DashboardHQ is coming soon, we swear
Robert | 1.17.2006 @ 10:34 AM
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Our first product, DashboardHQ, is coming soon - we swear. Soon, we'll be opening things up to beta testers, and once the first phase of DashboardHQ is stable and has been released, we'll be starting on the second appliçation in what will eventually be a suite of tools. You'll be able to pick and choose which ones you want in your Dashboard, and every one of them will be as painless to use as a paperclip.
So keep checking back here. We'll keep you posted.
Permalink | 0 Comments
Our first product, DashboardHQ, is coming soon - we swear. Soon, we'll be opening things up to beta testers, and once the first phase of DashboardHQ is stable and has been released, we'll be starting on the second appliçation in what will eventually be a suite of tools. You'll be able to pick and choose which ones you want in your Dashboard, and every one of them will be as painless to use as a paperclip.
So keep checking back here. We'll keep you posted.
When "No big deal" is a very big deal
Robert | 1.16.2006 @ 1:59 PM
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Ever found yourself uttering the statement "it's not a big deal" when deciding to let something you know is a usability problem make its way into a final product? Yeah, me too. I'm going to stop now. Here's why:
A few days ago, some people inside of a company I work with decided to use Flash Player 8 for their latest project. Why? Well, it it wasn't because Flash Player 8 does anything they actually need, but rather, because a graphic designer, while building out some Flash content, accidentally used Flash 8's new Filters feature, not realizing the filters only work with Flash Player 8. And instead of going back to fix his mistake, he decided to push for using Flash Player 8.
The project manager contacted the client's "tech guy", who replied by saying that the client's users get around the web quite a bit and have probably run into a Flash Player 8 installer at some point, so "it should be fine" to use Flash Player 8.
Even if 80% of the users within this client have already upgraded their plug-ins, you're now asking the remaining 20% to upgrade without a compelling reason (the project could have, and should have, been built for Flash Player 6). They may never know that you're doing this - as far as they're concerned, you're requiring the upgrade for a good reason - but you are, in fact, inconveniencing them for no reason.
Since this decision, I've heard at least one person say "It's no big deal."
Yeah. It's not really important to respect your users. Inconvenience them however you want. They'll take it. They'll suffer. They'll do whatever you want them to do, because you have the power and they have none. Right?
Of course, following this logic, they may eventually decide they might like another company better, and stop asking you to design the projects for them.
When you say "it's no big deal", you add to the already gigantic list of other things programmers and such have let slide with the same sentence. Your particular item is not the only one they'll come across that day. They'll come across a thousand other instances where someone said "it's no big deal" and let something slide. These so-called little things are huge in the minds of users. Coming across a few of these in a day adds up to frustration and resentment, not productivity.
Next time you find youself saying "it's no big deal", ask yourself the following: "If we fixed this, and did it well, would that make us better than the other guys?"
Yes. Yes it would. Fixing it, making it better, would make you incrementally better than the other guys. Do this enough times, and you'll have an application that makes you far superior to the other guys. Put out enough software while living by this rule, and there won't be any "other guys". You'll be the only one left standing.
Permalink | 1 Comments
Ever found yourself uttering the statement "it's not a big deal" when deciding to let something you know is a usability problem make its way into a final product? Yeah, me too. I'm going to stop now. Here's why:
A few days ago, some people inside of a company I work with decided to use Flash Player 8 for their latest project. Why? Well, it it wasn't because Flash Player 8 does anything they actually need, but rather, because a graphic designer, while building out some Flash content, accidentally used Flash 8's new Filters feature, not realizing the filters only work with Flash Player 8. And instead of going back to fix his mistake, he decided to push for using Flash Player 8.
The project manager contacted the client's "tech guy", who replied by saying that the client's users get around the web quite a bit and have probably run into a Flash Player 8 installer at some point, so "it should be fine" to use Flash Player 8.
Even if 80% of the users within this client have already upgraded their plug-ins, you're now asking the remaining 20% to upgrade without a compelling reason (the project could have, and should have, been built for Flash Player 6). They may never know that you're doing this - as far as they're concerned, you're requiring the upgrade for a good reason - but you are, in fact, inconveniencing them for no reason.
Since this decision, I've heard at least one person say "It's no big deal."
Yeah. It's not really important to respect your users. Inconvenience them however you want. They'll take it. They'll suffer. They'll do whatever you want them to do, because you have the power and they have none. Right?
Of course, following this logic, they may eventually decide they might like another company better, and stop asking you to design the projects for them.
