Topic : Conferences

8
Aug 11

The Wisdom of Edward Tufte

I finally took Edward Tufte’s day-long information design course last week. Tufte, long a thought leader on the topic of graphically showing quantitative and scientific data, shared his principles for displaying this evidence in any media. Here are some high-level notes:

  • Designers of data displays, either printed or online, should strive to reduce the time it takes to learn the display format and increase the time the reader devotes to thinking about the data.
  • Use “small multiples“, repeated use of the same type of graphic, to reduce learning time. Once a person figures out how one graphic is read, they know how to read all the graphics.
  • Charts and other graphical displays should always tell stories. This often involves displaying information using a time scale.
  • Data displays should supply context as well as information. A price increase from one year to the next tells little unless it is shown in the context of the past five or 10 years.
  • Multi-variate data graphics supply the richest context and tell the best stories. Price increases (or declines) shown over time and compared to wage increases (or declines) for the same period tell a much more powerful story than simply showing the price increase alone.
  • Keep “chartjunk” and “chartoons” to a minimum. Embellishments like gradients or patterns for the backgrounds of charts and graphs only get in the way of the information. Designers should strive for a high ink to data ratio.
  • If content in a display needs to be compared to other content, put the two chunks of content next to each other. It’s unreasonable to ask a person to go back and forth between web pages or printed pages when trying to compare two or more things.
  • Using area to display quantitative data is a risky proposition. Unless the scale of the area of all diagram elements exactly matches the scale of the data, the graphic is lying.
  • In a related thought, the only thing worse than using a pie chart to display quantitative data is using multiple pie charts. It is impossible for people to figure out what percent of the whole is represented by the pie pieces without the numbers being displayed on the slices. And if you need to display the numbers, why not use a simple table instead.
  • When designing line and bar charts, don’t place a legend off to the side. This forces people to have to scan back and forth between the graphical element and the legend. It is better to put the notation near the elements in the graph itself.
  • A graphical user interface should be “invisible” so that people can focus on the information. If we as designers do our jobs correctly, people won’t be aware of our work.

I’m sure there are points I missed. All of Tufte’s principles are covered in four of his beautifully produced books that came with admission to the course. They are themselves examples of Tufte’s principles.

Published in: Conferences / Information Architecture / Interaction Design
21
Jun 11

Touchscreen Design Best Practices

Saturday was Day 2 of the Mobile UX sessions at Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week in San Francisco. The focus was on designing for touchscreens. Here are my high-level notes:

  • Allow Users To Go Back and Undo: Make sure users can compensate for accidental taps. Have them confirm any action that would delete their data, erase their work, or process a transaction.
  • Don’t Force Users To Change Device Orientation: Whether your app is a content app like the New York Times or a utility app like American Airlines make sure it can adjust its layout to however a person is holding their device.
  • Pad Those Links And Buttons: Padding a widget can improve people’s accuracy in clicking it. For example, if you display an product image and description in a list layout, make the whole row clickable, not just the image or the text.
  • Padding Can Prevent Errors, But Won’t Increase Efficiency: In cases where you have a clickable invisible padding area around an object, people will still slow the movement of their finger as it approaches the target. Because they don’t know the target is actually larger, they treat it like it is smaller. Fitts’ law is still on the books.
  • Pad Links On Your Wired Site If You Want It Used on Tablets: Many site managers have learned that iPad and other tablets owners are using their wired sites instead of the mobile versions that were designed with smartphones in mind. See Yahoo!’s tablet site for cues on how a wired site can be tweaked to work on a touchscreen tablet.
  • Avoid Localized Swipes: When a left or right swipe only changes one horizontal section of a screen, it confuses people as to what the gesture does. Localized swipes don’t match real world movement, in which pushing something moves the entire object, not a portion of it. Don’t make your app a stack of independent carousels.
  • Provide Cues To Unseen Functionality: Gestures are great for maximizing screen layout but can be undiscoverable by new users. The convention of pulling down on a screen to refresh content that Twitter and other mobile sites use is hidden from the view of new users. Provide cues to new users to help them learn these gestures.
  • Don’t Rely On The Accelerometer For Navigation: People who are new to more advanced mobile devices may not even know about “shaking” as a means for input. Others may find it clumsy or uncomfortable. It’s OK to use the accelerometer, but don’t make it to sole means for input. Urbanspoon’s iPhone app is a good example of an app that uses the accelerometer but also has a big red button.
  • Use Sliders With Caution: Sliders as interface controls are imprecise. Don’t use them if the person has to get to an exact value.
  • Tablets Are Not Smartphones: Don’t be afraid of rich interactions on iPads and other tablets. Tablet users are not “on the go” in the same way as smartphone users.
  • Design A Distinctive Home Screen Icon: Make your app’s icon distinct so it can be recognized on a crowded home screen. If people have to remember your app’s icon, they may never click it.
  • More Is Often Less: Adding features to your mobile app doesn’t always make it better, especially if they add too much complexity. Add features of they make sense in a mobile context, not just because they exist on your wired site.
Published in: Conferences / Interaction Design / Mobile
18
Jun 11

