STUCK ON AMBER

The Perfect Weather Application?

Searched "Weather London" on an iPhone this morning. Got this clear and simple interface, where you move a slider to see how the sky changes from early morning to tonight. Some rain expected, but not until 8pm. Good, I'm going to cycle to the office.

Nothing revolutionary, but exactly what I need for my daily use. Great products are not necessarily packed with innovations. Making existing things work better, more accurately useful and usable, can be as exciting and rewarding as the act of creating something totally new.

 

Google+ Innovative (and Fun) Feedback Feature

 

Click Highlight. Select all the page zones on which you want to report an issue (the word 'Public' in my example above).

Click Black out. Select all the elements you don't want Google to see. They're covered with black blocks.

Describe the problem. Preview. Submit!

Straightforward Help (It Will Never Work, Episode 1)

We spend so much time striving to design perfectly self-explanatory interfaces. Instructions seem to get old-fashioned nowadays. Probably because we know nobody likes to read text on a UI anymore; everything should flow like magic. 

This application decides not to care, and provides all written instructions at first launch; bang! But that works fine, because the style is daring to the extreme and catches your attention efficiently. 

It will never work, they said? Perhaps 'poor' ideas like that should always be tried if that's cheap to do. We may have good surprises and save a lot of time.

 

Don't Get Too Fond of Designing

When a user or client tells you he wants a certain feature, ask why he wants it–determine his immediate goal [...] Keep asking until you move well beyond the boundaries of the immediate design problem. Why should you ask these questions if you have clear requirements? Because if you love designing things, it's easy to get caught up in an interesting interface-design problem. Maybe you're good at building forms that ask for the just the right information, with the right controls, all laid out nicely. But the real art of interface design lies in solving the right problem.

So don't get too fond of designing that form. If there's any way to finish the transaction without making the user go through that form at all, get rid of it altogether.

– Jenifer Tidwell (from Designing Interfaces)

I think I'm going to pin this on my wall in the office. It's harder to keep it in mind than I imagined. There's almost always a more straightforward solution, that works well too.

See also in this blog: Plain Red and Plain White, the Coca-Cola Redesign

Distilling an Idea... Please Don't Disturb

Before I opened the studio I worked for many companies, large and small [...] And I have worked for studios that were ten, 20, 30 people. And I feel that when I look at the work emerging from any of these entities, the really good work was done by three people. When 20 people were involved, it mostly sucked. So for me, it never seems that size works in favor of the client.

– Stefan Sagmeister (from How to think like a great graphic designer)

An obvious reason has nothing to do with the design discipline or creativity: it's just that communication overhead increases when new people join the project team.

Another reason is that the success of a design is much related to the consistency and clarity of the concept. It must speak to you, it must have a personality that you get easily. And all that begins to turn into a mediocre compromise when too many people influence the design. The best way to cook a delicious cake is certainly not to ask 10 guys to throw their favorite ingredient in the mixture!

I don't think that involving extra people in a creative process is a bad thing per se (often an external contributor adds a key element that was missing), but it inevitably triggers more discussions, often about emotional aspects that can be debated endlessly anyway.

The problem is that it disturbs the refinement process, which is critical. When we enjoy the beauty of a nicely designed thing, we don't see the refinement steps that led to it. But if we don't allow that distillation to run in peace, and stay focused, we might never see that nice product come out at all.

So while creating, it's great to have a few external eyes, but not too many–and above all, not continuously! And you need a decision-maker.

See also in this blog:
Conceptual Integrity

Terrible Calendar Design

So when is that dentist appointment, Mr Outlook? 19th or 26th?

Top feature expected from a calendar: show me clearly what occurs when.

Of course you could argue "obvious, events are hanged just right under their date", which puts my dentist appointment on the 19th.

But consider the case where you want to add an event to an empty day. By selecting the white cell, are you 100% sure the upper label applies to it, rather that the lower one? Same problem with days full of events. It would help to make very clear which label comes with which cell, through a better visual association.

 

Distilling Text: The Art of Making it Short

Short and efficient statements are difficult to write. If your care about being understood, it takes longer to write short things than long ones. And yes, we should spend more time on writing less.

