Design Approach for Print and Web Design
I started in print. I was a designer for a local newspaper in 1996. I then moved onto a magazine and then an agency. The whole point of graphic design for print was to present information in the most visually appealing way in order to differentiate your information from a competitor’s information. Visual design was king. My approach was to find elements of design that would grab a user’s attention as they flipped through the pages or sifted through their mail and then make the information stand out so the user would stay once I had their attention.
When I made the shift to web design in 1999 I tried to apply this same style of graphic design to web projects. What I quickly found out was that most of us were designing web pages for other graphic designers. We were trying to “out-cool” one another through the use of moving graphics, 1-pixel-wide borders, and the smallest fonts we could use. The designs were stunning and drew praise from other designers but fell short when launched. Why were these sites failing? They were cooler than anything we ever got away with in print.
Late 2000 or maybe early 2001, I was working on a design late into the night. I thought I really had a winner on my hands and wanted my wife to try it out before I presented it to the client. She sat down at the computer, looked at the web site and said “where do I click?” I was a little stricken by that question because it seemed so obvious to me. I prodded her to click where she thought she should click and she pointed the mouse around the page until she found something clickable and went in. Watching her struggle with my design was a very eye-opening experience. It occurred to me that it could look like the coolest thing in the world but if the user couldn’t interact with the design and couldn’t get to the information, then the site design was a failure. This was an epiphany and it shifted my thought on interactive design altogether.
At that point in my career I began to define design as the way a person worked with the thing. I no longer considered design as the front-end graphic design or “skin” of the site. I began working with the information architect on staff and naturally gravitated toward information design. Once I saw design as the structure and the method for navigating the structure, my web designs achieved a much greater acceptance among the users. Because my web design was thought through from the ground up, it wasn’t getting in people’s way and they were able to accomplish their goal on the site. The “skin” didn’t even matter to the people. Users only seemed to notice the graphic design when something stood in their way of doing their task. Bad design was noticed and good design was overlooked as something that worked the way it should work.
What I learned in my transition from print to web is that you can never assume someone will understand your intentions. No matter how obvious a design choice seems to you, it will probably confuse some users. More often than not “boring” design is effective interactive design because it doesn’t distract the user from their goal. If you take web design seriously then your approach should change dramatically from your approach to print design. Design is how it works. How it looks is icing on the cake.
The Then-Than Epidemic
I have quite a few friends that have trouble with then and than. They’ll say things like “I’m better then you at football” or “it was more then I expected.” I always shrugged it off as a quick typo, thinking ahead of your typing. But after reading a respectable online news publication this morning, I believe this problem is bigger then I suspected.
From IHT.com:
“More then 1 in 100 American adults is in prison, report finds”
And that’s the headline. In case they fix it, I’ve included a screen grab.
It Just Worked
What can I say about Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”? I can say a lot of wonderful things as has been noted in the blogosphere. But it’s what’s not being said that is irritating me. I have been using Macs regularly since 1996 and I have been a champion of the platform since 2000. Apple has had their share of misses in the software category but the distance between the usability and dependability of the Mac operating system and Windows was gigantic. I may have had my frustrations in the past but the alternative (using Windows) wasn’t really an alternative so I just worked my way through the bugs. The thing is, the bugs were never really that bad. And some of them weren’t even really bugs, I just didn’t like the way Apple chose to implement a feature in it’s operating system or other software. But I wasn’t going to switch to Windows and Linux just never had enough of the mainstream software to ever be viable.
The same is true today. Switching to Windows Vista is simply out of the question. And the distance between the usability of Leopard and Vista is just as wide as it’s ever been. But my problem is that the distance between the two operating systems may be just as wide but both operating systems have retracted in usability and dependability. Yuck. Since upgrading to Leopard I’ve had more problems with my machine than I ever did with Mac OS X 10.1 through 10.4 combined. I’ve been a member of the Apple Support Forums since 2002 and in that time I have 13 total posts. And of those 13, 8 are due to my trouble with Leopard. 8! In 5 years I only posted 5 times and some of those were in response to other people’s issues, not my own. But now I’ve posted 8 new issues because I’m at a total loss for a fix.
