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Archive for November, 2006

27
Nov

The Purpose of Design – an overview

With the next few posts I am going to show the thinking and decisions that go on behind the scenes in design work and what it is I do. If you find this information useful I hope you’ll pass it along.

I have noticed that many of my clients do not understand that design work has a purpose behind it. In fact, most of my family members and peers don’t understand the decisions made and the process behind a design, either. While anyone can identify a good design because “it looks pretty,” few can actually describe why those particular pieces in that order looks pretty.

Think of a web site as a road map, a ‘user’ as the driver, and the internet as the wide open highways. A good road map is easy to use. By looking at the colors, shapes, symbols and other graphics, you can figure out where you are and where you want to go. If you can’t figure out how to read it and use it, it ends up thrown in the trash. The same thing happens to a web site. When arriving at a web site, users immediately want these questions answered: Where am I? Why am I here? Where can I go?

If they cannot answer these three questions in the first few seconds of arriving, they will give up in frustration and hit the back button, never to return. Why visit again when it’s just frustrating?

It is my responsibility to build a good road map, using design elements (like shape, color, graphics, textures, fonts, etc.) to help answer these questions. While maps have common measurements and standards, making it easy for anyone to find their way and drive, the web is much more challenging to navigate. My job is to create a guide so users can reach their destination as quickly and easily as possible.

Just like the legend on a road map, there is an hierarchy to the pieces of information found on a page. The most important pieces of information are the ones that answer the basic questions quickly. This is why a good web site makes the answers easy to find:

  1. the name of the company and/or their logo – “Where am I? I am at Company XYZ’s web site.”
  2. the navigation – “Where can I go? I can browse through the scrapbook, apply for a job, or read more about their products.”
  3. and the content – “Why am I here? So I can find out more about the history of Company XYZ.”

In the next post I’ll explain color – how it works on the web, the ‘psychology’ of color, and how colors are used as signals.

Related posts:

22
Nov

How to get good service

While working fast food I learned a lot about good service – what it meant to provide good service and how much it is valued. The average customer at a fast food restaurant expects poor service and so they treat the employees with little respect from the very beginning. After a few rounds of rude customers the average employee will in turn become rude to other customers in return, starting a vicious cycle. The best way to guarantee good service is to start being polite. Simple respect and politeness will go a long way – I don’t care what business you are in.

On a particularly stressful day (lots of orders, shorthanded on staff, little sleep), I encountered an unusual customer. We were out of chicken sandwiches and I had the terrible task of delivering the bad news. Instead of receiving the usual grimace and under-the-breath complaints, this particular woman flashed me a smile and said, “That’s ok. Can I get the chicken strip dinner instead?” Not only did I get to sigh in relief, but I also comped her meal. Although she did not ask for compensation (and many less deserving do), I was more than happy to see to it that what was delivered was above and beyond expectation. Why? Because my customer was polite. While most servers have the power to comp. meals under certain circumstances, it doesn’t happen often because the customer was rude. Asking me “How hard can your job be?!” will get you nowhere. Asking me “Can I get the chicken dinner for the price of the chicken sandwhich?” will yield much better results. Help solve the problem, not be a part of it. It will make both parties happier, since everybody wins.

This holds true for most anywhere. My boyfriend and I were flying United West and it was a long enough flight it served a snack and dinner. Near the first class seats, a frequent flyer stopped the harried flight attendant and complained about his drink. She muttered sorry and went on her way. When she stopped by to pick up our trash she sighed and mechanically said, “can I get you anything else?” Scott said, “You know, that was kind of a small sandwich, but I’d love to have another if you have any to spare?” She brightened a little and said, “sure, I’ll be back in a little bit.” I am not saying people live to serve. But if you have an alternative answer for a problem, you make their jobs easier and you get something in return too.

The most recent experience I have come across occured at work. My co-worker and I were signed up to attend a 2 day CSS workshop for next week, when the bad news hit my e-mail:

Hi Thuy and Tim,

Thanks for your registration. Sorry to inform you, but our HTML class for next week is cancelled due to low enrollment (and the slower Thanksgiving season). Please check our website for future dates and we have NOT charged the credit card.

Also, another option besides our public class is for our local trainer to visit your office for one-on-one training. You can choose the training date, customize the class and even use your files. We usually can cover two days of material from our public class into one day of 2on1. The price is usually $900/day, 2on1 or 1350 for a group, but I can lower the 2on1 rate to $800 and $700 for day 2 if you want another day since we cancelled on you.

If this is the route you would like to go, please let me know and I’ll check our trainers’ schedules to call you to further assess the training and pick out a date that works for you.

Regards,

M.

It occured to me to stomp and whine and cry and be annoying. I wanted to ask “what kind of company just up and cancels?!” I had been looking forward to this workshop for nearly a month! I wanted to give M. a piece of my mind. Instead, I remembered what it was like to be the messenger. I took a break, came back and wrote:

Hi M,

Thank you for not charging the company card. I must admit Tim and I were really disappointed to see the HTML & CSS class has been canceled. However, we are very interested in your on-site training.

Because the Angus beef industry is seasonal, we have a very short window of opportunity for training sessions – would it be possible to receive the 2on1 at $600 for two days? Since our current training budget was already approved, we could move forward on this very quickly.

