"Redesign Must Die", by Rosenfeld

http://www.slideshare.net/lrosenfeld/redesign-must-die

I've had Rosenfeld's polar bear branded O'Reilly book about information architecture for as along as I can remember. It's one of the books I recommend to folks getting started in web design. So I enjoyed this set of slides that I only discovered this week.

While there is not accompanying audio, for those who've been in the business of UI design for any time, the slides themselves tell the story.

I was particularly struck by this presentation because I work at a University and Rosenfeld's examples of how his alma mater continued to redesign and rebrand their home website hit close to home. Our communications department does much the same thing. They have a total homepage redesign schedule of every 3 years. This isn't based on user feedback or any analytics or, apparently, common web sense. It's a decision made years ago by someone in marketing. And it makes me nuts.

I'm a fan of "refine" rather than "redesign", and that is one of the central points of the slides. Hope you guys find the information interesting.

Responsive Layouts & Information Visualizations

As a web/UI designer, I have been asked to specifically design to fixed width and sometimes flexible/liquid layouts. When there is no specific direction, depending on the amount of information to be displayed on each page, I would either choose fixed width or flexible layout.

About six months ago, I received an email with the subject ‘Responsive Layout’ from my boss. The body of the email had few links, videos, and podcasts about the responsive layout. I was very curious to find out what it really is, so I clicked all the links that opened in my default Chrome browser with separate tabs. I went back to finish reading the rest of my email and in short, my boss had asked me to start thinking about converting our products to responsive layout. Here are the links that my boss had sent me:

http://adactio.com/journal/1696/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

After that day, I started googling and came across: http://bit.ly/m51JoB and http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/

http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/blog/about/hardboiled_css3_media_queries/

You might find many other sites that are adapting to the responsive layout design…

So, basically responsive layout design is a technique using flexible grids, images, css, and media queries to adjust layouts. Initially, I misunderstood and thought that this technique is not new. Well, it’s not new. But, how you do it—is, what’s new. Responsive layout adjusts to the size of a browser window, whereas the traditional way of supporting multiple devices would be to detect if a device is a desktop or mobile. For example, go to about.com on your desktop browser and resize the window, and notice the layout adjusts to fit perfectly to your viewing preference. Do the same with cnn.com. You might want to try this in your mobile browser; about.com would adjust to fit, whereas cnn.com would detect if the platform is desktop or mobile.

If I were to design a brand new site or redesign an existing site, I would prefer responsive layout over the platform detection technique. But, if an organization just wants their site to be on a mobile device and does not want to edit their existing source code, then I would choose the platform detection technique. I believe both of these techniques can be very effective if applied properly. But, the responsive layout adds to the list of choices for web/UI designers and probably stacks additional work to be done.

Advertisement vs. Design

On July 27, 09 in New York Times, an article talked about how Walt Disney is cooked up this Disney Media and Advertisement Lab to identify how effective ads are displayed on their sites.

The chosen tools are advanced than what you would think. As we have discussed various usability tests in the class, these media groups are using similar methods to track how ads are viewed and which ones are effective. Such tools besides eye tracking were heart-rate monitors, skin temperature readings and facial expressions to monitor. They are trying to figure out how small the ads can be but still viewed by users or how they feel about certain ads by looking at their facial expressions.

Again, we are faced with corporate driven $tragegy vs. functionality of information dissemination. This disturbs me greatly as they have to figure out a way to effectively making sure users see ads. As a usability designer, how would you feel about your design being compromised. I understand if it is for entertainment. What annoys me the most is that ads are getting aggressive and no longer a part of the page anymore. In old days, ads had a space in your page. They are in your face and you have to click to stop ads. In usability standpoint, it is not functional part of the sites and not friendly to users. It distracts you from doing what you want to do. If you are an independent designer, you may purposely add spaces for ads. In larger corporate levels, is this how it works? Would designer informed how ads will be displayed so they need to change design to accommodate ads or simply told to design a site but marketing dept. will figure how to put over ads over your design?

What happened to user-centered design? I haven’t across any design books/sites that talks about how to incorporate ads as a part of design. I see Google ads model where you can simply select what type of ads and place a widget on your page. But that’s more for independent designer. I wonder about larger corporations that accept ads. What do you think?

Service Oriented Design Reality?

True Service Oriented Design vs. Large Corporate Politics

We have started to discuss the service design and it’s concept. I really like the idea of experience as a whole interaction and focuses on you as a customer. I just recently read relevant service design topics on the web.

Dustin Curtis, who is a talented User Interface Designer, decided to redesign American Airlines Website after experiencing terrible time booking a flight via AA website. Dustin redesigned a front page in a few hours and suggested some things that are very important, but most importantly “customer experience”. After his posted his redesigned site plus some suggestions, he actually head back from AA User Experience Architect! This architect explained a few things.

A letter to AA:
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines.html

A reply from AA:
http://dustincurtis.com/dear_dustin_curtis.html

The letter from AA architect touched a few things about Front and Back Stage Design process and how it is completely messed up system that they have to work in bureaucratic/political corporate environment. The website, especially AA would suffer tremendously due to many departments are in charge of area in the website. Each department have its objectives and goals to meet. By the time all of the contents are added into the site, it become large mess to customers. As a customer, you know what you need to do from their website. It is not a very long list of tasks, but the site makes it complicated.

Dustin responded a letter and mentioned that “customer experience is the new brand”. I have to agree with the idea. Everything, I mean everything the company communicates to the customer or the other way around must be part of corporate strategic plan. You have to shake your head to the airline companies. I am not sure about you, but I haven’t had good experiences when I flew. I don’t care for security procedures, booking, pricing, airport, scheduling, food, seating, and the list goes on. It’s a “have-to” thing to get one place to the next quicker. So you have to ask why don’t the airlines make the experience more pleasant, especially in the front end where a customer has to interact before flying. The during a flight and after is important too.

The UI design on the web and services people have to interact to be served are necessary evil that the corporations must to rethink. Sell the experience!

Another interesting read about painful process of corporate product development:
http://www.core77.com/blog/business/the_painful_process_of_corporate_product_development_13589.asp

New experience in search engines:
Another quick note about the new development with a few search engines that just released to public.

Microsoft Bing is a new search engine that displays related content, but little more visually interesting to crawl the search engine. It shows you some related contents that you are looking for. Photos and videos search displays somewhat different from what you expected from Google. I especially like the thumbnail views of video that you can actually play a few seconds when you mouse over. $100 million marketing campaign is not just the hype only. It has some minus but the concept is good. However, there is already a talk about copyright infringement of music/movies in thumbnail’s view.

Bing
http://www.bing.com/

Wolfram Alpha, a maker of Mathmatica, released this interesting knowledge-based computing. They call it, “a computational knowledge engine”. Is this become the rise of machine? We have to see...

As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. Built with Mathematica—which is itself the result of more than 20 years of development at Wolfram Research—Wolfram|Alpha's core code base now exceeds 5 million lines of symbolic Mathematica code. Running on supercomputer-class compute clusters, Wolfram|Alpha makes extensive use of the latest generation of web and parallel computing technologies, including webMathematica and gridMathematica.

Wolfram Alpha
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Are we seeing a new kinds of search engine here? Google was loved by everyone when it came out after a series of ugly search engines that didn’t provide anything that you can actually find information you need. Google’s simplicity made a difference. Is Google behind now? What users want from the search engine. Are they looking for a particular information, related information, or simple crawling. The users will be the judge to which search engine provides value/experience they want.