Examples

Documentation around the Caml programming language is one of the best examples I've seen. Every sentence is designed to go straight to the point, without lacking precision. Faithful to the philosophy of the language: compact, clear, non-redundant, yet expressive:

 

John Valentine introducing his game Zenith keeps it super short. The game is quite unusual, so better give you the big picture first:

 

The classic book Universal Principles of Design introduces design rules whilst remarkably applying them to itself. You read, you get it. You even hardly notice the book actually has a design. You just see what the book has to tell:

The list goes on, but let's keep it short. Your time is precious and you already got the point.

I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

– Jason Fried, founder of 37signals

 

iPhone Message Composer (Episode 2)

When I first saw the iPhone's message composer, on a friend's device, I was working on the design of a similar feature, and a detail struck me: the message bubbles on the left side of the screen were horizontally aligned with (and exactly as wide as) the input field at the bottom.

I said to myself: "What a smart and simple way to indicate the origin of messages!". The bubbles on the left obviously were the messages sent by me to Maria, and the ones on the right were the ones received from her. The alignment trick made it useless to indicate explicitly the sender name for every message. The visual association was the information.

Many months later, I realized it was not working this way. The observation I was so excited about was just a coincidence. I was disappointed. How could Apple get that close to such a nice concept by accident, and not take advantage of it?

By studying more carefully their design, I found that:

• the width of the bubble varies so as to best fit the length of the contained message (a simple "Yes" is displayed in a very short bubble). Pure aesthetics consideration, it seems.

• the width of the input field varies too, because it depends on the width of the "Send" button that itself depends on the language of the interface. In French, it's "Envoyer", wider than "Send".

• if it took me such a long time to realize that my beloved design feature actually didn't exist, it proves that having it or not didn't make a big difference to me. 

 

More importantly: who cares who sent what?

Think about it: if I am Fabrice the user (rather than Fabrice the designer), who wrote what is supposed to be obvious to me because I know the history, the context of what happened.

Designers sometimes make wrong assumptions about what's necessary in the real life, because they fail to be the people. In the screenshots above, you have no way to know whether I'm the author of the messages in green or those in grey. But that's fine, because that's my conversation, not yours. So as long as I know, that's okay.

See also: iPhone Message Composer (Episode 1) in this blog

Designing Pop-up Messages the Right Way

We don't really read them, do we? We just want to get them out of the way. I think Cancel/Shut Down is always better than No/Yes, which forces me to read what the question is about. Of course, in an extreme case like "Cancel this reservation?", it's getting complicated... that might be the exception, fair enough.

I would even shorten the title to a more economic "Shut down your computer?". The first part "Are you sure you want to" is noise. It's not friendly sugar. As to "Now", it's pretty implicit. 

Plain Red and Plain White: The Coca-Cola Redesign

Going through an old issue of the excellent Creative Review magazine, I found an article about the 2008 redesign of Coca-Cola's visual identity. Extremely simple, just plain red and white, ditching all the gratuitous clutter. These designers who remove and clean up rather than creating on top of their predecessors' work always impress me.

It seems that it was quite a marathon to get the proposal approved. Design firm Turner Duckworth and their client contact Pio Schunker struggled for about 18 months to convince the brand's marketers that, YES, Coke should dare to go back to its iconic roots, and NO, Coke logo didn't need any "starbursts, drop shadows, or gradients". And no, it wasn't important to have "a picture of some bubbles on the side of the can. People know Coke is a fizzy drink".

So, is that genius, or too easy? How can such a no-design cost so much to win the client's acceptance, and by the way, several awards? How creative is that?

Well, that's the point: design is not always meant to be a piece of art, demonstrate one's Photoshop skills, or one's effervescent imagination. It has to fulfill the client's communication requirements. You get paid to solve a problem; if you conclude that the solution is technically simple, then that's good news. The bad news is that you might need to focus all of your energy on proving it!

A bit like the doctor that recommends: "Dear Mr. Smith, all you need is a good rest and less food."

"But... you don't give me any medicine?"

"No. It's not what you need. Trust me."

Based on Patrick Burgoyne's article "Coke: a simple story" in Creative Review, August 2009.