A great product page design case study from a guy at UX agency CX partners:
Shoppers tell us that emotion pays a huge role in their buying decisions. I wanted to create a product page that would let a shopper fall in love with a product. To do this, I created a fictional high-fashion shoe retailer called Beech & Taylor, which combines the best of eCommerce interaction design with the styling and engagement of a fashion magazine.
Following on from my earlier post about 'brainstorming' I was interested to read about the new book from the guys behind 37signals - the productivity people behind basecamp. It's called Re:work and it's about getting stuff done, a topic close to my heart. You can download a preview PDF here. I am not sure if I totally agree with their comments on meetings as they see them (perhaps rightly) as a block to actually doing things, and this makes them Bad and Wrong.
I certainly have worked with a couple of companies where all the marketing people are in meetings all day long and then work in the evening, and you wonder if all this group activity and consensus building actually helps make better products in the end.
At their worst I think meetings are responsibility sharing mechanisms. Building excuses for failure and sharing the blame: "it wasn't my fault, we agreed it in a meeting". However, many of the same principles apply for meetings as they do for brainstorms, you are essentially exchanging productivity for team building and developing a shared sense of purpose. I heard something interesting the other day, in that at least 50% of the purpose of a meeting has got nothing to do with the work, it is about engendering the feeling of joint responsibility and having a common goal.
Nonetheless, the following tips from the 37signals people may be helpful if you find yourself in 6 hours of meetings today:
From 'Let my people go surfing' by Yvon Chouinard, Founder of Patagonia
When I had my blacksmith shop, I contracted out the tooling of our climbing gear, and some of the production, to Harold Leffler's machine shop in Burbank. Leffler was a draftsman and tool and die maker with fifty years' hands-on experience. We called him the genius as often as we called him Harold. He was so good at his craft that he received requests from aircraft companies around the country to bid on their projects, even though he ran a small shop.
Harold used to joke about the blueprints he received from the engineers; they were so over-designed that the cost to produce them would be ten to twenty times higher than necessary, and in many cases, they would be impossible to make at all. Because I had no training in engineering but did know what I wanted a carabiner or ice screw to do, I would show up with a simple sketch or a carved wooden model, or just an idea in my head, and we would work together to come up with a design that would be feasible. Even after Tom Frost, a talented engineer and draftsman, became my partner, we consulted Harold Leffler at all stages in the design process.
My relationship with Leffler taught me all about how important it is for the designer to work with the producer up front. This applies to every product. Building a house proceeds more smoothly and less expensively if the architect and contractor work out the real-world problems of a blueprint before the cement truck rolls up to pour the foundation. Likewise a rain jacket is better made when the producer understands from the start what the product needs to achieve and, conversely, when the designer understands what processes have to be followed and, finally, when everyone stays on the team and works until it is done.
Michael Kant refers to this team approach as concurrent, as opposed to assembly-line manufacturing, in which responsibility for one part of the process is handed off in stages to the next in the line. A concurrent approach brings all participants together at the beginning of the design phase. As Dr Kami points out, only about 10 percent of the products costs are incurred during the design phase, but 90 percent of the costs are irrevocably committed. The ongoing relationship beyond the design phase is critical too. Builders have been known to make on-site changes without knowing the architect's intentions, and sewing contractors can easily compromise a rain jacket's performance by altering construction of a seam to fit their own work habits and practices.
We (Elvis) launched this week an augmented reality game for the Britvic water brand Drench. It’s an on-pack promotion for bottled water (sounds boring) in which you go online to play an augmented reality game where you use your webcam to burst bubbles by hitting them with your head. (sounds interesting!). There is a code that will be on a lot of water bottles in the coming months which will qualify you for prizes.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
Douglas Adams
Tell me, does the site above look like Facebook? No it doesn't. But a couple of days ago, it rose to the top of the Google search rankings for the phrase "facebook login". As a result, all those people who use Google rather than type addresses into the address bar (quite a lot of people) ended up logging into ReadWriteWeb instead of Facebook, despite the fact that it is a completely different website that looks completely different and talks about completely different things, but happened to have a facebook logo in the blog post.
Check out the comments:
All these people were completely defeated. Easy to laugh, and genius funny, but instructive, however these are the people who we design for. Next time someone talks about user centred design, remember these are the users.
Sources: UX Magazine / ReadWriteWeb
Everyone has had an elderly relative incapable of handling some kind of electronic device. The now outdated talk of how only kids know how to program video recorders is legend. One story I heard is how it is because of the way older generations' mental models of technology have developed and then crystallized. They grew up in age of mechanical dials.
By and large, outside of high tech labs, each control, button or lever, had only one function - you press something and it affects some real life mechanical or hydraulic system. As a consequence they just couldn't get their heads around how one control can have multiple modes of input, which is standard fare in the modern electronic age. By this I mean, press the button and one thing happens, alter the state (say by cycling through a menu using another button) press it again and something else happens.
It seems simple to us children of the seventies and eighties, but to your average 50 year old, this is mind-bogglingly complex and unknowable like trying to imagine the fifth dimension.
It seems interesting to think about how technology will develop over the coming 50 years and how we might just not get it. Perhaps it will seem incredibly alien to people that you won't always be contactable, or that people don't know where you are, or to have an instantly accessible library of information about everything you see and do.
Our quaint little button pressing ways will one day seem hilariously outmoded I am sure.
Photo from wimmulder on Flickr, via the inestimable No ideas but in things
Inevitably there was disappointment this week over the release of details of the iPad. This is standard procedure for Apple launch announcements – frenzied speculation, incredible disappointment, good sales. Don't buy it though, never buy the first generation of any Apple product. You pay the Mac tax plus the early adopter tax for a substandard product.
That's another story though, what I meant to write about is the discussion around why Adobe Flash is still not on the Apple mobile products, when clearly it could be. On the face of it, it's a no-brainer, you can't watch YouTube, or iPlayer, or the news on any of the main sites or any of the other millions of things you do on the internet all the time on your desktop.
It's simple.
Flash would rip the heart out of the apps marketplace. Apple makes a fortune by completely controlling the experience you get on your iPhone. The apps are actually tiny up-sells each time you want access to additional functionality.
Remember, apps are the internet for idiots. Many of the things you can do with an app, are actually not very difficult web applications, but the asence of certain technology (flash, javascript, in-browser java) has meant that up til recently, you needed to create a separate standalone mobile app to run on the mobile device.
If you could run a flash app on a web-page, full screen and have it work on any phone with flash on it there would be no further reason to ever download an app again. Given the Apple have made untold millions on the 3 billion or so apps that have been downloaded, they have a substantial disincentive to let Flash run on their devices. The other manufacturers are probably following the same logic.
True enough, the latest release of Abobe Creative Suite has an app development toolkit, so you can output flash applications as mobile apps, but much of the web is enabled by flash players.
If I were Nokia or Sony Ericsson right now, I would be pushing through Flash enabled phones as fast as my little workers could pack them into boxes. Free apps for everyone would be a sure-fire way of reducing the Apple appeal just a little.
If I were Apple, I would be trying to come to some sort of arrangement with Adobe to enable some sort of crippled version of their software to run on the phone. Something that would allow web users to say watch videos, but not to do complicated functionality.
It will be interesting to see it develop. Apple has a strong historical dislike for open systems, and has made up for it with a very compelling user experience and design aesthetic. Flash has been instrumental in the development of the internet over the past 10 years and its owner Adobe is going to strongly push for it to remain that way. A clash of civilizations is approaching.
Update: since writing this last night, Robert Scoble has written an interesting piece on whether Flash is doomed or not. Worth a read
