ideas worth stealingDesign and strategy tips in less than 140 characters
A few design and strategy tips I’ve posted to Twitter recently. Could be the beginning of a trend.
What do you think?
Posted by Robert on November 12th, 2008 | Permanent link | 3 Comments »
Time to vote!
To my fellow US citizens —
As you all know, one of the most important elections in our history will be held tomorrow, November 4th, so I’d like to make one last plea.
If you haven’t already voted, set your alarms. Get up early. Go straight to your polling location and vote.
Don’t assume that your candidate of choice is a sure-thing. Go out and make it happen.
On a personal note, I’d like to extend my hope that you vote for Barack Obama.
Obama has the judgment, intelligence, policy proposals, and the wisdom to turn this country around, whereas John McCain would take the lead on the failed policies of the past 8 years and continue driving the country deeper into the mess it’s already in.
Now’s your chance to make a difference. No election on our lifetimes has been more important than this one.
Get up and vote!
Posted by Robert on November 3rd, 2008 | Permanent link | 6 Comments »
Free tickets to the all-online conference
UPDATE: THIS CONTEST IS NOW OVER.
And the winners are … Justin David, Chris Griffith, and Sotheavy Ouk.
Congratulations, and thanks for playin’!
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The <head> conference kicks off tomorrow, and I have three free tickets to give away, courtesy of Aral Balkan, the conference organizer.
The conference is the world’s first international, all-online conference. Sessions will be given using Adobe Connect, there’s an IRC backchannel, and even scheduled gatherings in Second Life.
All sessions will be recorded, so don’t worry if you can’t watch it live. You can always sign in after the event and catch up on anything you missed.
My session is this Saturday at 1pm Pacific / 2pm Mountain / 3pm Central / 4pm EST time (20:00 UCT). If you’re more into the coding side of things, Stephanie’s session is at the same time.
Interested? The first 3 people to contact me with the correct answer to the following question win:
What is the Japanese term for “error-proofing”? (Hint: it was discussed in Designing the Obvious.)
Ready … set … go!
Posted by Robert on October 23rd, 2008 | Permanent link | 3 Comments »
What’s in a name?
We’ve officially, finally, launched the company blog, Miskeeto Bytes.
The inaugural post, What’s in a name?, reveals the story behind our funny name (and its funny spelling) and explains our pricing model for design and development work.
Oh, and though it’s not 100% cooked yet, it does come remarkably close to the design recommendations I made for blog designs in my latest book, Designing the Moment. (The design was the result of a 400-person design discussion I led at WordCamp 2007, and I admitted in the book that I hadn’t yet applied the recommendations to my own blog.)
Posted by Robert on September 23rd, 2008 | Permanent link | No Comments »
Never too good for the basics
Ever watched a professional billiards player? Every game, every match, every win is an exercise in the basics. No matter how experienced these players get, they still rely on the basics to put together a winning rack.
Web designers need to do the same thing.
A developer recently asked me for advice on a data-grid in a learning management system he’d been working on. Each row in the table featured the name of an eLearning course alongside some other details, and he had struggled with how to enable users to edit a course via the table. The current version required users to double-click the course name to open the Edit screen. The developer suspected that double-click functionality would be a problem, and he wanted to avoid adding an Edit button to each row in the table for fear that it would clutter up the interface.
I explained that double-clicking was indeed non-standard for web apps, and that it’s difficult for users to discover. I explained that even if he added a line of instructive text to point it out, users were unlikely to read it. I said I’d need to see a screenshot of the data-grid to offer a more informed suggestion, but based on what he explained, adding an Edit button was probably the best solution.
Then he sent me a screenshot. And the answer jumped right out.
In the screen, the course names were displayed as plain black text. There was no hint in the interface that the course names could be clicked (or, in this case, double-clicked).
To solve this problem he’d been fretting about for days, he simply needed to use standard HREFs and then restyle the course names to look like links. Get rid of the double-click functionality. Scrap the idea of adding instructive text. Forget about adding an Edit button.
In other words, stop trying to reinvent the wheel and let HTML do what it does best—connect pages, screens, and screen states via the magic of hyperlinks.
When he replied to my suggestion, I could almost see him kicking himself. Like a lightning bolt had just struck him in the head, and he simply couldn’t believe he had missed something so obvious. So … basic.
If you don’t understand and repeatedly apply the basics, there’s a good chance any invention you come up with will miss the mark and fail to support the goals and behaviors of your users. Before you can innovate well, it’s vital to understand why these standards exist in the first place.
Every game, every match, every win is an exercise in the basics. No matter the project, the basics will take you a very long way towards achieving a good design.
Posted by Robert on September 11th, 2008 | Permanent link | 3 Comments »