos.

LDS Interaction Framework

The Interaction Framework (IxF) is the result of a collaboration between members of the Interaction Design Team in Church’s Information and Communication Systems Department. The goal of IxF is to make development and prototyping faster, to ensure best practices in UI design and ultimately to save sacred tithing funds and make the user experience better for the folks who use our apps. We are excited to formally announce this project and introduce you to some of the work we’ve been involved in.

Here's a glimpse of us at work....

Here’s a glimpse of us at work. We meet each morning for a design review, printing out our work from the day before, and run it through the gauntlet. The team works together to ensure consistency and feeds off of each other’s ideas. The whole is indeed greater than the sum of any parts would could produce on our own. Once designs are flushed out and approved, they are moved out into the hallway for reference for us and for content and development teams after hand-off.

To the side of our meeting space, we have a row of desks with low dividers that allow of instantaneous and effective collaboration. Our developers and content teams are immediately down the hall and across the cubicle wall. Physical proximity, tactile, analog conversations and design explorations, and being surrounded by our product is crucial for a project of this scale.

A snappy user experience beats ...

"A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one." ~ From a nice revamp of Nielsen’s classic “3 response time limits” article that has proved very useful to me over the years in determining how fast is “fast enough,” and how to communicate progress effectively in different situations.

Good article by Neven Morgan ab...

Good article by Neven Morgan about designing icons and the various sizes required for iOS. I was especially interested in what he mentioned about resolution independence and how it’s not possible to have a single source file for an icon.

Just stumbled across designer a...

Just stumbled across designer and photographer Steph Goralnick. Excellent work. The energy in her photography is amazing.

Playing catch-up on the web

It continues to perplex me how so many basic interaction conventions did not make it onto the web. With each browser revision, we’re slowly improving experiences online, but so much of it is simply catch-up and not new innovation. Sure, it was born as a method for structuring and sharing documents, but once we started building things with it that involved interaction, why didn’t we at least start with what we knew thus far? Simple patterns designed decades earlier are slowly starting to show up on the internet but so many are still not even technologically possible.

It’s unfortunate because it limits the internet’s potential. By requiring experienced users to learn new behaviors, requiring users to deal with a sub-set of features, or lowering standards and expectations by providing new users with a sub-par experience, we are doing them a great disservice.

This is a preview of the front ...

This is a preview of the front page of the news and events section coming in the new lds.org. It will be up on the beta site in the next few weeks. It will provide an aggregate of articles and new content being published on the site and by official Church news services.

Apologies for the crickets arou...

Apologies for the crickets around here. Lots going on, and we hope to fill everyone in soon.

In the meantime, we’ve got crazy amounts of really smart comment spam hitting the site. How do you code around this type of spam? I’m not sure a captcha would work. Ideas?

Comments on, for now.

Sometimes we get lost talking a...

Sometimes we get lost talking about possible solutions and need a wake-up smack down. (Original at xkcd.)

How's this for a social media s...

"How’s this for a social media strategy—watch your customers flail around on your site, or app, or whatever, listen to what they need, and then go and build that. Regardless of whether it fits the latest headlines." ~ Great quote from Mark Hurst on not drinking the latest tech-buzz Koolaid.

Google celebrates the PAC-MAN 3...

Google celebrates the PAC-MAN 30th Anniversary. Make sure to play, at least one, before making a search. Use your arrow keys as your joystick. Thanks Google!

North Temple designer Jared Lew...

North Temple designer Jared Lewandowski shares insights from real world project experience and tells us how to do more with less time in his recent article featured on UX Magazine.

LDS.org gets a facelift

Hoping to write much more about the thousands of decisions that went into this, but for now come see our latest work on beta.lds.org. We’ll be adding features and new pages in big monthly bursts, with a funeral for the current site planned for October(ish)..

If you are confused in any way ...

If you are confused in any way about the chart posted by Michelle (or you simply feel there are too many typefaces out there), this simplified version should be a lot clearer. (via grady, who I think got it from cameron somehow—what’s he up to these days anyway?)

So You Need a Typeface by Julia...

So You Need a Typeface by Julian Hansen. Accurate, funny and looks exceptional on a 30” display. Be sure to check out the Comic Sans flow.

We just shipped it on Saturday....

"We just shipped it on Saturday.
And then we rested on Sunday." ~ Product management 101, courtesy of Steve Jobs. In last week’s iPhone Q&A session, he answered whether Apple had “veered away from widgets on the iPad.” Prodded further with “So widgets are possible?”, Steve responded, “Everything is possible.”

ticky-techie tactics...

"ticky-techie tactics" ~ My favorite (and also alliterative) quote from Mark Hurst
in his most recent Good Experience newsletter, outlining
three overlooked lessons about the iPad.
(He and Rob Foster appear to be very much on the same page…)

Password Change Survey Results

So here’s the results of that password changing survey. Let me preface this by saying that this survey was done purely to satisfy our curiosity. We are NOT looking to this survey to help make any decisions here at the Church. We acknowledge that this survey was not scientific and thus the results need to be taken with a grain of salt. That said, I still think that we learned some interesting things. Just don’t go around quoting statistics from this survey and expect them to stand up to scrutiny.

