At the recent Voices that Matter conference, I had the privilege of having dinner with Bill Cullifer, the Executive Director of WOW (World Organization of Webmasters). I hadn't check in with that group in a while (they've been around since 1996), so I was excited to hear about a lot of the great stuff the are doing to help educate Web professionals, including conferences, and "Iron Chef" student competition, and certification. Bill invited me to be interviewed for the WOW Technology Minute, and we talked about Web Typography.
Check it out on the WOW Technology Minute Web site.
Every other Thursday, AOL presents speakers who will help you stay on the cutting edge of your profession, hone your skills, understand industry best practices and keep you ahead of the competition. We'll meet 12PM-1:30PM on alternating Thursdays in Dulles and New York to hear about new and advanced topics in Web design.
As a special bonus, the first session comes with lunch provided free! Expand your knowledge of Web Typography and fill your stomach! Who could pass that up?
If you plan to attend, please RSVP Jason Cranford Teague (j.cranfordteague@corp.aol.com) at least 24 hours in advance of the meet-up.
Click "Read More" for session dates and descriptions.
Of the general mobile phone market with web browsing capabilities, only 14% actually browse the web on their phones. However 90% of iPhone users browse the web.
Wow.
Mobile phone companies have been pushing their web browsing phones into the marketplace for years, yet not until Apple created a better experience -- a better design -- could usage increase this tremendously.
We saw a similar result when we launched an updated navigational system in our StyleList site several months ago. Our traffic rose ten-fold the very day it launched.
As we evolve our web sites, let us take note. Success is not always about getting new features into the marketplace. Sometimes the greatest success can come from inventing new solutions to radically transform current features into even greater effortless and delightful experience.
Last week at the Voices That Matter Conference, I was privaleged to attend a great presentation on how to give great presentations. Garr Reynolds, the author of Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, wowed the crowd by creating a compelling and informative presentation using Power Point (actually he was using Keynote, but Power-Point has become the "Band-Aid" of slide software). Unlike other information design experts (ie. Edward Tufte), Garr has a lot of hope for Power-point presentations, but with a few helpful suggestions (paraphrased here):
At this week's "Graphing Social Patterns" conference in Washington D.C., attendees perched on ends of seats, focused on gleaning hints or tricks or otherwise silver bullets to turbo-boost their web properties' social syndication quota.
"Design for the Viewer," advised a panelist.
"Not just the user. Design for the Viewer."
Focusing on the "Viewer" rather than the user in this context means to "make your widget noticeable." Utilize your arsenal of brand and creative design to grab the user's attention, quickly. As Chris Anderson recently observed, in the "attention economy," a person's time actually is money and gaining even a split-second of it will commensurately enable monetization opportunity.
Make your placements visually vocal. Make them shout "This Thing is Grabbable!" or "This Thing Does Something With Facebook!" or "Like MySpace? You'll Like This Too, Then!" Images move faster to cognitive recognition and association. Images are sexy, free-tv-bundled FIOS where text is generic dial-up.
"Grabbability" - the ability to be taken and embedded elsewhere - was noted as a function without standard iconography and widely misunderstood or plain missed by the target audience. Separately, the Facebook logo (and by extension other logos with a brand afterimage) was cited as an element which "speaks to" Facebook users, and increases clickthrough by a multiple.
Text alone will not suffice to evoke the concept of intersite portability - at least not within the split-seconds available before whimsy or flashing hamsters distract. Often, site owners utilize text to describe a social app's value, and the text gets lost in a quick scan with other page text. To gain notice from attention-lacking social surfers, employ something visual, persistent, and relevant to the viewer's experiences or affiliations offsite.
The inference drawn is to design a system of visual prompts or cues (suggested to me earlier by John Kilpatrick) for what page elements refer to activities a Viewer may carry on to other favorite web destinations. And then, one will hope, back again.
This week I'll be at the Voices That matter Conference in Nashville, TN speaking on the topic of Web typography, but I wanted to give everybody at AOL a little preview of the center-piece of my presentation: Web Safe Fonts.
