The power of rich visual modeless feedback

One of my favorite aspects of product design is the feedback mechanism. When I think of feedback, I think fundamentally about the car dashboard. Nearly every action that a driver makes in a car is responded to with one or more forms of feedback whether audible, tactile or visual.

When turning into a left lane, the driver will (hopefully) use the turn signal lever to indicate the change of lanes. Pulling the lever anti-clockwise will activate the turn signal on the exterior of the car, but will also offer the following feedback:

• Audible: The dashboard will emit a clicking sound
• Visual: A green arrow will flash on and off in the dashboard
• Tactile: The lever will click or nudge over

All of these feedback mechanisms work in tandem to communicate with the driver that the turn signal is active and working. As a side note, if you’ve ever activated your turn signal and it emitted a clicking sound at double the normal rate, it usually means that one of your lights is dead (this is considered negative audible feedback). That’s great design when you consider how impossible it would be to turn on your signal indicator, get out of the car, run around it to check all the lights are working and then jump back in again, all at 30 miles an hour!

Continue reading...

Important visual design principles for interface design

Now that everyone at Cooper has committed to writing a more frequent Journal, I’ve found myself reading a lot more blogs. That’s not to say that I wasn’t happily browsing and sponging before, but I’ve been really consumed by other people’s opinions lately. For instance, Ryan Singer of 37 Signals pointed to an interesting UI discussion just a few weeks ago. The discussion began in the comment area of a screenshot posted to Flickr, and it related to an iPhone application called Triplog/1040 by Stevens Creek Software; I've pasted the photo below.

The screenshot received a great deal of negative criticism. The customer reviews at the iTunes store have been equally negative, and the average rating is currently 1 ½ stars out of 5. (Not great if you’re looking to earn revenue on your application and there are several competitors challenging you).

So what to do about it? Well, I *could* critique the screen with additional constructive thoughts but I feel like Steve, the designer, has received enough suggestions and probably is not looking for more feedback. (If my work had received that kind of attention I think I might quit and become a barista). Instead, I’ll highlight a few visual design principles that this conversation sparked in my mind.

First impressions count
Just like you gain an instant impression when you meet a person for the first time, the same is true for interfaces. Called the Aesthetic-Usability Effect in Universal Principles of Design, this principle highlights the important role that visual design plays when designing products:

The Aesthetic-Usability Effect describes a phenomenon in which people perceive more-aesthetic designs as easier to use than less-aesthetic designs — whether they are or not ... Aesthetic designs are more effective at fostering positive attitudes than unaesthetic designs, and make people more tolerant of design problems.

The discussion about the Triplog software has been all about how unusable it looks despite the application not being available at the time to use. That’s not to say there aren’t usability flaws but a visual design with more organization and the right prioritization would go a long way to improving the perceived usability of the application.

Dense doesn’t have to be ugly but it does require you to be smarter
Much criticism of the Triplog interface was about the screen being too cluttered. But as Steve pointed out, his users need to view all of that information at the same time. I'm not challenging whether information should be removed but am reminded that for screens with high information density it is more important to use visual design techniques to organize the structure and flow of content as well as prioritize the most important information in a way that’s easily scannable.

Looking at a dense interface is like listening in a restaurant. When the restaurant is quiet it’s easy to hear the person you’re dining with but if the restaurant is busy and there’s a lot of background noise then it takes a lot more effort to hear and understand what the person sitting opposite is saying. You can do it but it takes a lot more work and isn’t as much fun.

Dense interfaces should have a clear visual hierarchy with a maximum four or five levels of distinction. Dense screens should be designed so that similar interface elements share attributes such as size, shape and color or proximity. Dense information should be organized so that elements are aligned to an underlying grid, which aids scanning. Finally, dense screens should contain minimal gratuitous noise that doesn’t support the user interaction.

Be different if you want to be remembered
Several people offered constructive ideas in the discussion. Some even went as far as to quickly mock up how they would design the interface (see here and here). Some resulted in screen designs that looked very similar to Apple’s UI guidelines for the iPhone.