Cheers,
Thuy Nguyen

Although we were already offered a discount, it never hurts to ask. I thought it fair, since we originally planned on attending the public class and expected to pay $1200. And the worst that could happen would be an answer of “no.” Here was M.’s reply:

Hi Thuy,

Thanks for your quick reply. If our trainer came to your office, it would be 1200 (1190 to be exact) for two days, is that correct? The same price as the public class for two. That would be ok on our side. If ok with you, then I’ll check the trainers schedule.

Regards,

M.

Huh. Looks like fast food taught me more than just “do you want fries with that?” after all.

22
Nov

Slow Leadership

I found this post originally on lifehack.org:

Adrian Savage proposes a return to civilization and humanity in organizations. Does this sound something like your day at the office? You are driving on a rain-soaked freeway. The other cars are speeding past you. You speed up to stay in the flow, but your knuckles are white as you grip the wheel. Familiar? Here’s how to find the next exit.

Visit Change This to read the synopsis and download the manifesto.

After spending five years of my own life working at a fast food restaurant, I find Savage has hit the mark right on the nose when it comes to describing Hamburger Management. While I was only working the job in order to pay for college, I felt pressured, stressed and had resulting poor health because of this type of management style. If that job gave me nothing else, it helped me to identify other companies that treat its employees poorly.

15
Nov

Case Study: Sale Books, part 2

After re-reading part 1 I realized I left out the sale book development timeline and examples:

As you can tell by the dates, the first two were still being implemented until quite recently.

Each of the generations had their quirks in production and functionality. [Mostly the pattern included sacrificing functionality in the name of production speed and better visuals.]

The searchable catalogs took 2-3 days to build and post, rarely offered photos, came packaged with dull graphics, and did not visually represent the as-printed version of the sale books, but had the best features when a user was looking for specific stats and search criteria.

The Flash Paper pages took less time to build, cutting days down to hours, and gave the added bonus of actually seeing the graphics and photos that were in the printed catalogs. However, it gave up the high functionality of the searchables: can only search text, cannot search for specific stats on animals, and took much longer to load. In return the Flash Paper pages were easy to print, easy to zoom in and out of graphics and text, and quickly skipped to any page in the catalog by using the links header.

The Flash animated catalogs took minutes to build, offered high quality presentation and was shown truly “as printed.” No more font issues, no long hours to build a sale book then upload it, and acceptable loading speeds for our 56k users were reached. Unfortunately it also meant no more search features and no more print-friendly versions.

While our customers enjoyed the new look and feel of the Flash animated catalogs, we continued to search for a way to bring back some of the functionality of the older methods. With version 2 we hit the sweet spot – that fine line between functionality and presentation. We created a hybrid of the “as printed” catalog above the fold and reinstated the searchable catalog below it. Not to mention we hit our technological limits as well – our average user has Flash Player 6 and there was very little non-deprecated server-side code available for the searchable catalogs.

Related Posts:

8
Nov

Case Study: Sale Books, part 1

One of the first projects I worked on was building a better way to deliver print content on the web. Angus Productions Inc.’s bread and butter is building sale books for our breeders’ sales. One of the perks to ordering your sale book through API is a complimentary online version, posted to our breeder sale books page and/or on their web site’s sale page as well.

At the time, the current format to deliver as-printed catalogs online was using Flash Paper. The process was rather long and involved:

  1. Take the .pdf and rip it into individual pages.
  2. Print each page in Flash Paper.
  3. Build a header linking to each individual page.
  4. Upload the resulting work.

A typical catalog has between 30-110 pages. A large catalog can have as many as 300 pages. Barring any corrupted fonts embedded in the .pdfs, the entire process would take roughly 45 minutes to build and post to the web.

The problem was, corrupted fonts embedded in the .pdfs occured on a regular basis, and could extend the process to four or five hours because Flash Paper insisted on having viable fonts.

The second problem with Flash Paper was download time. The majority of our customers are on 56k modems and basic dialup lines. A single page usually took a whopping 5 minutes to download! While our customers were used to this, I find it unacceptable.

Also, even though Flash Paper offered our customers the greatest amout of flexibility in viewing controls and navigation, our competition was still winning customers over with their slow-loading, poor quality, online deliverables because “it does this really cool page-flipping-thing!”

So this became the list of problems we wanted to solve:

  1. Find a faster way to adapt print catalogs for online delivery
  2. Cut the download times for our 56k customers
  3. Deliver the catalog in a high-presentation format (as in, something a bit flashier than Cattle Mail does it)

The hard part was working with the tools we had. Because the web department’s services are viewed as a ‘bonus feature’ or ‘perk’ by our customers [for doing their print business with API], new tools and technologies are not considered a priority. So our options were: static HTML, Coldfusion (limited to what we could learn on our own), Flash Paper, and any other commonly supported plug-in: a Java applet, shockwave file, or flash file.

Because Flash player was already a required standard to view the catalog pages, it was decided to continue using it to deliver our catalogs. But how to deliver them in a faster, more presentable fashion? Slideshows connected to a database could pull in small jpegs and were easy to build. A proprietary web application modeled off of the links header and Flash Paper might work, but it would take some serious time to develop. Or we could build a slick-looking animation in Flash that turned the catalog pages like a real book.

Since time was precious and we were denied a database (falls in that ‘new technology’ realm from earlier), it was easy to choose building our own Flash-based project. It also gave us the advantage of having a customized, branded look.

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