Web typography is pretty much synonymous with limitations. Limited controls, limited styles, but, most importantly, limited font-family choices. The first of these limitations will require changes in the browsers, however, there are a surprisingly large number of fonts to choose from, but only if you are willing to work with a more fluid typography. Most designers are familiar with the 11 "Core Web Fonts" that are industry standards. Primarily, we will use Arial (or Helvetica), Times New Roman (or just Times), and Georgia has become popular in the last few years. You will occasionally see Verdana and Trebuchet MS tried, but these are not the most elegant looking of fonts. We use these fonts because we know that they are pre-installed on most computers. Yet most computers will also have many other fonts pre-installed on them, either by the operating system or by specific applications.
I have created a list of "Web Safe Fonts" showing fonts pre-installed on Windows and Mac as well as fonts installed by iLife on the Mac (which is standard on all Macs) and Microsoft Office for both Mac and PC. Although not all of these fonts will be of general use, it does balloon the list of reliable fonts from 11 to around 200. To make selection easier, I have also indicated which OS the font is pre-installed for, ranked each font on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for fonts almost certain to be installed and 5 for fonts unlikely to be installed), and the source of the font.
Let me know what you think of the list, and if you spot any fonts that should be or should not be in it. The site is in "Beta" while I work on vetting the list and adding functionality (like the ability to sort the list), so any constructive criticism would be most appreciated.
At the SxSW conference, I enjoyed hearing Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert share best practices for design critiques. Here are some key takeaways:
1) Introduce your varied concepts without interruption
2) Introduce the team discussion by asking "What works? What doesn't?"
> Keep the conversation moving, as the team may get hung up on details. At this early stage however, it's best to capture overall feelings instead of tiny details.
> Make sure each design is discussed adequately. Sometimes the team will say "that's the one!" and not chat about the other designs, but much can be learned from what is/isn't working in the other designs to help the refinement stage.
> Stay "problem-focused" as the team will likely share solutions instead since it's easier for them to articulate those. A typical "solution" is to take one thing from the first concept, another from the second and yet another from the third. Recognize that if you say "yeah, we can do/change that" during the review, it may screw up the design when you actually try it out. Say that a potential solution is something you'd like to explore, but you'll keep the actual problem in the forefront and will solve that in the refinement stage.
Click "read more" for more tips.
Next June (sometime between June 10th and June 13th to be more precise) I will be presenting a session on Web Typography at the Voices the Matter Conference to be held in Nashville, TN. The conference, run by the book publisher New Riders, brings together some of their top authors for a four day lovefest of everything Web design. This is my first time at the conference (of course, this is only the second VTM conference) but it looks pretty exciting, with some authors I know well and others I'm looking forward to meeting.
If you want to attend, you can register before May 2nd and save $200 and (just because I'm a sweet guy) you can use my special promo code at ANY time to save another $200. Use the priority code WDDSPKR during registration to save $200 on any of the packages.
I hope to see you there.
At this year's South By Southwest (SxSW) conference, I had the pleasure of listening to Kathy Sierra speak about how to create passionate users. She reminded us that we can make our audience fall in love with our experiences if we can make them feel great about themselves while on our sites.
Here are some of her suggestions on how to do this:
> Try to create human-ness in our designs. Recreate subtle, real-world elements -- like the iPhone screen scroll bounce -- in our animations to make things feel more alive.
> Read facial expressions during usability tests -- you have to see people's faces (not just read a report afterwards) because we naturally simulate other people's thoughts in our own brain. When we see a face frowning, we infer what that person is thinking. They're not articulating it, but we can see it and use those perceptions to influence our design strategies. (Click "Read More")
For the past 6 months we've been working with Adobe on a few AIR desktop products that leverage web-based services and content to create rich internet applications (RIA). It's been great to be part of the future of such a powerful new desktop authoring environment like AIR which combines web technologies including, html, JavaScript, AJAX and flash with a rich cross platform technology. The possibilities are truly limitless for what you can do...just look at the full spectrum of apps presented on Monday.
Ebay Desktop Buyers App
http://desktop.ebay.com/
New York Times Mobile Content Saving
http://shifd.com/
Nasdaq Market Replay
https://data.nasdaq.com/mr.aspx
The slide above is a simple animated build landing the point that AOL Programming is developing a diversity of brands to appeal to unique segments of the market. Aside from the header it has just ONE line of copy for a relatively complex idea. The pictures basically land the point before you even read the line.
If you do these things odds are good that everyone will think you are a ROCK STAR next time you present...
