Paradox of choice

This is very nice and interesting video. A different perspective in looking at things around us.

Paradox of choice? Ask a designer. Its part of his every day work.
Design is about choosing the right decision. Every step in design is filled with options. And to add to complexity AJAX has adding many more choices to decide (more degree of freedom) from for designing UIs. I have seen a lot of designers getting stuck at points just because they fear of taking decisions.

The biggest thing is "Responsibility"; if you are responsible for a design you have to make it work. And for that you have to make the correct choices all along the way. More choices you have more chances are there to get it wrong. We have to learn to live with choices and become smarter in decisions. I guess this can only come when you know your job well. Same as if I know and I'm confident I'm buying the right stuff; my chances to taking the right decision are more (and be satisfied with it). What I need is, to be clear about those parameters that are crucial for me. And remember humans have a low short term memory; its difficult to compare more than 4 parameters at a time. See this is convergence - cognitive science with psychology :)

Thus i guess; 'more clarity' lead to 'better decisions'. Be clear on your 'decision making parameters'.

Accidental Designs (Serendipity)

Accidental Designs? Well I didn’t know what else to call them. I recently attended a conference USID 07 in Hyderabad. There was a talk by Google. And the same old story – Google’s Homepage. Yes; I know, recognize and appreciate their Home page.

But!! Was it designed? Not exactly. It’s an “Accidental Design”. Just because Larry Page didn’t know HTML he created this Page and it worked. I’m not sure he knew what users wanted when he launched. Its not a thoughtful design - it was not intended.

Getting the design to ‘work’
This is the most critical aspect in design. Getting the designs to work perfectly; which is the most challenging part and is a “Black Box”. While designing you never know what will work. So if you know what is working its more than half of the work (decision making & getting the parameters) done. I feel its easier to know what doesn’t work; while it’s a challenge to know what actually works. If Google Home page had been a failure they wouldn’t have known how to “redesign” it (they would have known some problems; but what’s the real problem to solve?). They were lucky to get their page to work and thus may have discovered why it’s actually working. And now they seems to have built a whole philosophy of UI design built on this - which I guess works.

Coming back to some earlier thoughts (in earlier post) some best designs like Periodic Tables or "The 1854 London Cholera Epidemic map" can also be debated if they are accidental designs. One thing to know in design is – will it work? And because of the subjectivity of design, that question is the hardest to figure out. Even with best of processes and analysis you are not sure if it will work till you see users using it. The only way to know it is to put it in front of users – let them play & they will teach you. I’m trying to imagine how would the Google Homepage would look like if Larry Page has asked a designer to design it? I’m sure it wouldn’t have been so different from the other competitors that time.

What to do
In the huge pile of failed designs these Accidental Designs come shining through. The trick seems to be experimentation and a bit of luck. Also getting them right at the fundamental level is critical because it defines how far the designs can go. If it works, you know how to go ahead; if it fails – God bless you – it’s a rough road ahead.

Some get it right
I also feel there it’s a talent - some designers have a knack of getting their design to work. And some even though they work hard never get it right. It could be intuitive and depended on the value systems & design decision parameters.

G! Maps…Street View…rocks!!!

Google launches ‘Street View’ for their maps. It’s a really WOW – it surprised me with what it can do and with the quality. Very neatly done – full points to them. I have a very healthy respect for Google designers.

I can understand the feeling of ‘satisfaction’ and the feeling of ‘achievement’ maps team would be feeling. Or may e they have got used to it :)

The one thing I don’t like about Google is their disrespect to visual design. They don’t use it properly. I think a bit of color can significantly increase their page layouts and make the information segregation better. Too much white space is good; but not so much. If I were to do their page I would have done this way.

click to enlarge

Hiring Designers? Some thought on ‘Patterns in Designers’

I can say I have met quite a number of designers both during my college days to my professional life – especially through interviews. I have been involved in hiring process for designer for Yahoo! for quite some time now. My involvement mostly have been to evaluate the ‘design thinking’ of the candidates. Interacting with people I’m starting to see some patterns in designers. These are some patterns that I have seen in designers and design thinking :

Feature Thinkers – For clarity they are not ‘Ideators’ or ‘Thinkers’ or ‘Innovators’ if you think. These are generally designer who generally give good ideas about a new feature, product etc. They can think at a macro level and can give nice ideas on it. But these may not be the best people to implement it. They’ll give nice ideas but are ‘generally’ not able to transform (implement) these ideas into usable/useful designs. These are broad level ‘feature thinkers’. They generally throw wild ideas.