Mobile Design Best Practices

Today was Day 1 of the Mobile UX sessions at Nielsen Norman Group’s Usability Week in San Francisco. Here are my high-level notes:

  • Design For Interruptions: Since mobile usage is out “in the wild” you have to assume interruptions will happen. Support auto-save and user initiated saving of work. Remember what people type into form inputs and never make them type the same information twice.
  • Design For Continuous Experiences: If users can enter information or save things on your wired site, make sure they can access that information on your mobile app/site. And also let them save and add information on the mobile version that flows back to the wired site.
  • Reduce Interaction Cost: Anything you can do to remove typing reduces interaction cost. Even on the most advanced mobile device, typing is annoying at best (I know this because I’m writing this on an iPad). Whenever your design asks a person to type, ask yourself if there is another way to get this information other than the device keyboard.
  • Make Designs Self-Sufficient: Don’t make people have to leave your app/site to get a necessary piece of information. For example, if your site is a banking site that only processes transactions on business days, don’t offer a date picker that includes weekends or holidays. If someone has to get into their device calendar to check if June 19 is a weekend, they may not get back to the same place in the transaction and may have to start over.
  • Don’t Force People To Rely On Memory: Don’t send people an email with a cryptic promotion code and then send them to a site where they have to remember that code. Pass the code in on the URL if they click anything on the email and keep it in memory for the length of their session. If they have to go to their email when presented with a promo code input during checkout, they may never get back to complete the transaction.
  • Preserve Session State Throughout The Visit: Don’t let people click a Save to Favorites icon from a search results screen and then send them back to a screen where they have to reenter their search term(s) to get the same results list. Remember what they were doing and get them back intact when they go down alternative paths. And provide them a way to easily start a new search if indeed they are done with their previous search.
  • Remember People’s History: Don’t make people reenter information they already provided. If someone enters a zip code or selects a gender while shopping for shoes, persist that throughout their session (at a minimum). There’s little that’s more annoying than having to reenter information on a mobile keyboard.

Day 2 of Mobile UX is tomorrow. The focus is on touchscreens. You can follow the live tweets at #nnguw.

Published in: Conferences / Interaction Design / Mobile
8
Feb 11

Having Fun With a Great Idea

I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun working on a weekend. This happened when I had the good fortune to be a participant in the UX For Good’s UXXU 2011 design challenge about a week ago. I got to spend two days with some really smart folks trying to help solve some very serious social problems. It was time well spent.

My challenge team got to partner with the Adler School of Professional Psychology to develop a plan to better engage their students, faculty, and city with their mission of advocating a community-based approach to addressing mental health issues. For two days we delved into the challenges the Adler School faces and brainstormed on short- and long-term solutions.

Did we solve the problems? No. But did we expect to? Not really. To be honest, these are some fairly complex social problems that are way beyond the ability of 100 or so dedicated people to resolve in 48 hours. There have been critics of what we did, but they totally missed the point. Instead of rebutting I’ll let Cia Romano’s thoughts make the case.

So what did we accomplish? I think we showed the five non-profits that short exercises in brainstorming can be extremely productive. We showed that tapping engaged and passionate people who may lack in-depth domain expertise but have a knack for quickly ferreting out the details of a situation can be a beneficial exercise. We showed that opening discussions about a problem to a wider audience can yield fresh ideas.

Is this approach how the social ills these groups are fighting will be solved? Probably not, at least not by itself. But can it be part of a larger recalibration of how we address problems that have been so seemingly intractable for so long? I certainly hope so. And that is success.

Note: UX for Good will in New Orleans next year. I can’t think of a better place to move this idea forward.

Published in: Conferences