I recognize that these mock-ups were done extremely quickly, but the alternatives run the risk of being too generic to be memorable, looking too much like an iPhone utility and not enough like a unique, useful, and original application. I’m the first to recommend standard UI best practices, but standards need not get in the way of establishing a brand. (Some commenters even preferred the bright blue background in Steve’s design to the more familiar iPhone UI, perhaps because it is unique and memorable).

It’s an exciting time to be in visual interface design
Okay, this may not be a principle, but it’s worth mentioning. There are all kinds of new digital products with interfaces that are changing the world we live in, and it’s exciting to see, discuss, and participate in this movement. Apple’s iPhone is one great example. New technologies require new thoughtful design. Now I just need to figure out what iPhone app I’m going to design and sell on iTunes.

The airline industry needs to check their own baggage

I wasn't surprised to read that the airline industry was rated the worst in customer ratings. It seems like every week there's a news story about one of the major airlines raising their fees or adding another miscellaneous cost on top of their base ticket prices. I'm slightly sympathetic to the fact that the airlines are dealing with ever-increasing oil expenses, but not all airlines are dealing with their struggles in the same way.

I was pretty outraged when American, United, and US Airlines announced plans to charge an extra $15 per checked bag. This is already on top of the $25 for a second checked bag that they (and in fairness most other airlines) already charge. Why couldn't they simply add $15 to the price of their tickets? Because they can't compete on price with low cost carriers like Southwest and are feeling the squeeze from both sides.

Now more and more travelers will abandon checking luggage and cram all number of accessories into smaller carry-on bags, thereby causing long lines through security and long boarding times while they struggle to shove their bags overhead with little assistance. This will ultimately lead to delays and more misery.

The bottom line is that for flying, people mainly care about cost and if you've flown on Southwest, American, United or Virgin America there's not a great deal of difference in service — so why pay more? If anything, I enjoy flying on Southwest and Virgin America more because the employees tend to be friendlier and the personal entertainment on longer flights breaks up the time.

Until airlines like American can prove that their higher prices reflect a better and more enjoyable service I'll keep picking the lowest price I can find. I don't mind sucking it up even if I end up in a middle seat between two big burly guys with no elbow room. We've all been there.

Instead of these airline companies being creative with accounting, they need to get creative with designing better experiences like Alaska Airlines is doing or consider re-engineering planes to fly with alternative fuels like Virgin highlighted recently when they used 5% biofuel. I might pay $15 more if I think it's worth it but I definitely won't pay an extra $15 to have a more miserable experience when I know I can pay less elsewhere.

With any luck, one of the travel sites will be updated so that I can search flights and compare the full cost for my travel knowing that I'll be gone for two weeks and will definitely be checking one bag if not two. Then the larger airlines will maybe take note and change their travel plans.

How we use Fireworks

In our training courses, we're frequently asked what tools we use. The answer is pretty simple. While we might use Photoshop for heavy photo manipulation or break out Illustrator for the odd diagram or visualization, we've come to love Adobe Fireworks for designing screen-based interfaces and illustrating scenarios.

Recently, Adobe asked us to share some of our Fireworks techniques with the user community. As a result, we worked with them to create this short video about how our interaction designers and visual designers worked together on a recent project for GoldMail.

If you want to get more in depth with Fireworks, you can read a more thorough article about specific techniques that I recently wrote on Adobe's developer center.

Using research to end visual design debates

Imagine the following scenario: You're involved in a new product design project and are presenting several visual design options to the team. Everyone in the meeting is leaning toward one direction when in the back of the room an executive's hand shoots up. "I don't like orange," he says, and suddenly the meeting spirals out of control, degrading into a discussion about whether or not the square elements of the interface look too blocky, and "Could we use circles instead?"

If you've ever had to present visual design to a group, you probably have your own collection of similar horror stories. But why is it that a group of otherwise level-headed adults can't seem to have a productive meeting about visual design? The short answer is that in the absence of clear context about what they are evaluating, most people don't know how to objectively evaluate visual design, so they rely instead on subjective intuition.

Why is there subjectivity in this process? Visual communication, perhaps even more so than verbal communication, is a nuanced language. Rich gradations of tone and style exist in even the most straightforward of applications. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is just where the trouble begins. A thousand words—especially when they're the wrong words—can do a lot of damage.

Continue reading...