Posted by Sean Madden - July 19, 2007
If you are a web-standards or web-accessibility purist then you have been given quite a lot of reasons to put your hackles up with the release of iPhone (yeah, Steve doesn't use an article so I'm not going to either). You see, people are releasing sites that are iPhone-specific and even employing dastardly mechanisms to sniff your browser and only serve their wares to those wealthy enough to shill out $600 for iPhone.
THE NERVE!
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Posted by Sean Madden - May 30, 2007
For those who haven't seen it, go check out Microsoft Surface.
First Reaction: "Now that is cool."
Second Reaction: "Wait, haven't I seen that before?"
My second reaction was both true and an unfair poke at Microsoft. Yes, I have seen this type of technology before, most notably Jeff Han's research. But Microsoft is not the first company to take direction from a nascent research sector and run with it (I'm looking at you Apple). With the pending release of iPhone and general buzz around multi-touch technology it makes perfect sense that Microsoft is headed in this direction.
How close are we to realizing any of the goodness displayed in the sample videos? I would venture a guess that we are not very close at all.
The most interesting hurdle (or perhaps MS sees it as a lever?) to adoption will be Microsoft's inevitable insistence that their tables only work with Microsoft devices. A table like this would be far more useful to the average consumer if it were built in such a way that any device could be programmed to interface with it.
Unfortunately, this is not the way the world works and the peripheral devices will most likely have to be Microsoft-approved. Bummer. (It should be noted that Apple would probably do the same thing, so I'm only singling out MS here because it was their announcement). From Microsoft's perspective, this is an interesting entry into the coveted living room space and if it sees wide acceptance could act as a substantial selling point for their peripherals.
I find the credit card scenario at the end of the third movie to be sort of silly, but the geek in me sure did like it.
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Posted by Sean Madden - May 7, 2007
I spent Thursday and Friday of last week up north in Portland attending and speaking at the annual Webvisions conference. Webvisions is a regional conference now in its seventh year that promises to provide "a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your Web site, company and career."
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Posted by Sean Madden - April 9, 2007
What can we learn from a street musician flopping in front of a busy commuter crowd in Washington D.C.? Tons, if that musician happens to be Joshua Bell, recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize.
On January 12th, 2007, the Washington Post set Bell in a busy commuter station as a street musician to see how the crowd would react to having one of the greatest classical musicians on earth delivering a free concert to no one in particular. The resulting article's findings are astounding.
Bell was virtually ignored.
Aside from this being a fascinating cultural experiment, there is an excellent lesson embedded within it that designers of any ilk should heed: context matters more than you would like to believe. In one setting Bell can fill halls with people who gladly pay hundreds of dollars to see him and stifle their coughs in reverence to his craft. In another, more than 1000 people pass him by without even the slightest acknowledgment.
No matter how good your idea is and no matter how well you execute on it, if you get the context wrong you will miss your audience entirely. Like Bell, this will be hard for you to stomach because the mastery of your craft is no different between the varying contexts, only the environment has changed. Because of this it is tempting to blame the commuters for their cultural ineptitude, just as it is tempting to blame users for not fully understanding our systems.
Accounting for context is, and should be, an integral part of understanding the user experience. If we are designing a mobile application, we must be aware not only of the diminished screen space, but also of the environments users may be in. These environments may cause them to only use one hand, only have half an eye available, or may require them to operate the application blindly. If we don't take these factors into account, even the sexiest, most kickin' application ever put together falls flat.
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Posted by Sean Madden - March 29, 2007
One of the elements lauded in flickr's interface is it's general goofiness with the written word. Each time you log in, it greets you in a different language then the last time.
"Hala smadden!"
When you click a button, it doesn't say "submit" it says "get in there!" These interface tweaks personalize the system, make it seem more friendly to the user. Such decisions are absurdly easy on the technical end but can be difficult to make from a business standpoint. Does it make our brand too lackadaisical, not serious enough? Personally, I really appreciate the small touches, which is why I really enjoyed finding this gem from Google on Digg today.
If you look at step 20 in the driving directions, you will find "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean." Now that's funny.
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Posted by Sean Madden - March 23, 2007
One of the elements that draws me to develop for the web is astoundingly close-knit and open community of designers and developers. A natural side-effect of such a community is the rise of an A-list, or rockstar group of designers who get an inordinate amount of attention and adulation. Personally, I don't object to this behavior because those who have taken or been pushed into the spotlight are nearly all excellent ambassador's for the craft. They have no issue sharing methodology or inspiration and are constantly giving back to the community at large.
It is for this reason that when needed, the mostly silent community can come together and have a potentially great impact. Recently, Dan Cederholm of simplebits has been the victim of some pretty egregious design theft. He didn't blog about it but simply posted an image of the stolen work in his flickr stream. It has been fascinating to watch the community's response to Dan's situation. At first, nearly everyone who commented agreed it was ripped off and simply sent him condolences. However, at some point the offending proprietor of the site selling the work jumped in with ludicrous accusations and decided to stand his ground against Dan.
And the resulting cacophony was like he individually slapped everyone in the face.
The noise transitioned from sympathetic into proactive, and now the community is coming together and doing whatever it can to raise awareness about the shady business practices of the offending company and supporting Dan in anyway they can think of. Dan never once asked for any of this. It is true that he is a "web-celeb" and is probably receiving some of the attention due to that, but I have seen other designers work get stolen and gain support from our community as well. Typically, the theft deals in CSS and HTML and the offending parties are quick to remove the stolen work as soon as they start to receive the negative mention.