Implementers – Implementers are thinkers but of different sort. These are designers who can solve the problem effectively. These are innovators who can make things ‘work’. They may not be the best of thinkers who can provide broad level “out of box” ideas. But they can solve design issues at more of a grass root level. Their innovation is in making thing work; give them an average idea and they will make it good by their implementation solutions. One attribute which ‘could’ be associated with them is their eye for detail.

Hybrids – And then there are hybrids. A mix of both ‘Feature Thinkers’ and ‘Implementers’. And these are the one who are toughest to find.

Followers – These are sadly the most common to find. These are designer who are Skill Driven. You tell them what to do and they will do it in no time. But they don’t add anything to you knowledge pool or to design. They just follow what’s told to them. These designers thrive on their software skills and they could be useful in some cases.

I guess the best team would be a mix of all these types of designers. Every one has their own qualities. The best would be to get implementers; but identifying them is difficult. One needs to analyze them thoroughly to know if they are good implementers.

Innovation happens at every level – at feature level or at implementation level. Thus I haven’t called Feature Thinkers as innovators. Innovation is considered an innovation if its come out of the ‘factory’, just good idea is not innovation it needs a good implementation. Thus for innovation you need both – ‘Feature Thinkers’ and ‘Implementers’.

These are my thoughts; so don't ask me to support my claims with data ;)

Design Patterns: Are we looking at them from the wrong way?

Was thinking about patterns some days back and was wonder why haven’t created the impact they could have. I’m not talking about big corporation which use them extensively, but small companies or innovation oriented companies.

The reason I feel we are looking at them from the wrong perspective is because the way we structure the patterns are not easily accessible. Let look at the common scenarios of design – what time will you look for a design pattern? Most when you are taking a design decision. Lets look at the current structure of pattern libraries available on the web today. Most of the sites have them classified by their names like breadcrums, drag and drop, tabs, double tab etc. Now if you look at them from the usability perspective; while designing do you think we need breadcrums or I need a drag and drop ? The question that usually comes to mind is “I need to how the user where this current page is located”. At this point of time you want to see what all design options you have to show users the current location of the page. And here the current design pattern structure fails. Unless you know breadcrums are one of the solutions you may never be able to find the right design solution.

The current structure is usable if you know all the “names” of the design patterns that are in use. So what happens most of the time is that you end up using only those patterns that you are aware of.

Another common way that I have seen some people using is by making a self library of design patterns from the web. Designers choose certain design patterns that they like and then start to design their pages trying to some how fit those into their design. This is very negative way to approach design. Design being a problem solving process shouldn’t encourage this kind of usage to patterns.

It’s something like - to create a movie you first start to choose certain scene from other movies that you liked and then try to mix them together to create a story out of it. For better results it should be like you create the story (purpose), then look at the catalog of scene (design pattern) that fit into that story.

This tells us that its not the name of the movie clip that is important but what it shows (purpose) that is important. At the right point of time I should know which scene is to be put together by “purpose” than by it “name”.

It’s a pure information categorization issue. How to present the data to users to make it more sensible to them.

I need to see some solution to a specific information or interaction. And I should be able to find it through my problem rather than by name –

“Double Tab” – it makes sense to people who know it, but I’m sure there are a lot who don’t know the name but may be aware of the design. Thus names could be unintuitive unless we create a Nomenclature which is universal and which may also indicate the purpose of the pattern. The current categorization needs a lot of learning; we have to find ways to cut them and make it more logical.

I’m be writing about this more in future…

G's new Header

Google changed its universal header today. And interestingly it looks very similar to what I once proposed. But the background needs to be a bit different so that it can stand out from the rest of the page. If top header gets segregated from the rest it will bring more focus to the page. Slight grey or light bluish can do. Also the bg could be made a bit transparent to allow it to gel well with iGoogle themes. I hope Google is not listening...

This was my idea.

See my original post

Understanding “WOW” & “Neat”

It’s a very fuzzy topic to write about. The industry has been using these terms to explain the outcome of a user experiences. These are common words – Wow or Neat.

Lets try to see what they mean and what ‘might’ generate them. Lets talk about WOW. When did you said wow for any UI? Of what I have gather through my memory about my WOW moments; I can say – I said them when I got surprised (for sure) or when I liked a liked a very visually impressive UI (hmm say while using Mac).

