July 29, 2010

An Event Apart

Fair Warning: I'm going to write this without looking up more than names of presenters & their presentations ... so I guarantee some details will be fuzzy and quite likely not fully accurate. This post is more about overall impression - the flavour - rather than the specific details. You want details, check out Luke Wroblewski's excellent summaries dated July 27 and 28. Also, Marc Drummond has some absolutely wonderful summaries.

The infamous Jeffrey Zeldman kicked off the conference with a brief history of computing and the web and between some of his comments and being surround by young whippersnappers, I suddenly felt quite old. I knew most of what he covered (this was to become a theme throughout the conference), but his style was very engaging and I thought it set a nice tone for later pieces both for those who already knew the information and for those who weren't well-versed in computing history.

There were three talks in particular that were particularly important and meaningful to me and the second talk is one of those. Whitney Hess talked about user experience and user testing - something that I harp about constantly. Seriously, people are tired of listening to me bring this up. A lot of what Whitney had to say resonated with me because I've been saying most of it since my teaching days. The first website I built was for my students - and I was stunned when each individual did not find it the most easy to understand website they'd ever seen. I'm not kidding, I was really shocked to discover that certain elements had been easy for some to pick up, but difficult for others. I asked for feedback, I adjusted the site ... and then the same thing happened the following semester which led me to realize the most important lesson about web design:

Your website is never done.

It's never perfect, not everyone will get everything, and you should always, always, always listen to your current users and continue improving what you have.

My favourite tidbit from Whitney, I think, was her insistence that you need both anecdotal evidence and analytical numbers in order to do a real examination of what's working and what's not. I feel strongly about this myself, but wasn't sure how to really quantify or prove that to others, but Whitney pointed out that you must use anecdotal evidence to help interpret the raw data of analytics. I think that's true in a lot more disciplines than web design ....

Of course, the most difficult task is paring down a site, or even a page of a site, to what the user really needs. There's a lot that goes into figuring out who your users are, what additional users you want to attract and how to fight off the various departments who insist what they have to say HAS to be on that page - usually in 48px h1 ... and can you make that red and maybe blinking so it attracts their attention?

Next up was Jared Spool. I was half afraid he was going to give the Amazon talk, which is utterly delightful and really well done, but I've seen it online a handful of times already. (Tuscan whole milk, anyone?) Instead, he talked about the different kinds of design strategies - like the 37 Signals guys do "self design," that is, they design for themselves. They do it quite well and while it's quite off-putting to some people, it is a legitimate way to to design. To be honest, at this point I started enjoying Jared's style and stories so much, I managed to stop retaining information. I'm going to have to go back through the slides, notes and Marc Drummond's excellent notes in order to really absorb Jared's talk.
I got to meet Jared for a few minutes later on in the conference - really nice guy. Wish I was a lot better at small talk and schmoozing because I came across as a clueless schmuck, I'm sure.

After lunch was Luke Wroblewski's talk about the mobile experience. I knew how mobile was exploding, but some of the raw numbers still surprised me. This has been an issue I've been fussing about recently ... but haven't had the time to address. I feel like I'm overwhelmed by all I need to get done! Once upon a time, you coded a site. Now you code the site, the mobile version, the print version ... and to really do it right, it should be a flexible grid ... but that's bleeding into another talk that came later on. I'm afraid I've given Luke short shrift here, but I really do need my notes for this one.

Next up was Aarron Walter talking about human interaction on the web - this was definitely a favourite presentation and something I've always felt strongly about. There is just no reason that a site can't be engaging and admit the human element. You can still have a professional site and be engaging and full of personality. Of course, you also must have a solid site architecture, excellent user experience (from the functional point of view) as well as the element of engagement. Aaron works at Mail Chimp as a user experience designer and I have to say, that has always been one of my favourite sites in terms of its personality. It does what it is supposed to do ... it is easy to use ... it is well set up ... and it's fun. People log in just to see what the chimp will say on certain pages. They'll log in to see what the login page looks like today. They'll hunt pages (when they have the time) for easter eggs like the width of the page "tearing off" the chimp's arm.

That's this unquantifiable "essence" that I think a lot of business-oriented types don't get. There is a human, emotional, non-quantifiable benefit you get to having people enjoy using your site. That warm, fuzzy feeling when they find something new and relate to it is most likely going to make them more patient when something goes wrong - as it inevitably does.

The last talk of the first day was Dan Cederholm's talk on CSS3. I'm afraid I'm going to give Dan short shrift as well because really, I pretty much already knew the bulk of what was covered in Dan's presentation. It was a good overview and it was important to have the first day of the conference, but because his flight had been delayed (canceled?), he came as the last main presentation of the day. He was scheduled to go just before lunch, when people could focus a little better on the nitty gritty and then Jared was to have been the last main presentation of the day - and given his speaking style, this probably would have worked better. But, it is what it is. Dan's talk on CSS3 covered the basics of rounded corners, RGBA, transitions and the like. There were some good details in there that I need to go back over and make sure I've internalized, but it was mostly a basic CSS3 grounding.

That's a heck of a lot of material and that was just the first day! I'll try to summarize the second day some time over the weekend.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | Design | Stumble

July 27, 2010

An Event Apart, Day One

Earlier this year, I was thinking it would be nice to go to a web conference. While I'd love to hit SXSW, I never seem to have the vacation hours to go and I didn't think my company would find it a proper conference, I mean, SXSW is really it's own beastie.