My latest drama is that ever since I updated to 10.5.2, my all-Apple WiFi network is now failing me. My iMac intermittently drops it’s WiFi connection from my Airport Extreme base station with no rhyme or reason. In fact, my connection dropped while writing this blog post. To say I’m disappointed with Apple is an understatement. I feel like what I’m experiencing is the result of too many things going on at Apple, not enough engineers working on any one project, and products being rushed out the door. This just hasn’t been my experience with Apple and I find it frustrating. Someone switching from Windows might not see a problem since the gap in usability is so heavily in Apple’s favor. To them it might seem light years ahead of where they were. But to someone who has used Macs for so long and has come to expect products to “just work,” this change comes like a blow to the gut.
My hope is that it’ll get better, but a small pessimistic voice inside my head thinks that this may be a problem that’s here to stay. Their market share is increasing and their footprint in consumer electronics is getting larger. Letting bugs slip through the cracks must be a lot easier these days.
Update: Looks like someone may have found the culprit behind the intermittent WiFi drops in Leopard (automatic broadcast channel). I’ve set my channel away from my neighbors and we’ll see if that does anything. I’m pretty sick of these drops though.
Understanding People
Dennis O’Reilly wonders why so many people use IE, if it’s such a crappy browser:
Part of the reason may be that it’s so tightly integrated with Windows: It takes an effort to download Firefox or another alternative browser, while the little blue “e” icon is omnipresent on the desktop, start menu, quick launch toolbar, and elsewhere in Windows.
Ya think? Maybe if you understood human beings at all, you’d understand that people choose the path of least resistance. When Microsoft decided to embed Explorer into the operating system, they created an anti-competitive environment which is why they’re being watched for another 2 years. And IE is a crappy browser, no one should be using it.
Do Not Start iDisk Sync in Leopard
After the upgrade to Leopard, I found my Mac was slow to respond to commands, the Finder was constantly crashing, and I couldn’t restart or shutdown my computer anymore. I ended up doing clean installation of Leopard thinking something went wrong during the update process. No dice. My computer was great for about an hour after getting all caught up on my updates. Then the problems started to occur. I posted this question on the Apple Support forums in hopes someone else had a similar issue. I really didn’t want to send my computer into Apple. After getting a good reply about the possibility of my RAM failing, I purchased memtest and ran it thinking that it had to be a bad RAM module. I was sure it would come back with a bad test for one or both of the modules. Nope. Then I thought one of my WD Firewire hard drives were failing. Or maybe my Firewire controller was bad. So I unplugged everything from my computer, force-restarted my computer, went into single-user mode and deleted all of my cache files from /Library and ~/Library and booted up. Still wouldn’t restart or shutdown and my Finder was as unstable as ever.
It began to occur to me that my MacBook Pro at work was experiencing similar issues. But they weren’t as extreme as the problems I was having on my iMac. I couldn’t restart or shutdown about 50% of the time but I could occasionally restart or shutdown so there weren’t any alarms going off in my head. When I started to think about what these 2 machines had in common, the only thing I could think of was Leopard. In every other way, they were different. I felt like I was running out of options.
I’m not an Apple Certified Technician or anything and I just never think to look at the Console. But for some reason I did (probably because I was really trying to get out of sending my iMac in for repairs). And I noticed this line:
FileSyncAgent[147] LOCK /.FileSync (FAILED)
I didn’t even bother with a Google search for .FileSync. I immediately knew who the culprit was after reading that line. I jumped to my System Preferences, clicked .Mac and stopped my iDisk Syncing. As soon as it was stopped, I went to the Apple Menu and selected Restart. Bingo. That was it. My computer was back to being a bad-ass.
What really irritates me about this whole story is that I didn’t check the console sooner. No, that’s just a shame since I wasted so much time. No, what really irritates me is that this is Apple’s own product. Their product which has some really great uses but is also a big, fat lemon. The .Mac suite has to be one of Apple’s biggest failures over the course of the last few years. The idea behind it is solid but the implementation just sucks. If it weren’t for the amazingly simple way to get photo gallery pages up online for my family, I wouldn’t have any use for .Mac.
I don’t know, after this whole episode I’m pretty soured on .Mac anyway. Maybe it’s time to just give up on it since I don’t think they’re ever really going to fix it.