Another point that I want to make clear is that this survey doesn’t really address how secure our passwords are. We know that the best passwords are truly random characters and numbers without any logical order and the longer the better. Our survey doesn’t specifically figure out if you’re using a “secure password.” We only tired to figure out what happens when it comes time to change that password.

Question #1: When forced to change a password I…
42.98% – Just increment a number. Password1, Password2, Password3, etc
8.77% – Change a topic. Ford1, Chevy1, BMW1, etc
23.68% – Some other pattern (explain in comments below)
21.05% – Come up with a completely unique password
3.51% – Other

There really weren’t that many surprises in this question. I had anticipated that an overwhelming majority of people would use some sort of pattern. Only 21% of us come up with a unique password every time we change our password. That means that 75% of us are using some form of an “easy to remember” password.

Again, please don’t use this to infer a sense of the of general security of a system. “Easy to remember” ≠ “easy to guess.” An incremented password of th55myp55wrd3 is more secure than the unique password of stapler. That said if someone figures out the root portion of the incremented password that gives them a much smaller number of possibilities to try.

Question #2: How do you remember the new password?
69.30% – I use a pattern so it’s fairly easy to remember
10.53% – I have to write it down for a while, but eventually toss the paper
6.14% – I have to write it down and keep it until the next change
14.04% – Other

Based on the answers to the first question, it wasn’t surprising to see that most of us don’t need to write our passwords down. We know that writing passwords down is one of the least secure ways of remembering it. I think that is why we develop these patterns. We know that writing it down is bad, but remembering a bunch of random characters is hard, so we adapt.

From the comments it appears that many of us are using password management software like 1Password, LastPass, etc. Personally, I’ve been looking into these programs and they seem like a good solution. The theory is that they allow you to set a truly random password for each site. So no two sites use the same password. Sounds great, as long as every system (computer, mobile, etc.) you use has that software installed. The other downside is that if your laptop/mobile phone is stolen they only need to crack your master password to get access to everything. But I suppose that it’s easier to remember one complex password than hundreds of them.

Question #3: If you didn’t have to change your password (or at least MUCH less frequently) you would…
35.09% – Still do whatever easy option I did above
35.96% – Make a semi-complex password that would be more secure
28.95% – Make a considerably more complex password that would be more secure

Here’s one question that surprised me a bit. I’ll admit that I assumed most people would continue to do whatever is easiest. We’re human, we’re lazy, we’re creatures of habit. Surprisingly, nearly 65% of you would use a more complex (read: more secure) password if we didn’t have to change it so frequently. That’s probably the biggest take away from this survey. Changing passwords is supposed to make a system more secure, but making those changes too frequently could have the opposite effect.

Question#4: How often are you forced to upgrade?
2.63% – Every few weeks
6.14% – Every month
8.77% – > 1 month ≤ 2 months
50.88% – > 2 months ≤ 3 months
31.58% – More then 3 months

Question #5: Personal desire for security
5.36% – I don’t think the stuff in my account is that sensitive so I don’t need a complex password
41.07% – I understand why I need security, but I can’t try to remember a new complex password every X months, so I make it easy for me.
50.00% – If I could have the same password for > 1 year I would make it complex and thus more secure.
3.57% – I’d keep my password easy no matter what. My ability to remember is more important then my account security.

So this was probably a question we should have worked through a bit more. Personally, I would have answered with both the 2nd and 3rd options if possible, but we just kind of threw this together. Still the take away from this question is that we understand why we need to be secure, but we need to access stuff, so we compromise. But, if we didn’t have to change so frequently we’d compromise less.

Yesterday on the way home from ...

Yesterday on the way home from work, I listened to an interesting podcast from LDS Radio’s “Everything Creative” series. It featured an interview with Doug and Laurel Hatch, creators of the non-profit Mormons Made Simple site and owners of the for-profit company Stuff Made Simple. The interview and the sites offer an interesting angle on simplicity, usability, creativity, the downside of overly polished work, online missionary work, and people taking initiative to “do good.”

Studies show that commuters are...

"Studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters. A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists…

People usually overestimate the value of the things they’ll obtain by commuting – more money, more material goods, more prestige – and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health." ~ Quoted from a Business Week article in The Commuting Paradox on SvN this morning. Matt adds, “Who wouldn’t want a team that’s filled with folks who are less stressed and more satisfied with their lives?”

A new global visual language fo...

A new global visual language for the BBC’s digital services. More than just grids, their entire process. Required reading.

Great ideas can't be tested. ...

"Great ideas can’t be tested.
Only mediocre ideas can be tested." ~ Legendary advertising icon George Lois, from the t-shirt series
The Ten Commandments of George Lois.