For sure I can say my WOW moment was when I got surprised – when I didn’t expect some thing but was there. One way to get this wow moment is to think out of the box feature or “may be” a new impressive interaction. The other way to get a wow is by detail – surprise a user by the designing for the minutest details (and getting it right).

“Neat” is I guess slightly different. It’s more to do with getting your structure right. Where every component on the page fits together properly to bring out a clear message (communication). Neat is uncluttered but may not necessarily mean “visually impressive”; thus may not be complete in User Experience. Also Neat doesn’t require a surprise while by my understanding WOW can’t be achieved without it. Neat is essentially doing a standard stuff in an easier/simpler way.

So I can say WOW is the complete Holy Grail of user experience while “neat” is one step short. Looking at examples around us I will say – Apple products fall in WOW while Google fall in the category of “Neat”.

Dealing with GIS

GIS is the next generation technology; one that deals with geographical data. GIS makes a basic layer which can be used as a base to build multiple utility products from - building a local business product; to urban planning; to architecture layouts to Town planning;to topography sheets in geology - everything that has anything to do with Geographical data.

The first thing that you would like to ask is - What data do you want to show at what zoom level (‘if’ you are dealing with zoom)? This totally depends on the intent of the design – what is to be achieved is what will define what data is important and how is it interconnected. Thus the full information set needed - with priority of each.

One data set (for one zoom) could involve multiple data – roads (with numerous categories); water bodies (with numerous categories); land use (with numerous categories); Electric lines; topography; soil type; vegetation etc. The list can be enormous.

After you choose the data type you have to visually represent it. Now it’s easier said than done…look at the options you have to control to make your designs -

• For - Vector Line
• Line width (in px) + color/pattern of line + Transparency (alpha channel) + Line type + (maybe) elevation – z axis data as well;
• Border (in px) + color of border + Transparency of border + Line type (dotted, dashed, complete etc.) + Anti aliasing;
• Text (Name of the line) + Font for Text + Color of the text + Border to Text + Color of border to the text + Transparency of the text + Name to be rendered – full, part, abbreviate.
  

• For - Polygons (regions)
• Color/pattern of region + Transparency + (maybe) elevation – z axis data as well;
• Text (Name of the region) + Font for Text + Color of the text + Border to Text + Color of border to the text + Transparency of the text + Name to be rendered – full, part, abbreviate.
  

• For - Points
• Marker/Icons;
• Text (Name of the region) + Font for Text + Color of the text + Border to Text + Color of border to the text + Transparency of the text + Name to be rendered – full, part, abbreviate.
  

Every data has a lat-long info attached to it. Thus all the points correspond to a point on earth. But there is another issue for you to solve – the correction in making a map by taking into account the circular aspects of the earth. Though thats a mathematical problem; but as designers there are a lot of scenarios where it makes a difference (like if the map is to be imposed on any background like satellite images; aerial images etc. or if it has to corresponds exactly on a point in earth - say for planning.).

This is definitely huge list – how many permutations and combinations? This is the kind of information overload you are dealing with. The only way to design – simple – if you are focused, you know what you are doing…this is a piece of cake. If not…you’ll be lost. It’s just a pure ‘age old’ information design problem…just digitally enhanced in terms of degree of freedom (more parameters are to be controlled now).

So it all depends on "design" how much users might want to control in GIS; how much parameters (degree of freedom) can be controlled. There are interrelationships and dependencies which are to be accounted while designing for a specialized use.

The more you are aware of what data you are dealing with and what is the importance of it...the better you can design - both the GIS or its usage.

Intelligent designs!

I was going through TED.com when I saw this presentation. I must admit this is one of the most interesting presentation I have seen. Ted's UI design itself is interesting; have a look sometime.

At one of the point David talks of “intelligent design”. I guess that some thing very very important in design. That is one factor that separates a good design from a bad one. Trust me making ‘intelligent’ designs are not easy; the only way one can make is by very good understanding of the problem. As I always say at every step there are multiple solutions; but there are very few (mostly only one) “intelligent” ones. And to get to that solution(s) you have to pass through all the rest. Meticulously evaluating and removing them one by one; and this is no easy task. This is the LOGIC part of the design; one which need analysis and thinking.

