Rock Web Form Design like an 80s Hair Band

Have you ever listened to some music while your working and found the symphony of ideas. You were just thinking that there were too many links on the order form that may distract the user, and at that moment, the Genius playlist pulls up Jump by Van Halen.

Coincidence? Hardly.

It is true that 80s hair bands came to stardom (and most fizzled from) before the Internet went mainstream and anyone outside of a research center knew what a web form was. Still, that just makes it all the more extraordinary how good form design advice is richly peppered through the rock lyrics They were like Nostradamus (with long hair and a four necked guitar).

The Rock the Forms website - rocktheforms.com

Why you should vote for Rock the Forms?

Because it’s fun. Read a post or two of the corresponding blog rocktheforms.com. You will come away with two feelings.

• The first is a feeling of validation. Confirming something you had considered was good design practice, but never formulated into words.
• The second is a feeling of nostalgia for the cheesy but loveable music of yesteryear Cinderella, Tesla, Poison, Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses and the memories of where you were when you first heard those songs.
• If you enjoy this structure, then you will love a live panel with video clips and music pumped in for added effect.

Please do vote

With over 2000 panels vying for consideration this year, every vote for every panel is a huge recommendation. Your vote matters, so please do take the time to go to the Official SXSW Panel Picker and vote and comment on the Rock the Forms panel. And if you really are excited, please spread the word, join the movement and let’s get some Rockin’ Web Forms at SXSW 2010.

The Innovator's Dilemma

As I finished reading The Innovators Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, and I was charged up.  I became aware of a successful path on integrating innovation into a large company, and I realized with new clarity how close my company had come in our own efforts, and where we misstepped.

Some of the main takeaways are:

• The innovative team should not be also supporting business initiatives, it  needs to break away from the main company, if not physically, at least in terms of workload and metrics.
• Let me repeat that one, because it’s probably the most important – the innovative group can not be held to the same metrics as the rest of the company.
• The innovative group needs a leader who does not have to fight to justify the existence of this group.
• The innovating team needs to be fully staffed with talented individuals who believe in the work.
• The team needs to celebrate big what would be seen by the larger parent company as small wins or possibly even loses.

So, yaaaaarrrrrr the President?

I would support the initiative to have more transparency in government anyway, but I love how this new administration is using social media to provide these views inside the Oval Office.

On Flickr they are literally providing views inside the Oval Office. The White House has it’s own Flickr feed being populated by talented professional photographer Pete Souza. The results are really stunning. Check it out at http://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/.

A group of us Fools attended the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive conference; here is the slide deck of a few of the learnings and ideas that we took away.

What Users Want

A fast food industry wanted to increase the sales of milkshakes, so they put out a poll as to when and why people buy milkshakes and learned it is in the evening with dinner or thereafter. Then, they went to the sales data and found out that in actuality people buy milkshakes in the morning between 7 and 9am to be more than a snack but an activity as they commute to work.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

As we continue to build out community sites, it’s worth remembering people don’t come to the site to stay, they come to get the information they are seeking and then go about their day. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are not bucking this trend, they simply have so much information to share, that they appear sticky. But they are making the information easily available.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

WordPress was frustrated not getting the new user conversions they wanted. The design consultant team spent about ten minutes fixing the problem: users couldn’t figure out what to do, and they needed something clear like a big button. By the next week, they conversion rate had jumped 25%. Users don’t like feeling like beginnings or noobs, so help them get past that quickly and easily.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Building Community

Start your new users off with small simple tasks, like the Outperform or Underperform options on CAPS. There are more fields available for the skilled player, but for the noob all they have to say is up or down, and they are in the game.
(inspired by Robert Hoekman’s Seven Rules for Great Web App Design panel)

Still, let’s not forget that users are generally selfish, and won’t even make that simple vote if there is nothing in it for them. Look at Flickr tags, which this is a differentiator for Flickr; it is used because it provides a means for users to find their photos again. Threadless gets it’s votes by offering a cash prize to one random winner? What is in it for users to interact with our site?
(inspired by Derek Powazck’s Design for the Wisdom of Crowds panel)

Charlene Li asks why the company and the customer are separated at most companies? She provides this bold org. chart to encourage companies to think about the customer as the center of their organization and everyone, even the CXO positions are there to support.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

Typography & Brand

The Fool is a service company with web-based products, but what if we weren’t. What if our premium services had to be packaged and placed on a supermarket shelf right next to competing products. How would we package our services? What would we call out?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Back in the days of letterpress, having two typefaces was huge. People made the best of what they had. Now we have thousands of fonts and feel slighted in the web world with only 8-10 solid cross-platform fonts. But instead of lamenting that SIFR or CSS3 aren’t more widely accepted (so we could have a myriad of fonts), we should take on the challenge of doing better typography with our limited font set.
(inspired by Sam Warren’s Web Typography, Quit Your Bitchin’ and Get Your Glyph On panel)

Starting from the top left going down it’s Disney, Jeopardy, Yahoo, Apple, Coca-Cola, Dunkin Donuts, New York Times, ESPN and Grand Theft Auto. How recognizable is our branding?
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

Design & Development

What’s the better approach? A consumer-oriented library like YUI or jQuery provide a lot of pre-made widgets and actions, but come at the cost of the larger code base to include that full library. A developer-oriented framework like Prototype provides the shortcuts to be able to build our own widgets and actions faster. On top of the developer-oriented framework we could built our own custom (internal) library.
(inspired by John Resig’s More Secrets of Javascript Libraries panel)