It was a very basic primer on Agile, and included information on other methods of process, such as the waterfall method and the snowman method. You can read about all things agile at Jeff's site (link above). Much emphasis was on speed to market, and how Agile methods can support a faster turnaround on product completion.
We did a "real" agile project, where teams had to work with a "User" to define and develop a product end to end, splitting up tasks appropriately. The products were cars, and they were drawn on a puzzle board so each person could take a piece and then put it together at the end. We were of course terrified of the Homer Simpson factor, an incredibly accurate depiction of what you may end up with if you rely completely on what users think they "want" without reality checks.
The Homer Car:
Sorry about the delay in getting the promised software round-up from Macworld out, but not only did I comeback from the conference with a suitcase full of new goodies, I also came back with a head full of a nasty virus that kept me in bed asleep most of last week.
The first product I want to talk about has already started to change the way I'm sharing design comps for feedback. On the face of it, Skitch is just another very cool screen capture tool for the Mac. It lets you capture all or part of the screen, as well as click on interface elements (such as a window or the Dock) to capture them isolated from all other elements on the screen. Once the screen is captured, the image is brought into the Skitch interface, where you have some simple drawing tools that allow you to add labels and then save the final results to your desktop.
And if that were all Skitch did, it would still rank as one of the best screen capture apps I have tried. However, Skitch goes one step further, by giving you single button publishing of the image either to your own .Mac account or to the Skitch.com, which works a lot like a YouTube for still images. You can email out the link to your screen capture and get feedback directly on the page or the viewer, if they have the Skitch application on their own machine, can download the image, add their own comments directly and then (with the press of a single button) put their changes back into the originating Skitch.com page.
The up-shot of this is that, rather than passing around screenshots in emails with bulleted lists of vague comments underneath, we can use the image to enter a running dialog with each other with the image being the focus and, hopefully, provide more accurate and meaningful feedback during during development. I've only just started working with Skitch and it is still in beta (although seems perfectly stable), so there may be some bumps ahead as I try to integrate this app into my work flow, but I invite everyone on the Blog to download Skitch and give it a try.
The auditorium at the Rem Koolhaas designed Campus Center in Chicago was the perfect setting for a discussion about design process. Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners), Jason Fried (37signals), and Carlos Segura (Segura Inc. ) lead a "presentation and discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration."
Lately, I find myself focusing on creative process. How to create great work, keep the team inspired and avoid some of the pitfalls that happen to a creative team while working at a large organization. So, I headed out to the Seed conference in Chicago to get an outside perspective.
It was a strong group of speakers, and I enjoyed the range of disciplines. I was inspired by the broad range of work from Carlo Segura's design studio, and the high level of design he maintained over the years. The redesign of Corbis is briliant. But, I really went to hear Jason Fried from 37 Signals talk about his work process. Jason Fried's work philosophy centers around the principle of working with small teams, but I still took away some basic concepts I could apply to the AOL entertainment design team.
A few key points from Jason presentation that hit home:
Ship when the core product is ready. Nothing is worse for team morale than long development cycles.
Your work expands to fill the time available.
2 or 3 people work on a core product. If that team can't do the work, they scale the work back. They never add people to the team.
Interruption is the enemy of productivity. At times, collaboration can be considered an interruption and a fragmented day is not a productive day.
Meetings are symptoms and not solutions. Meetings should be a last resort as they require preparation that people aren't going to do anyway. Meetings shouldn't last more than 30 minuets.
"I would rather people grow out of our products rather than not be able to grow into them." Jason Fried
I'm back from Macworld and I am officially Macworlded out. The presentation went great. I had about 100 people in my audience, mostly teachers, who seemed to respond to what I was talking about and I got a lot of excellent feedback afterwards.
I've seen a lot of exciting new Mac software, which I'll be talking about in my next several posts, but one of the most surprising entries in that category is the new AOL client for the Mac. Built from scratch as a native Coco application, meaning that it runs smoothly in OS X, this is not the Mac AOL client of yesterday. It includes a full featured Web browser--using on the same technology as Apple's Safari--a new AIM client that rivals Apple's iChat, and integrated email that keeps both it's own address book, but also ties into the Apple Address Book software. It also includes the excellent Mac implementation of AOL Radio which has been out for a while.
If you are a Mac user, check it out on the AOL Beta Site.