I am certain that design theft occurs in nearly every discipline, but is the community around that discipline as eager to defend one of their own? Can anyone point me to any examples of this?
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Posted by Sean Madden - March 15, 2007
I spent a lot of my time at SXSW this year sitting on panels discussing the mobile space. I did learn quite a bit, but the thing that I found most intriguing was the difficulty people are having distinguishing the various mobile spaces, particularly the difference between mobile applications and the mobile web. These two practices are fundamentally different and must be mentally separated by our community. The mobile web is about re-purposing current sites or creating stand-alone sites that are meant to be experienced through the phone's web browser. Mobile application development deals in applications written to run directly on the phone. These spaces are vastly different and have noticeably divergent challenges to overcome. Obviously, I am doing both of these spaces a slight disservice by only using one sentence to explain them, but hey, this is a blog post.
On Sunday I sat in an excellent session by Brian Fling of Blue Flavor where he opened a fire hose of information into the audience concerning the mobile web, running the gamut from mobile IA to the sweet spot of visual design. The overall message was clear: we already have most of the tools we need, it's getting easier, and mobile users are a space that absolutely cannot be ignored. When he finished and the questions started coming in, they were centered around technologies such as flash lite, brew, and other mobile development platforms. He deflected the questions easily, but the confusion in the audience was quite clear.
Later, I sat in a panel specifically put together to talk about mobile application development. This panel was a bit of a disappointment. One of the panelists was John Poisson from radar.net. He was very well spoken and their crew had done some very intelligent things (like only choosing words in their destination email addresses that didn't have letters on the same key adjacent to one another), but I don't believe that they have actually built a mobile application. Their service depends upon a user taking a picture and sending it to their servers via MMS, and the service then provides them with a site where they can view their friends' pictures in their mobile browser. This is NOT a mobile application, this is a very clever use of the mobile web. Yet there he was on the mobile apps panel. No wonder people are confused.
The only person on the panel that had any experience building a true mobile application was Simon King from Yahoo! who is working on their Zone Tag product (there was a designer/developer from Nokia but he couldn't talk to specifics due to secrecy issues). King spoke with authority and the most interesting thing he said was his definitive statement that Flash Lite is not a production ready technology primarily because of memory leak issues and lack of access to the phone's firmware. He did mention that it is an excellent prototyping tool, but certainly not ready for prime-time. Naturally, once the panelists finished and the questions started coming in, they were along the lines of migrating current web sites to the mobile environment, the state of ajax on the mobile phone, and other mobile-web centric topics. Most of these questions were simply deflected by the panelists and referred to Fling's presentation notes.
There will be enormous growth in both the web and application development for mobile devices in the near future. Yes, it is true that mobile applications use the same data services as the mobile web and there is definitely overlap between the two spaces, but they are different enough that they must be separated in people's minds. One is no better than the other, but developing and designing for them is going to be a challenge and we need to ensure that people understand their medium so that the correct challenges are addressed and questions are answered. I do not believe that there was any clarity delivered at SXSW, and that is mildly disappointing.
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Posted by Sean Madden - March 8, 2007
When Apple first added the airport express to its line of products, they seamlessly integrated the experience of connecting remotely to your stereo. As an unabashed admirer of their products, I picked one up fairly early on and was quite pleased with it. At the time I had only one device but did hear some rumblings about multiple adapters and Apple's inability to play through multiple sources at once. The grumbling quickly faded to the background and I forgot about it.
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Posted by Sean Madden - February 7, 2007
I have always been fascinated with ESPN.com. As a lover of sport, it is my de-facto source for information. As an interested observer of web-design principles, it is nearly always a place to look for examples of how a gigantic internet presence is attempting to solve the problems we all face. Some of the decisions made are absolutely questionable, decisions like auto-playing video content on the homepage, but some can offer valuable insights.
It seems that every few months the little corner of the blogosphere inhabited by professional web designers/developers blows up discussing the issue of acceptable resolution sizes. At this point, the defacto standard seems to be 800x600 but many are lobbying and many more are simply designing for 1024x768. I'm not here to weigh in on that battle, but rather to point out how ESPN has decided to parse out their precious 800x600 pixels. Their design is optimized for a wider resolution, but their grid puts their primary content within an 800px boundary.
Take a quick look at this screencap:
For most, it has been generally accepted that there is no such thing as a fold in the web. Vertical scrolling has been accepted and should not be looked upon in agony. There is something to be said, however, for making a first impression with your available vertical space. ESPN is using their space for two things: advertisements and brand.
Neither of these things are particularly user-centric. The availability of the navigation is nice, but the content doesn't begin for 235px, which is increased to approximately 335px if you include the users' browser chrome, or more than halfway down the page. I have a friend who used to art direct for ESPN.com and he indicated they received a lot of griping about the number of ads on their site. His response was to remind them that the majority of the content was FREE and they were easily the largest sports site in town.
If the intention is to grab a user's attention when they come to a site and compel them to stay, I'm not sure ads and brand is the best approach. ESPNs brand is fairly well known already and flashing ad banners is no way to retain visitors (even though in this screencap they are promoting internal initiatives, these spaces have been used for external products).
But I don't work there and don't have to live with the harsh realities of life at ESPN.com. I simply find it interesting to observe that they have used what seems to be their most valuable real-estate for two elements that would seem more at home in print or other forms of media.
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Posted by Sean Madden - January 30, 2007
Ok, it's certainly not boring, but I like to draw you in and then refute my titles. It's sort of a dirty trick, but I'm not above it. My article on the state of visual design in the web just went up over at Digital Web. Go check it out and sound off in the comments.
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