Design needs brains; it needs thinking…

First Step is hardest and the most critical

Some days back I was thinking about design when this thought passed by. I have always believed that the first step in design in hardest. Building something from scratch and making the first draft is so tough. The reason that I though its tough is because of this is the step when we deal with “ABSOLUTE” values. To tell you an example – for the first time when we built the spec for cartography, we had to do some much analysis – what to show; how to show; will it look good? So many questions came to the table. But once we built and render the first set, things became easy – now it all became “RELATIVE”. This doesn’t look good so remove it, or add some thing, push this down to a lower zoom etc. Suddenly you will realize it’s now much simpler to edit/manipulate/modify things; now that there is some reference to look forward to.

But there is another important reason why the first step is so critical. It ‘defines’ the number of iterations the design would need. The closer the first step is to final (finished) design the lesser the iterations. Also it give that much more time to iterate and finish you design to the best (or even allow you to extent you limit of ‘finish’). The final step/finish thus depends on the first.

But also if the first step is a failure; either the iteration cycles become enormous (some times unmanageable) or one has to go back again to the drawing table. Thus this step is very important and critical. A good designer should keep this in mind – the more effort you put in the beginning – more the chances of finishing the designing properly (and to your satisfaction).

Product: Competing in established market

We were having a casual discussion over the lunch when a nice thought came in. It is practically impossible or extremely difficult to build a new product to compete with competitor products which have been there in the market for some time. What’s difficult is to bridge the “time” difference between the products. Take an example of Maps; Map products have been around for more than 2 years (I guess) in US. So if some company now wants to come up with a new map product it has to bridge that gap of 2 years. In two year the competitors would have built so many features and enhancements that it is practically not possible to bridge that “time” gap instantly.

The best way could be to not make an exactly similar product but a different/unique product to compete. Some one mentioned Gmail; mail was around but Gmail stole the show because it was different. If it would have been similar to other mails, it wouldn't have created any impact. Its a really nice thought...

This is to some extent the state of whole Web Industry in India. Because it started late; there is hardly any innovativeness or uniqueness. Its lags in time from US; thus innovation is hard to come by. If we move 2 steps closer to them; they again more 3 step further from us. Because now things are well established they can make huge jumps forward; while most of our energy goes in just building the basic stuff.

So if you want to be a part of innovation; want to work with products that are ahead of their time…you have to be in US. Or so I think.

Visual Design as an Information Design tool

Visual Design or Graphic Design as people might call it; has been mostly associated with the Experience and Look n Feel part of design. But Visual design is tremendously powerful tool when it comes to information design / information architecture. I personally feel the real power of this has not been truly utilized on the web. With usage of the age old “Gestalts Law” information can be presented in a very interesting manner. The kind of tools that Visual design uses are – Typography, Color, Placement, Layout, Texture/patterns, etc.

Starting from the Layout – the page itself can be designed to allow users to focus on certain aspects of information / section.

Typography, placement and color could be used to effectively create chunks of information which can be effectively used in segregating information. Also this could effectively create the hierarchy in information. Important information / section can be ‘subtly’ highlighted very effectively. Even simple things like 'bullet points' can be used as visual cues to point to an information.

One aspect that all application should account for is ‘Glazing/Glancing’ and design for it. What I mean by that it; user by just glancing on the page should get as much information as possible. This will substantially increase the readability and understandability of the information presented to the users.

To even use this there is lot of thinking that need to go into design. One has to really understand: what is the - information hierarchy, information chunks and more importantly the “objective” of the page/screen. Objective – Why do we need this page/screen; what the user has to understand in the screen/page; what user has to do in this screen.

The challenge is that if you want to use this you need a pixel perfect both in design and HTML. This is where a single pixel or slight change in color can create a huge difference in design. Just one pixel the information chunks comes close and suddenly you will find that they don’t appear to be two different chunks but one. Here you need a good eye for design.

These are aspect which if present will not be so much noticed by the user; but if absent would make it difficult for users to understand the UI.

We used these techniques in the Map cartography and even the UI.

Designing Maps...

This blog post is for readers/students who want to know about the designing side of Y! India Maps. For our map product we designed both the map cartography and UI.

