Daily misery

I caught a group of teenagers dancing on the street yesterday. This is one of my favorite street shot so far.

from my experience, the single most important variable in web user experience has little to do with the user interface itself, and it’s probably the one thing interaction/interface designers have little control over - it’s the speed.

The web is a hostile development environment. The speed bottleneck of many web applications is either that the server(s) could not handle the load or the limitation of users internet bandwidth. If your web site or application is not responsive to user interactions, has slow loading time or graphic elements load like a teleprompter, then I afraid all the efforts that go into paper prototyping, personas creation, AB testing and other HCI methods will go down the drain as well.

Most of the time, even a slight speed bump may result in major experience improvement. And there are several ways to provide ‘fake’ speed improvement: by constantly updating your users about the state of their interaction. Notify them whenever something has been accomplished, something is about to happen or something is wrong. Communication is the best way to interact, in marriage or designing UI :P.

So remember, work along side your developers to make sure your apps are cheetah-certified.

“What is the purpose of good design if there is no one who can use it? Like the mythical tree that falls in a forest if no one heard it crash, is a product’s design any good if it remains on a museum’s pedestal? […]

When a product is lauded by the industry and the critics as an example of good design but struggles to reach the hands of the people it is meant for, is that an example of art or sculpture, a creative expression of the artist’s personal vision manifested tangibly rather than any validation of what is good in design? […]

What is the purpose of a design award for a product that failed to meet its own creative brief?” ~Niti Bhan [via putting people first]

When it comes to user interface design, what pleases the designerati may not always coincide with the needs of end users. Both are not mutually exclusive, of course. But we as designers have a subconscious tendency to choose one over the other. It’s easy to say ‘design for the users’ and argue it with [insert your favourite design philosophy]. At the end of the day, what really matters to me personally, is to not assume too much of what I know about my users.

Let the data helps you. Don’t skim on contextual studies, ethnography, qualitative insights or simple things like personas creation and structured analysis. Interaction or interface design is not about guesstimating or well blended gradient.

Last week we launched Plurk - a social journal we have been working on for the past 6 months.

There are already a bunch of social networks out there and some compare and contrast are bound to happen. That’s ok. I do want to share some personal thoughts about the kind of social networking problems Plurk is trying to solve.

The current model of using a social network, loosely speaking, is you add a friend and then you forget about her until maybe she takes a naked picture of herself jumping beside a hot spring during her visit to Yellowstone and posts it on the network. Either that or she is posting pictures and poking every one of her friends every single day and you get notified about it, every single day. So there’s this constant level of ‘either idle or noise signals’ that comes with current social networking model. Some friends take a more dominant role over others, regardless of who is actually more important to you in real life. Getting the balance right requires high maintenance of your privacy settings, filter options and whatnots. Luckily, under most circumstances, this problem can be solved by email and IM chat. But after a while they aren’t really helping. With IM, there’s always this mental obligation to reply right away. With email, you can never get a reply right away.

There has to be a better way to connect with your friends. Users want so badly to derive more values out of their social networking experience.

Plurk is trying to be that better way. A constant update of life, of people you care enough about to want to know what they’re up to everyday. There are many ways to utilize a social network. For some it’s a popularity contest. For others it can be an event planner or a career connection, or those three together. If you provide a more focused avenue for people to do all these things and connect with others, instead of just ‘here’s how you add a friend, send a message and upload your profile picture’, then you are helping people to connect better, I believe. Short messages is Plurk’s focused avenue.

Maybe I’m wrong. This won’t be the first time :).

Fell down on both knees
You were young
Bones still soft
Legs felt numb
Oh, how those sparrows sang for you.

Josh Rouse - Sparrows Over Birmingham

sketch there’s only one person who is able to read my sketch - me :-(

wireframe

first mock

I skip a bunch of in-between steps here. Take this as sort of a graphical representation of an interface evolution, from idea conception to the final design.

Someone chipped a tooth. There’s this girl who dressed as a cat. Someone else sprained his thumb. It’s probably the fluffiest mosh pit ever created. But “ready. set. SPARTAN!!!!!!!” has never been so much fun. It’s like everyone is giving each other a big hug :).