Yes, every site could certainly be faster, and there are plenty of immediate fixes available including using image sprites, combined and minified css and js and proper use of etags. The real question is, what happens when your site runs slower? If you intentionally throttle our bandwidth so we are 500 milli-seconds slower what will happen? Google loses 20% of traffic. What would happen to you?
(inspired by Steve Souders’ Even Faster Web Sites)

Instead of providing polished mocks straight away we should be doing more sketching, which we all know, but now here is some guidance to what the sketching should be. Leah Buley of Adaptive Path encourages us to examine different scenarios like first timer to expert, automated to manual or marketing to community and see how the sites would look different on that axis. The right look and feel is then probably somewhere in between.
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

Design principles are the quiddity of the site, the overarching essence of what the company/product/site is. Google Calendar’s principles include “More than boxes on a screen” and “Easy to share.” TiVo’s principles include “Everything smooth and gentle” and “It’s TV, stupid.” What principles do our sites live by?
(inspired by Leah Buley’s Being a UX Team of One panel)

The Road Ahead

Twitter is hitting the turn on the hockey stick and becoming mainstream. So many major companies not see Twitter as a competitor and are working to overcome or become more like Twitter. The irony is that Twitter has yet to present a real business model, so all these major companies are trying to be more like a company that has shown no real way to monetize. It’s a crazy time to be in the industry.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

Sure, they won’t bother reading them, but they could. In 20, 30, 40 years we will have left such a trail of actions and 140 word recordings of our lives, that our grandchildren will with little difficulty be able to piece together everything we’ve ever done.
(inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold panel)

We have to trust someone, who will it be? In personal interactions it may be Google for your email, calendar, reader and analytics, or perhaps Facebook for your networking or Twitter or Mint for your finance reporting. It’s becoming less and less practical to trust no one, so you will you put your trust in?
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

If Lisa is connected to friends, and Lisa buys these 9 West shoes then shouldn’t Lisa’s friends get an ad for 9 West. The intelligent technology is available; it’s just a matter of making the commitment for smarter advertising.
(inspired by Charlene Li’s The Future of Social Networks panel)

To continue to stay relevant, we need to continue to innovate, which means asking “what if” and following that train of thought to something new and interesting instead of settling on “what is” and being complacent.
(inspired by Charlie Sayer’s Brand Noir panel)

Warning to techies, our friends at 37 Signals say to be wary when you hear a business request that includes the following words “only”, “need”, “can’t”, “easy” and “just”. Any of those are warning signs of scope creep, but them together and the potential scope creep grows exponentially. All five in one sentence, and watch out, you probably just added another quarter’s worth of work to your backlog.
(inspired by Jason Fried’s 10 Things We’ve Learned panel)

Finally, tying this back to Austin, the Congress Street bridge is the home to 1.5 million Mexican free-tail bats, and every day they emerge from under the bridge to scavenge for food. Most come out the east side of the bridge away from the setting sun. There is no leader telling them to, they just have all figured it out together. A few still come out the west side and learn quickly to go east next time or fail all together. This is a metaphor for the industry as it is represented at SXSW. There are many of us there, with no clear leaders but through being in close quarters in panels and networking we are learning to move in the industry the same direction. A few will go their own path, but they will eventually come around or be forgotten. In the end, there are no right answers, but there are a lot of people working to go in the right direction and just see where that will lead.

Cool As buttons

As an homage to my closing line in the great movie by Tom Crenshaw at SXSWi 08, Selena designed this button (right) of what I have heard called “the cutest little poo ever.”

I also heard it called “the best button at South by” which made me very proud of my talented designer wife. I really appreciate all the kind words and seeing so many people wearing them throughout the conference.

Which brings me to my request. If you photographed it, or were photographed visibly wearing it, please let us know about it. When you tag that photo on Flickr, please include the tag coolasbutton.

And if I missed you, and you did not get one, my apologies, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to still get you one.

This year, I bought a nice new unlined notebook and pen and went the old-fashioned route of taking notes by hand.

My friend, Rachel, flattered me when she said this year’s notes from SXSW were really well done and that I should share them. So, here they are:

To view in greater detail, click on the image and it will take you to Flickr.

I'm gunning for you, hippo

I am really sucked in by the simple marketing / brand exposure campaign from the Canadian based mortgage community company, Smart Hippo. They are setting up a Twitter-based Scavenger hunt, leaving clues on their feed to find one of these stuffed hippos (pictured).

I love scavenger hunts and immediately without thinking twice set to follow @hippoSXSW as well as the two representatives @krusk and @georgefavves. So, now they have me, at least for the short term. I will be awaiting their twittered clues and any marketing they decide to mix in there I will be fully consuming. Brilliant.

You win by finding the hidden hippo. There are also prize drawing that you can enter by retweeting, which is also great, but I am much more focused on finding that hippo. And if I it, I’ll take the prize, but I am keeping the hippo as a trophy.

To find me in Austin, follow my tweets. I am @robleto at twitter.com.

I looked through fifteen resumes tonight trying to find the best candidate to fill a Production Designer position. Each resume presented numerous positive attributes that made each candidate worthy of consideration, but you know what drove one single candidate to the top of the stack? The first line in his resume was “Objective: I want a position as a Production Designer.”

Any other Objective I read was a series of resume-safe buzzwords that make no clear commitment to the type of work that candidate wants to do. They say, in not so many words, “I just want a job”; whereas this outlier seems to state “I want THAT job, the position you are trying to fill.”