Map Cartography

Map

Maps cartography is the designing of the maps. Map cartography is a pure “information design” problem. There are two aspects to it – “what data to show at what zoom level?” and then “how to show?”. From the design stand point they combine together to create the desired effect. Thus we used the Visual Design in a way to assist the information (Data) architecture. We had a limitation in terms of what we can do – like we can not have a border on text, there were limitation on transparency etc. So we work largely with colors. Things that the users want to see more often have brighter colors or are enhanced (by changing the width, border etc); secondary information is subdued. Every zoom level had a purpose (objective) in terms of what they will convey. And also every zoom level had relation with the previous and next zooms. This was important as the map is interactive; on zoom the user should feel as if hes zooming. Zoom spec tried to connect both the relationship aspect (with other zooms) and the individual aspects (it shouldn’t look cluttered).

Map Tile some time in Nov. It all began with this... (this is Zoom 06 and you are looking at Delhi)

To see this location (with same zoom level) in current version. Click here – you won’t believe it!!

Hybrid

Though the design principles remained the same the strategy was a slightly different. The Data in this case was a supplement to the Satellite images. Though at higher zoom levels the things don’t matter much but as you zoom in the specs starts to change. As the city level starts to appear the Satellite image itself becomes a huge repository of information. Then you start to see what information is going to add value to the image below. If you are looking for your house and you know which locality you live in, you could navigate through locality and some landmarks through our Y! India Maps.

User Interface

We tried to keep the page as light as possible - as less images as possible. Another question I had been answering from the time I proposed it was “why right navigation”. Well there is a long story behind it, which i'll tell later. But we kept the info pane on the right just to experiment; but this layout suddenly started to make a lot of sense:

• The Left became very less cluttered.
• The is not break between the info pane or map area – as in other map site with left info/navigation pane.
• The listings in the Search Result Page comes closer to the map. Its on the left on the right pane. Thus better visual connection.
• The map which is the main information space get the Topish –Left space. Most viewable area of the screen.

I had to create a separate twiki page (internal web page of this product) with the explanation because so many people asked this and so many times…

Another important aspect was to keep the information (and the UI) incontext. So you will see the yellow message boxes appearing below in “Do more with maps” section (one that comes after you search for a allocation). We designed the UIs with full feature in mind. Right now I can say its just 30% of what we deigned for. The design is largely scalable as functions grow they will be added without major changes to UI design.

We never tried to coping anyone; we wanted to solve the problem with the best effect. Some differentiators of Y! India Maps could be -

• Right navigation/info pane.
• The Split of the top header marking the map area and info pane area.
• Map being attached with its header than detached.
• The use of ‘Color’. Which are broadly taken from Yahoo! Local (US) – the blue being a little more bright to add a little “life” to the UI.
• The error messaging styles.

One thing that we didn’t think much was the Printable Version page. It still needs a lot of thinking and improvement.

Its encouraging to find that people have started liking it and writing about it - webyantra

It was real fun working on maps and we sincerely hope you’ll find it fun to use. Please do take some time off and post you feedback on the product. The stage is now set, its time to rock n rolls; hope this product goes a long way. Though I may not be there but I wish Y! India Maps - All the very best…

Google Header

I love Gmail but really hate Google's header. I was thinking of some solution for it...thought of a design. Though its not so great but still I guess would help to improve their design.
see a small screen shot at this link.
http://abhishek.iitr.googlepages.com/googleheader

Good UI ideas need not come from designers; but good ideas should also translate to good design…

Good UI ideas don’t just come from UI designers; they come from any where; at any time and by anyone. So why do you need a designer? Good question indeed. There is good reason why you should…

Now first thing to look about these “AHA! good idea” moments is there timing. If these ideas come very early in the conceptualization stage they are easier to accommodate. But the real problem comes when these ideas come at later stage. As I have been saying before design is built on decisions and they are like a pyramid of cards. If you try to replace a card placed some where at the bottom the whole pyramid can collapse. It becomes harder to design as we move up the pyramid. There are lots of dependencies that one has to take into account to add anything new to the design. Every thing in a UI is interrelated. Adding or changing can have a severe impact on the UI; a lot can change in order to do even some small changes.

This is where the designer comes into picture. Yes any one can get good ideas but what any one else can not do it to “translate” a good idea into good design. A good design fits into the scheme of things and blends perfectly with its interrelated elements. A good idea may look good in a specific use case; but may also spoil a bunch of others. A designer can make sure (if he’s good) to make that good ideas look good in all use case/scenarios/conditions. What designer can bring in is that multi perspective analysis to make sure it doesn’t conflict with any other elements on the UI and that the communication is not hampered. This is the beauty of design “make good ideas look good always”.