No, if I were to attend just one web conference, I knew what it needed to be ... An Event Apart by the A List Apart folk. I'd been following Eric Meyer since my newsgroup days on RTM (rec.toys.misc ... I am a toy geek) and the Raving Toy Maniac website/web-mag. No, the two Eric Meyers aren't the same guy, but I was into web design already and that's just how I discovered web standards.

So here I am ... at An Event Apart in Minneapolis, getting ready to start day two. Day one was wonderful - I enjoyed all of the presenters - Zeldman and Jared are always both informative and helpful (even if Zeldman made me feel old with the history lesson of stuff I already knew - it was still a delightful presentation and refresher). Whitney Hess spoke about user experience and usability which just validated everything I already thought I knew - and I needed to hear that validation. I'm determined to try again to push user testing ....

Luke Wroblewski's presentation on mobile was another session that was wonderful. Again, I knew the theories and reasonings behind much of the presentation and it was good to glean a few more details and get that validation.

The presentation that made me the most wistful (probably fitting), was Aarron Walter's talk on the emotional web. It was well done and despite what many non-web corporate types would think, very practical. This is the hardest sell where I am, harder than even convincing anyone that user testing is a necessary aspect to our HUGE ecommerce site. Sure, it is in some ways the sprinkles on top when everything else is done right ... but that doesn't mean it's not an important part of the experience ... the problem is that it's not immediately quantifiable. The mere fact that Mail Chimp created a "party pooper" version of their site without all of the funny charm ... and only .007% of their users actually used that version, does tell me that it is quantifiable to some degree.

This post is just a very quick overview before I head down to breakfast, but I'd like to make a particular THANK YOU to Marc Drummond for doing some wonderful 140char notes during all of the presentations. Marc's notes were an invaluable resource to me as it freed me from feeling really pressured to frantically take notes.

Today I think we dive into code just a tad more than we did yesterday (we were mostly hearing about process and such yesterday) and I'm looking forward to a little more nitty-gritty.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:00 AM | Comments (1) | Design | Stumble

June 27, 2010

Dear Adobe

Seriously? What is unexpected about File>Quit? I'd say that was pretty definite. I mean, it's not ambiguous like File>Ummmm, I think I might want to-OH LOOK! Shiny!

I mean it just does not inspire confidence to spend over $1000 oil-soaked clams on your software when you can't even get the programs to understand that the Quit command means quit.

Waaaaait. I get it. Every time I send in a crash report, I'm added to a list, right? And then you guys randomly send a beachball or "unexpectedly quit" command the los interwebz for every time I send in a crash report. Just identifying us troublemakers, eh? Well, I'm too smart, I just won't - hey! That's the idea, innit? You think that'll make us complain less? Well, you won't win that ...

I think this is what they call a vicious circle.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:41 PM | Comments (0) | Design | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

June 17, 2010

And That's About Standards

While I do wish that IE6 would die a horrible and LONG overdue death, this image just reminds me of the bad ole days where every other website had a "Use My Favourite Browser" button and all sorts of proprietary code.

Amazon? Can you please only show this if someone is using IE6 or IE7? Would be VERY much appreciated!

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:53 PM | Comments (0) | Design | Stumble

June 10, 2010

hOily Whale - desktops

By popular request, I have two sizes of computer desktop version of the poor beleaguered Fail Whale for those who are interested.

Some have asked, and there are various discussions about t-shirts as well. If you are interested in a t-shirt, please leave a comment below.

1680x1050 Desktop
1280x1024 Desktop

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:34 PM | Comments (5) | Design | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Sketches | Stumble

June 9, 2010

hOily Whale!

I have a lot of "internet friends," people I've never met face-to-face. A good many of them happen to live in the New Orleans area. I've got a friend who used to live up here who used to work on the oil rigs out there in the Gulf of Mexico. So when the Gulf exploded, I was following the goings-on closely. Getting unbelievable details from those in the area, friends with family who fished for a living.

It's gotten so that I expect every other tweet or email to contain oil. It's permeating everything down there - from the smell of the ocean turning to the stench of crude oil to the feel of it in the air. So when NOLAnotes tweeted that seeing the Twitter FailWhale yesterday was a little startling because there wasn't any oil on him ... I had a little brainstorm.

Originally, I'd wanted to do the green, green/yellow, yellow pattern inside the birds, but they're just too small for that to work (unless I wanted to do another huge illustration!). I chose to keep it very, very simple, hinting at the oil on the birds (in their eyes and wings - those black areas are usually white) and a nice, happy sun on poor Mr. FailWhale. I wanted to match Twitter's clean simplicity, so I didn't go for the amount of oil that really ought to be coating everything ... the key to parody, of course, is changing just enough to get your point across without beating your audience over the head with your point. In that respect, I think this turned out pretty well.

What I didn't expect was the attention this got - even landing on the Maddow Blog where it was called "instant folk art."

The world is a strange place sometimes - for some reason, I expected more response from the Adobe/Apple illustration which took weeks (and therefore, really wasn't as topical by the time it was done, I know), and this little parody was just something I whipped out when I couldn't sleep Tuesday night.

I'm not complaining ... just noting that the world is a strange, strange place.

Which, of course, is evidenced by the fact that oil has been gushing into the Gulf of Mexico for over a month while BP tries to polish their image and protest that their safety records are perfectly fine.

All that just smells a little fishy to me.

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:39 PM | Comments (6) | Design | Sketches | Stumble