My New Website and Portfolio with Google Sites

I'm really excited about my new site - Its called Interface with Design

I had my previous site on Google Pages. But this looks to be shutting down. So I thought of trying Google Sites.

Overall 'sites' is pretty cool; but there are a whole bunch of restrictions especially in the page layouting & font sizes. Also there a huge bunch of stuff you can do with HTML coding, but I think it should be supported from the UI menus itself.

What I'm struggling to find is how to put a redirect on Google pages to this Google sites. Whats really crappy in sites is the URL. Its practically not possible to remember it or tell it to your friends - its too long.

Anyways, Overall i found the sites to be useful. Another cool part was the easy intrgration with Google Analytics.

Pain of handling 'Error condition' & designers' dilemma

We have have built a complete web analytics application (internal) for tracking Yahoo! products. Being the only designer for the product I got the chance to work on every BIT of it; from each and every component to every pixel. I can tell you its quite an experience handling such a big product on our own - that too when you are not only the interaction designer but also user researcher, product designer and visual designer. I'm not boosting but 'cribbing' :(

With so many flows and interconnections it become overwhelming. During design we fix these complex flows for most ideal conditions. The design works flawlessly; but then came the surprises - ERROR handling.

The product behavior was built such that the settings can be transferred. To give you an example, you are looking for mail data; then you put up certain segmentation settings like show PVs from India with age group 10-15 with users as male. Now you click on another metric like time spent - the rest of the setting of age, country & gender is transferred. The behavior is to change only the setting which user chooses to change.
This on paper looks flawless work well iin concept but then comes the conditions - in some cases it doesnt work. So this behavior works for most cases (lets say 90%) but in rest cases it throws up error.

Designers’ dilemma
Should I change the behavior to make sure system gives less errors (or conditions of no data found) or to provide a way which give most value?

Well, I choose option 2. Most use cases will work perfectly and give tremendous value, as the user settings are seamlessly transferred. I am providing value for 90% cases (this number is rough assumption) and spoiling the experience for rest 10%. But I guess its worth the risk; as it seems to be working :)

But then I had to figure out ways to make sure those 10% cases are also taken care of. This may not sound to be perfect, but we 'redirect' users to conditions that give data - of course with user consent. We show them the options of redirect.

That’s the best we could do for now.

But one thing I realized. Error conditions can some times spoil the party!
Your perfect design can be derailed with these fringe cases. But that what makes a complete design isn't it?

Too soon a conclusion

There is something that i have observed around me that has motivated me to write about it.
Data analytics is not very natural to designers; its not a part of design training. I see people around me claiming data without understanding them. Some key points to look out for -

Number is just a "number"
Number is just a number; it doesn't convey anything without other supporting information. To give you and example - So if you say my site got 1000 Page Views the question is "What does it mean?". Nothing unless you say it got a 10% increase. So others know if things are going up or down.

Understand the Scale of the number
Secondly, understand the scale 10% of 100 is 10; 10% of 100000 is 10000. Understand this sense of scale in the number.

Number in Context
Don't make conclusions with one metric. Look around and see the other behavior. Eg. Site A is having a 10% rise in PVs but the UUs is going down by 20%. What does it mean? less users are giving you more PVs. But why are you getting less users? This can't be explained by data alone, which takes us to the next point.

Support Metric with other methods.
The data can tell you PVs are going down by "why" is a question that lies beyond data analytics.
There is a lot that data can tell you but you need to triangulate the data with other methods like doing user study (quantitative methods). There is lot that might have gone in the offline world that has influenced the performance - eg you might have run an Ad or might have done marketing. Or some event that has triggered a behavior. So keep that into account.

Where is your traffic coming in and what are the clicking or going is what primarily you might want to look at in the beginning. Next you might want to slice and dice data to look into detail - eg. you might want to segment the traffic based on age, gender, country etc.

These are some basic pointers for designers to get started on analytics. Keep in mind 'dont jump to conclusion too soon; you might land up with the wrong analysis or may only see just one aspect of the problem and may miss out other obvious stuff.'

After a long break!

I’m back to blogging after a looong break. I was involved in a major project, which took my time and attention. Now that the product is in Beta testing I can have some spare time to write about design.

Digits 2.0
Let me talk about my new product for a while. I was working with ‘Digits 2.0’; which is a Yahoo! Network analytics product. It helps teams and execs keep track of the entire Yahoo! Products.
It was a massive project as it involved looking at so many use cases across the company and on top I being the only designers. This being an internal application; the scope for getting more resource was always remote.
Designing this web analytics tool was an eye opener because it opened up a whole new way of looking at design. With design I got the opportunity to see the domain of analytics so closely. With proper understanding of number it gives enormous power to a designer to understand 'performance' of a site/app. But you truely need to understand the metric and dimensions in order to understand this aspect.

I'll be sharing about my understanding of this domain over subsequent posts - also about designing apps and design architecture/framework.

Awesome presentation on human behavior - cheating

This is really very insightful. It talks of 'cheating'; though unrealted to design in general. But having said that its important to know human psychology. The more we know the better we design.....ok ok ok im not preaching. There are some obvious implications for design.

Really a nice one to watch and consider in design. These are kinds of talks which make you feel - why am I not doing research; there is some much to know!