Thinking!!! Is all what ‘design’ is built on…the more you can ‘think’ the better (& more complete) design you can build. If you can think hard, your are already a designer :)

Built on decisions

Design is all about design decisions…at every stage you are trying to decide what will work for your designs. These decisions came very early in design – be it deciding what product you want to make to how would it look to how would it work…

At all step you are involved in taking decisions; and success of your design closely depend on these decisions.

The most important part of design decision is how many parameters are involved in that decision. The more the parameters you are using to take the decision the probability of creating a good design is more. What it means is that your designs are designed for all those parameters. It like you have to create a protective cover for an art work; so you want to make sure that the cover takes care of ALL those things/conditions that “will or may” damage that art work. The same is for design; you try to make sure you cover all aspects that are going to affect the product you are designing.

Another critical aspect of design decisions is their “interdependency”. What do I mean by that? Well I mean is all along the design process you would be taking certain decisions at say ‘stage 1’. Now when you move to ‘stage 2’ you would be taking another set of decisions. But now these decisions will be highly depended on what you decided at ‘stage 1’. Thus all along the design you would be taking decisions which you be so inter depended that if you try to change a certain decision that you took at a lower stage the whole design would fall into pieces. It’s like a pyramid build of cards. If you remove a lower card the whole pyramid falls apart. This is because of these interdependencies of the design decision.

If you take one wrong decision you land up with a wrong design…and if you realize is late – you are dead!. Thus design is one profession where you need to be very sure of what you are doing. And to add to the complexity the decisions that are involved are very “subjective”, with each path/decision having certain pros and cons. This is where the real adventure lies? Is it?

But with thorough logic, analysis and understanding you can to a large extent reduce the unknowns of design and bring in some objectivity in design decisions. Thus design is not about creativity it’s also about analysis and research…find out the problem and the solution will find you…

'Degree of Freedom' in design depends on…

We have come close to launching a product in some time now. When I look back I realize that what I realize that my “degree of freedom” to design closely depended on – Product Manager and the Front end/Web developer.

The reason I say this is because these are the two important people who really defines what you can do as designers. The Product Manager is product owner of the product thus he is the one who take the final decisions in terms of Business strategy, Engineering and also Design. When I look back I realize that I could ‘explore’ so much because the Product Manager allowed me to do that. It’s very important for a designer to have confidence of the Product Manager and the team. How much you can explore depends on how much “trust” they have on the designer/design team. This is very critical. Also if the product manger is willing to experiment there is a lot of freedom that the designer gets. What’s important here is that both the Designer and to some extent the Product Manager should “own” up the experimentations and their decisions. The most difficult part in design is this ownership of design decisions because of the subjective nature of design. So both Designers should own both the success and failures of UI. And I know its easier said than done; it’s a great responsibility. But the PMs should also own a bit of it as they are also part of most decisions.

The reason I have mentioned the Web/front end developers is because s/he is the person who is responsible for the implementation of the designs. Design doesn’t end by building JPEG screenshots but in final HTML (that what people actually see). And I know building the Front End is whole new ball game. They are essentially two different set of operations with both work with “different parameters and different decisions”. Design is subjective while Web development is very much mathematical. If you are lucky to get a good front end developer you can experiment a lot; else you are restricted by the web devs limitations. Thus the degree of freedom closely depends on the web devs also.

There are a lot of other people also who influence designs. But I guess these are the two very important people who really define what a designer can do. Over all as I have been saying…

The product is as good as the people who build it…to build innovative product you need creative people all along the product cycle.

Designing for the New Age Web

I recently spoke in “National Conference on Web 2.0” held in Bangalore. The topic that I touched was about the challenges for designing for Web 2.0 products. Web 2.0 has essentially changed the way we now have to think about UI design. It has added a lot more to think about now in terms of designing. I’ll touch upon some of them in this article.

Web is changing

Web is changing; and why should we be surprised by the change? Even the environment of the users is changing. Their economic, social and cultural environment has changed; and we web has been one of the instruments of this change. Even the other technologies have brought in new needs for web products. The famous examples are – Flickr and You Tube; if there hadn’t been digital cameras = digital photography/video these won’t have been existed.

These new found needs are pushing the way we have to think about the next generation of products. What’s important to know for designers is to be able to see these upcoming ‘needs’ and track these changing environment of users.