When you say "it's no big deal", you add to the already gigantic list of other things programmers and such have let slide with the same sentence. Your particular item is not the only one they'll come across that day. They'll come across a thousand other instances where someone said "it's no big deal" and let something slide. These so-called little things are huge in the minds of users. Coming across a few of these in a day adds up to frustration and resentment, not productivity.
Next time you find youself saying "it's no big deal", ask yourself the following: "If we fixed this, and did it well, would that make us better than the other guys?"
Yes. Yes it would. Fixing it, making it better, would make you incrementally better than the other guys. Do this enough times, and you'll have an application that makes you far superior to the other guys. Put out enough software while living by this rule, and there won't be any "other guys". You'll be the only one left standing.
Judgement calls in 50 milliseconds
Robert | @ 12:43 PM
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The result of a rather surprising survey, Nature.com reports that users can make judgements about a web site in just 50 milliseconds.
From the article:
"We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. 'My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,' says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny."
Note the words "the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information". Does this mean that this is the way users actually judge a site, or simply that they can? As in, do the first 50ms make so much of an impression that users decide that quickly whether or not they find the site appealing?
Yes. Yes, it does. But let's consider the details.
All you could possibly know about a site in the first 50ms, particularly one you've never seen before, is the domain name (if you bothered to look at it before clicking through from Google or another site), and that there might be information on it you want. It's not enough time to determine whether the information there is useful, where on the page to find the information, or learn anything useful about the site. It's a super-fast first impression, and all I could absorb in this test, in which you can view a web site for either 50ms, or 500ms was the background color, the fact that there is an image on the page, and some columns. I couldn't discern the photo's subject, the content of the columns, the company name or logo, or anything meaningful. This super-fast glance may not show me whether the site is meaningful for me or not, but it does give me enough time to know this isn't one of those obnoxious, brightly-colored sites generated from Microsoft Word about someone's cat. (This is useful information, because it's highly unlikely I'll ever need information from such a site.) It's enough to tell me the site might be well done enough to actually find something.
At 500ms, things are much more discernable. It is enough to pick out that the photo contains a woman with a baby, there are three columns on the page, there is some sort of input text field on the left (probably a Search box), and some icons are shown on the right. But it's still not enough for me to decide if I'm going to leave the site or stay and try to find the information I need.
It seems all we can really take from Nature's article is the already-obvious fact that layout is an important part of the first impression. For a judgement in that timeframe to be successful, the best we can do is make sure our layouts are simple and clean, stripped of any element that may make it too dense to absorb in 50ms.
And if you aren't doing that already, well, you should be.
Permalink | 0 Comments
The result of a rather surprising survey, Nature.com reports that users can make judgements about a web site in just 50 milliseconds.
From the article:
"We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. 'My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds,' says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology1. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts tallied well with judgements made after a longer period of scrutiny."
Note the words "the brain can make flash judgements almost as fast as the eye can take in the information". Does this mean that this is the way users actually judge a site, or simply that they can? As in, do the first 50ms make so much of an impression that users decide that quickly whether or not they find the site appealing?
Yes. Yes, it does. But let's consider the details.
All you could possibly know about a site in the first 50ms, particularly one you've never seen before, is the domain name (if you bothered to look at it before clicking through from Google or another site), and that there might be information on it you want. It's not enough time to determine whether the information there is useful, where on the page to find the information, or learn anything useful about the site. It's a super-fast first impression, and all I could absorb in this test, in which you can view a web site for either 50ms, or 500ms was the background color, the fact that there is an image on the page, and some columns. I couldn't discern the photo's subject, the content of the columns, the company name or logo, or anything meaningful. This super-fast glance may not show me whether the site is meaningful for me or not, but it does give me enough time to know this isn't one of those obnoxious, brightly-colored sites generated from Microsoft Word about someone's cat. (This is useful information, because it's highly unlikely I'll ever need information from such a site.) It's enough to tell me the site might be well done enough to actually find something.
At 500ms, things are much more discernable. It is enough to pick out that the photo contains a woman with a baby, there are three columns on the page, there is some sort of input text field on the left (probably a Search box), and some icons are shown on the right. But it's still not enough for me to decide if I'm going to leave the site or stay and try to find the information I need.
It seems all we can really take from Nature's article is the already-obvious fact that layout is an important part of the first impression. For a judgement in that timeframe to be successful, the best we can do is make sure our layouts are simple and clean, stripped of any element that may make it too dense to absorb in 50ms.
And if you aren't doing that already, well, you should be.
