Working with text analytics, I found this visualization of all nouns in the English language pretty neat. The coolest thing is the patterns you see emerging based on the semantic meaning of words.

[These are my notes from Steve Krug’s talk at the Jan. 16 UPA Boston meeting.]

“Yes, Virginia, there is a perfect Web page.”
(Wikipedia reference)

• There are some things that just work
• but don’t get done very often
• even in the hands of good designers
• Two things that make a perfect Web page:
• Effective “You are here” indicators
• Prominent page titles
• On average, users miss most design subtleties
• If people need to see something, it can’t be subtle
• you have to make it louder than you’d like
• Example: StumbleUpon navigation tabs



• There’s a tendency to downplay navigation
• Always put “Home” on navigation
• This establishes the navigation scheme
• and draws people’s eyes to navigation
• “Consistency kind of sucks as a usability principle”
• Clarity always trumps consistency
• Consistency is often abused
• Secondary navigation should be close to primary navigation
• Example: Download.com -> Downloads tab: Subcategories are not visually connected to main tab, so it’s hard to see they’re logically connected



• Make prominent, well-placed page titles
• Titles should clearly be the top of the heap
• Should be bigger, bolder than most content, but doesn’t have to be the biggest
• Should be on top of content space, not navigation space
• Page title should map very closely to the words you clicked on (WICIWYG - What You Click Is What You Get)
• Things that go wrong:
• Many stacked things look like they could be page titles
• Page title straddles content space and left navigation
• Not the page title (marketing talk, other words)

Today was the first day of the UI12 conference and I had the pleasure of attending Luke Wroblewski’s one-day course called Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design (which is, incidentally, also the name of his book). Here are some random notes I took at the session:

• The goal of visual design is to communicate what (utility), how (usability), and why (desirability).
• You get on average 1.6 seconds once per month to convince a user to use your application.
• Using contrast to create a visual hierarchy: less contrast for context elements, more contrast for main elements.
• The visual weight of objects represents the priority in which elements are processed visually.
• People expect to see content on a website, so it should be the primary element in a visual hierarchy.
• Visual changes to a design (like color or size) should be seen as prioritization changes and be treated as business decisions because a “simple color change” can have a big impact on the visual hierarchy of a website.
• Design discussions with stakeholders shouldn’t be called “reviews” because it implies that design is a service and decisions are made by other people. Instead, they should be called “discussions” or “conversations”.
• Design patterns are useful because they can be used by developers without relying on designers. Good design patterns should focus on solutions to real problems, not rules.
• To avoid “new design freakout”, you can make gradual changes toward a goal for the end product.
• Don’t use Flash to build a website, use it to enhance a website (like YouTube).
• Random observation: Luke is very faithful to his color scheme. His shirt was the same green as the main color in his slides (and his website).

There were many more useful points in Luke’s slides, but I didn’t take notes on those because they were printed out. I think my favorite slide was the one summarizing what the whole course was about:

• Visual Communication is part
• Visual Organization and part personality.
• Visual Hierarchy is a deliberate prioritization of
• Visual Weight enabled by the manipulation of
• Visual Relationships to create
• Meaning for users.

I’m looking forward to more great sessions tomorrow.