Designing for Web 2.0

Looking at the changing trends and evolution of web technologies are pushing the limits to how we design on the web. The two important aspects that AJAX have changed are the –

• interaction design
• information design
• One critical aspect that has been added to the arsenal of the design is TIME.
  

A better control on time has brought in a whole new change in the way we have to think about Design. Now with power to control elements in time a whole new concept of animation comes to picture. And with animation comes Story. Story that can be used to effectively inform the user about the change in the state of the system.

Let’s look at this new design paradigm change:

• In-context Operations
• Animation / Story
• Continuity
• Multilayer of information
• Multitasking
  

In-Context Operations

Operations that needed another screen now can be done “in context”; user can be present in the state where s/he wants the operation is done.

Animation / Story

A good example of animation is from My Yahoo! When the user click on the ‘Close’ button the section blurs out and is removed. The lower block moves up.

These 2 set of animations – blurring + movement is what builds the story. The story saying “I have closed and now the place emptied by me is taken by another section”. In this case the user doesn’t actively participate but witnesses the change of state of the system. Now when you are implementing this the developer will ask how much time we should give for this to blur and the lower block to move. Then suddenly you realize that you are now dealing with “time”. This brings in a whole lot of thinking.

Continuity

What In Context features have brought are a lot of controls on the screen for a user. User can do multiple operations on the same screen. What it means is there are now multiple “trigger points”. Trigger points are objects/behaviors on screens that trigger operations like buttons, hover actions, roll over actions etc. Not the designs have to thoroughly understand the various states of the UI.

• What if the user starts an operation and clicks on some other trigger point mid way through the first operation?
• What are the dependencies of one operation to another?
• Will or how will the other trigger points change if one operation is done?
• How will they conflict with one and other? How to solve it?
• How will the one operation conclude and how the next one will appear? What should be the feedback?
  

Multilayer of information

Now with AJAX the same component/place holder/ information holder can be used to convey more information. The two basic ways of deign are –

• Either the additional information came in a different layer
• It can be animated - removing one and showing another after an interval of time.
  

Multitasking

New web technologies are allowing the designers to think about allowing user to do multiple tasks at the same time. The one famous example is the new Yahoo! Mail which allows the user to do multiple tasks at the same time through its Tab design.

What does it mean for designers/product managers?

This means that the “Degree of Freedom” to think about design has drastically increased. The new aspects have added a lot for designer to think before they find a solution. Also it means that now there is more probability to go wrong in design.

• So as the degree of freedom has increased there is more need to think about design in product development cycle.
• More is the need to conduct User Testing to make sure you are on the right track.
• Create new set of Web 2.0 patterns for designers.

Design an Adventure?

Can design be adventurous? Yes of course, it actually is. When you actually work on design there are a lot of decisions that one has to take. And for most of these the designer doesn’t necessarily have user research data. Thus most decisions are built on intuition, experience, understanding etc. So for most of this part there is complete “Black out” about how will the users reacts to it. You can never be sure till you launch the product and start to get feedback. Thus design is pure adventure…you don’t know how the design will go with users. You will be biting your nails till the design goes out.

A lot can go against this as well; that ideally you should know every bit about the user and should design for it. But practically speaking this is impossible. My little experience in design has showed me that “most” UI designer are afraid of taking decisions in these case. I feel that’s the best part – a little “sensible” and “logical” experiment is what makes design so exciting, right?

Failure is just a step forward to success :)

Be a responsible adventurer…and enjoy your designs.

Chain is as strong as its weakest link

I was reading some article when I read this line “Chain is as strong as its weakest link”. It suddenly struck me how relevant this is to product development. Working on product at Yahoo! I have realized that product can’t be just pulled in by any one team or person. It indeed is a collaborative effort where different expertise comes together and makes their dream a reality. Every one involved in this chain of building the products effects and influences the outcome of your product. So if the backend team is weak your system is weak; your design team is weak, your communication is weak; your front-end is weak, design is screwed up and the list goes on.

What’s important to identify which the weak links in your product development chain are? If you can identify those then you can make extra effort in those areas to bring it up. Give more time to that areas/teams/person or try to pull in some expert who can balance that team.

As being in design team I can say how important a front end team is. Design doesn’t end by making mock or JPEGs. It ends with the product being finished. So it’s that much more important that the designers and front end engineers work in sync with the other. What users see is not the JPEG but the HTML…design ends at HTML and not on JPEGs. So if your design team is weak make it strong if your front end is weak make that strong.