FlashDevelop
Kris Hadlock | 1.13.2006 @ 3:10 PM
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When we are not busy working on 33inc related projects, Robert and I are both full-time Flash Programmers for an e-learning company in Phoenix. We deal with the trials and tribulations of ActionScript on a daily basis and are quite comfortable coding anything that a client puts in front of us. The biggest issue that we have faced is finding a decent editor for our code, but at last one has arrived, it is called FlashDevelop.
It is extremely lightweight and packed with fantastic functionality. It does all of the typical code hinting and package creating that some other decent AS editors have accomplished, but it does it with grace and it works consistently. Here is a list of great features that I have found:
The list goes on and on, if you use ActionScript, it is really an essential tool!
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When we are not busy working on 33inc related projects, Robert and I are both full-time Flash Programmers for an e-learning company in Phoenix. We deal with the trials and tribulations of ActionScript on a daily basis and are quite comfortable coding anything that a client puts in front of us. The biggest issue that we have faced is finding a decent editor for our code, but at last one has arrived, it is called FlashDevelop.
It is extremely lightweight and packed with fantastic functionality. It does all of the typical code hinting and package creating that some other decent AS editors have accomplished, but it does it with grace and it works consistently. Here is a list of great features that I have found:
- Paramater type hinting in methods
- Code hinting for Singletons
- Hinting through inheritance
- An extremely easy to use snippets panel with key commands to display a list of pre-defined and custom snippets
- A "Go to declaration" shortcut to find the defining classes for objects
The list goes on and on, if you use ActionScript, it is really an essential tool!
The Tao of Software Design
Robert | 1.07.2006 @ 8:10 AM
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Last nght, while reading Designing Visual Interfaces (Mullet, Sano), I came across one of the most beautiful statements in any software-related book I've read. It's this:
"Reduction through successive refinement is the only path to simplicity."
Well said. The sentence itself is clear, concise, and vigorous writing, which makes it all that much more effective, but what's most important is that this single sentence captures the very essence of what interaction design, and 33Inc, is all about.
Software design should always be about "designing the obvious", which means designing software that, used in context, is so simple and intuitive that users attibute their ability to use it effectively as sheer common sense (which, as we all know, isn't that common). Designing the obvious means understanding your audience on a personal level, understanding the context in which they use your software, the goals they have and challenges they face, as well as what's important and what's annoying, and designing a solution that genuinely helps them achieve their personal and practical goals. This can only be accomplished through research, iteration, and smart design. And Mullet and Sano's statement above provides ultimate clarity when considering how to design great software.
Each word in the sentence speaks volumes. The word "reduction" tells us we need to reduce the scope of our software and strip it down to what's really needed, helping to avoid clutter and keep things visually simple, resulting in less bloated software. The words "successive refinement" tell us to iterate. Don't stop at a single design and call it a day. Keep iterating the design, re-evaluating at every step, challenging yourself to make it cleaner, simpler, and more elegant (and thusly, more purposeful). And the word "simplicity" clearly states the principle goal of software design.
This is how you make great software. This is the tao of software design.
Permalink | 0 Comments
Last nght, while reading Designing Visual Interfaces (Mullet, Sano), I came across one of the most beautiful statements in any software-related book I've read. It's this:
"Reduction through successive refinement is the only path to simplicity."
Well said. The sentence itself is clear, concise, and vigorous writing, which makes it all that much more effective, but what's most important is that this single sentence captures the very essence of what interaction design, and 33Inc, is all about.
Software design should always be about "designing the obvious", which means designing software that, used in context, is so simple and intuitive that users attibute their ability to use it effectively as sheer common sense (which, as we all know, isn't that common). Designing the obvious means understanding your audience on a personal level, understanding the context in which they use your software, the goals they have and challenges they face, as well as what's important and what's annoying, and designing a solution that genuinely helps them achieve their personal and practical goals. This can only be accomplished through research, iteration, and smart design. And Mullet and Sano's statement above provides ultimate clarity when considering how to design great software.
Each word in the sentence speaks volumes. The word "reduction" tells us we need to reduce the scope of our software and strip it down to what's really needed, helping to avoid clutter and keep things visually simple, resulting in less bloated software. The words "successive refinement" tell us to iterate. Don't stop at a single design and call it a day. Keep iterating the design, re-evaluating at every step, challenging yourself to make it cleaner, simpler, and more elegant (and thusly, more purposeful). And the word "simplicity" clearly states the principle goal of software design.
This is how you make great software. This is the tao of software design.
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