Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Design and Usability: Part 1

Wednesday, December 24th, 2003

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, as a design­er I val­ue aes­thet­ics high­ly. How­ev­er at a certain
point aes­thet­ics clash with func­tion­al­i­ty – or more specif­i­cal­ly usability.
Some­times I wish I were a painter. No con­straints, no font size issues, no low
con­trast col­or com­bi­na­tion prob­lems, no acces­si­bil­i­ty or usabil­i­ty concerns
and no angry users to face. You either like my work or not, no strings attached.
But I’m not a painter, I design websites.

The dif­fer­ence between a paint­ing and a web­site will be obvi­ous to most. A
paint­ing does not require inter­ac­tion, at least not on a func­tion­al lev­el. I
can not use a paint­ing. I can nev­er­the­less enjoy or dis­like
a paint­ing (the same anal­o­gy is to some extend applic­a­ble
to motion pic­tures). A web­site, on the con­trary, has a func­tion that carries
beyond its visu­al attrac­tive­ness. Web­sites gen­er­al­ly require (func­tion­al) interaction
of some form. The most feared and tena­cious embod­i­ment of inter­ac­tion being
the homo inter­neti­cus.

You know what? Humans are nasty mam­mals. Humans devel­oped to per­fec­tion their
apti­tude to bitch, whine, moan, com­plain, nit­pick, nag, crit­i­cize, grumble,
protest and dis­ap­prove. Iron­i­cal­ly though, with­out users (thus inter­ac­tion) my job
is rather use­less. Design­ing web­sites is (unfor­tu­nate­ly?) not exclu­sive­ly about
visu­al­ly pleas­ing users, it is also about lim­it­ing inter­fer­ence to effectively
deliv­er con­tent and enable effi­cient inter­ac­tion. The lat­ter is of course a
sim­pli­fied state­ment; the process is more com­plex and con­sti­tut­ed of more factors
and elements.

In “Design and Usabil­i­ty: Part 2” I will dig a
lit­tle deep­er and try to dis­cern some of the fac­tors and ele­ments relat­ed to
usabil­i­ty and func­tion­al­i­ty. Last but not least, prov­i­den­tial­ly, humans can
also adore, cher­ish, care, appre­ci­ate, val­ue, under­stand, real­ize and love.
It is with these thoughts that I leave you and wish you a Mer­ry Christ­mas and
a Hap­py New Year. See you in 2004! 

Categories:

• Design

7 Comments

The Art of Navigation

Thursday, December 18th, 2003

When build­ing a web­site there’s an inevitable moment when it is required you think hard about nav­i­ga­tion­al ele­ments. I’m not talk­ing about infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture here. Infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture usu­al­ly helps answer­ing the ques­tion: “How will this function?” (among oth­ers). Nope. I’m try­ing to answer the ques­tion “How will this look?” – pure­ly from a graph­ic design perspective.

The above men­tioned stage of the design process is one that I spend a con­sid­er­able amount of time on and par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoy with­in any project. In this post I want to share my lat­est exper­i­ment on nav­i­ga­tion design.

In my quest for ele­gant, clever and nice nav­i­ga­tion design I decid­ed to let go of cer­tain require­ments. In this case I decid­ed to ignore a few usabil­i­ty (and acces­si­bil­i­ty) best prac­tices (note: this should of course be avoid­ed in real life imple­men­ta­tion).

How­ev­er, I’ve set myself a few con­straints which make per­fect sense, even in an exper­i­ment. This design should of course be con­struct­ed using the sounder XHTML and CSS com­bi­na­tion, as opposed to tables. Fur­ther­more, once CSS is dis­abled, a nice unordered list should remain. Oth­er than that the sky is the limit.

The main pur­pose of this design exper­i­ment is to see how far we can push CSS. Is it pos­si­ble to cre­ate the most com­plex nav­i­ga­tion (in terms of graph­ic design) and have it marked-up as an unordered list? The answer of course is “Yes!”. And there are a few design­ers who ele­gant­ly proved this point in the past.

As said and proved by many before – CSS can han­dle your wildest dreams. Unfor­tu­nate­ly we are cur­rent­ly only lim­it­ed by the pace of web stan­dards imple­men­ta­tion in mod­ern browsers (specif­i­cal­ly one brows­er, no names of course). This small exper­i­ment should work in most mod­ern browsers, but your mileage may vary. Com­ments are more than wel­come, but keep in mind that this is only a tri­al in design, not in prac­ti­cal imple­men­ta­tion as such.

Categories:

• Uncategorized

24 Comments

The Old Technology Giveaway: Contest Results!

Thursday, November 13th, 2003

Final­ly, after care­ful­ly review­ing every entry (read: drool­ing for hours over old junk I wish I had), I have select­ed the two win­ners of this oh-so-close-to-tongue-in-cheek con­test, and they like­ly come as no sur­prise to those who have been keep­ing up with their respec­tive entries:

• 1st Place: Grant Hutchin­son — Grant’s sub­mis­sions were all ter­rif­ic, and a lit­tle scary at times, but what won me over was his BeBox, a machine I’ve still yet to see in per­son, but wish I owned so I could play with it night and day (ok, get­ting a lit­tle freaky now…)
• 2nd Place: Emilio Van­ni — While there were a lot of great sub­mis­sions, I only have two prizes to award, and I just kept com­ing back to the Apple Base­ball Cap hid­den at the bot­tom of Emil­io’s list. “But wait!” I hear you scream, “that’s a hat, not a piece of old tech­nol­o­gy!” My answer is sim­ple: Tough noo­gies! Keep in mind, this is my con­test after all…

I will be con­tact­ing the win­ners to arrange deliv­ery of their prizes (remem­ber: Grant gets first pick…), and hope­ful­ly they will be nice enough to send in self-por­traits with prizes in hand.

Thanks to every­one who entered, com­ment­ed, linked, or oth­er­wise con­tributed to the OTG. More wacky con­tests will come as I think them up…

Categories:

• Technology

4 Comments

Old Technology Giveaway: Update

Thursday, November 6th, 2003

It’s time for an update regard­ing the Old Tech­nol­o­gy Give­away, as it’s dead­line looms near.

If you haven’t sub­mit­ted your entry, now’s the time (that is, if you think you can beat Emilio and Grant :-) — the con­test will close no lat­er than Novem­ber 30th, but I might just decide to end it sooner…

Good luck to all!

Categories:

• Uncategorized

1 Comment

ReUSEIT! Entries Posted

Tuesday, November 4th, 2003

The entry dead­line has passed, so as the judges get to work review­ing the sub­mis­sions, we get to see them as well, and there is some fine work to be seen.

Some of my col­leagues do not think the entries are very inspired, and I agree, but I’m look­ing at them based on their real-world appli­ca­tion, using my per­son­al “would Jakob use this design?” meter, and by that unit of mea­sure­ment, there are some real winners.

Categories:

• Design

4 Comments