Select/Deselect

December 19, 2007

Or maybe that’s Unselect, although that’s obviously not a real word, but when does that stop us? As I try and complete a design specification for a product finder, only interrupted by my writing about trying to complete a design specification for a product finder, I notice that its the subtle nuances that really take the time to figure out. I know what a table looks like. I also know what a drop-down list of comparable subcategory products looks like. I even know what a Products By Category: Subcategory Listing: Filtered: Single Attribute product list item looks like. But I don’t know whether the 508 label for a button that allows you to uncheck a range of checkboxes should say ‘Unselect All’ or ‘Deselect All’.

Actually, I do know that its ‘Deselect All’, but I only know that because somebody told me. I’m sure someone here who can quote the style and editorial guides complete with page references and footnotes off the top of their head would have been able to point out to me the grammatical and semantic reasoning behind that decision, notwithstanding the fact that unselect isn’t actually a word, even though I thought it might be, because my vocabulary necessarily contains a mixture of English, US English, and web terms, which means I’m never quite sure these days when I write an email or comp a blurb that I’m making any sense at all. Much like as I’m writing this.

The thing is, however long I agonize/agonise over the relative placement of a product image and whether the attribute listings should be bulleted or repeat the attribute names, or what labels we give to information architecture in context with other category pages, the thing that will take 20 minutes to resolve, in a meeting where you’ve got 15 minutes to present the design specification, of which that component appears on 2 pages which should take 2 minutes to cover, will be the annoying label for the widget. So I’m sorting that out right now. I’ve probably missed an entire interaction flow as a result, but that label is now correct, right?

Listening Post: Teenage Fanclub: Commercial Alternative

The Secret Is Out

December 17, 2007

There’s no magic bullet for design, no one-size fits all, or cross-market, cross-audience component set that captures unique customer needs across your entire audience. But there is some cream.

It’s worth investing 7 minutes of your life watching the video to discover what you probably already knew – customers really do know best when it comes to design. Designers are just here to do exactly what you say.

In noting this approach to making your design customers instantly happy, I’m considering making a purchase. As we wind down to the holiday season, we’re winding up on deliverables on a few design projects that should see the light of day early in 2008. I could really do with some Information Architecturizer Spray to instantly organize some category page frameworks. If anyone knows where I can get some by Wednesday, that would be great.

But seriously. No, hang on, that was seriously.

p.s. Happy birthday, Martin

Listening Post: Iggy Pop: Nightclubbing

New Team Home

December 14, 2007

For any of you have been following the Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff blog, you’ve probably realized it’s no longer Martin Hardee writing it. Since Martin left Sun to go and customer experienceizate Cisco.com, we’ve been running that blog as a team effort and it’s probably about time we got ourselves a new team home. There’s no particularly good reason for moving, except that the blog’s URL is a personal one – blogs.sun.com/martinhardee – and we wouldn’t want to misrepresent Martin, or give a false impression of who’s writing for it.

Actually, that’s not 100% true. It sounds good in a corporately responsible way, but actually, the reason we’re moving is that this new blog is MINE. ALL MINE. Well, its the sun.com design team’s, so we’ve given it an abstract URL identifier so that its not associated with one person. We’ll probably lose 80% of our regular readership that linked to the old URL in a feed reader or added a link in their del.ectab.le bookmarks or just have it favorited, but I’ll be sure to put an enormous blinking message on the old blog, to try and redirect folks here. If nothing else, it’ll show us if people actually read the other one, rather it being popular through automated referrals.

We will endeavor, of course, to make this an interesting place to come, so hopefully, if you’ve never even read the old blog and are reading this because you thought ‘New Team Home’ might have something to do with football, then we’re already reaching out. As a point of interest, even though I might say something like ‘favorite endeavor’, I’m actually in the UK, so when I say ‘football’, I really mean ‘soccer’, but I’ll let you interpret it as it makes most sense to you, which is probably more sense than it makes to me. Most other contributors to this blog are in the US, so when they say ‘soccer’, they probably mean ‘football’, if you’re reading this in London. Not that they will. They might say something like ‘community’, though, which will refer to our programs to engage with specific audiences to build a relationship, not to a block of flats in Hackney.

We’ll be posting thoughts on web design, customer experience, usability and letting you know what’s happening on sun.com and associated sites. I expect we’ll post completely irrelevant things too, but we’ll try and make them sound relevant by adding a web design tie-in in the last paragraph. You can let us know what you think, or maybe just quietly agree/disagree. Either way, we hope you’ll find it a worthy distraction for a few minutes and maybe we’ll even be interesting or useful. That’ll be a first for me, but there’s more cleverer people on the design team, so if I can somehow bribe/blackmail them into breaking their blogging duck, it should be an interesting web experience.

Listening Post: Chris Morris: Radio Show 27/07/94

I’m smart me

November 1, 2006

you just need to think about making sure that when you express your projections and quantify your parameters that you are able to be inclusive when it comes to mapping back to a percentage of the experience and the incremental conversion rate based on your time-bound qualifiers but make sure you don’t ignore the quality because for example with 5.1.1 you’ll be sure to align against the 3 key flows and you have to generate quantitative measures against the apparently abstract deliverables or how can you measure how great you are. so think about that. you’ve got until friday.

on the other hand, you night be thinking that at this stage you’re just about ready to plunge into something completely different and it’s worth noting that there are any number of ways you might think about doing the things that you know you can do but don’t do so do them as it’s my job to ensure you attain those things as part of the competencies that map onto the paths which you’re allowed to change just let me know there’s plenty of things you can check out so don’t think you have to just do the same old same old but think about that development path as a parallel track down a lane of opportunity by a stream of aspiration running by the railroad of experiences into the depot of your life. or something. you’ve got until friday.

numbers

cor blimey

October 26, 2006

I’ll just shift that up there and tweak a bit of the list components and, ooh, I’ll add those dates you wanted and maybe, yeah, I’ll change the colour of that and, well, there’s a nasty looking hole there so excuse me while I spend the next hour making a small star in photoshop which serves no purpose except to look rather nice which is why you got me to do this right?

rev 27

June 23, 2006

well I didn’t know about it either but apparently this is the top priority now so let’s just work on a level of effort and commit to getting this done before the end of the week even though I know that bit doesn’t exist but it doesn’t matter because if you can just mock it up then that means it exists so there’s no need to actually implement it and why on earth do you need 4 other people just to get that bit from here to go over there and it doesn’t matter if it’s only 2k, it’s the fact that it’s the milestone we’re driving to that matters, so just get someone from the office to turn it into spanish and then we’ll get back to the thing I just thought of that you haven’t designed yet because you haven’t read my mind for some reason.

I’m sorry, I just don’t understand that bit, because that’s not what I do, so i’ll let you tell me how long it will take but whatever you say won’t be soon enough and anyway even though I’ve just admitted I don’t know what I’m saying you still have to do it so you might as well drop everything on top of the stuff you’ve already dropped and we’ll work on plan v79 get make sure we can align all activities and synchronize our choreography around our timelines and everything will be ok as long as you can prove to me that what you’ve just done is making money because it’s got your name on it now which serves you right for being so good at something whatever it is that you do

can you meet yesterday to go over the things I haven’t told you about yet?

I don’t care, you’ve got a week

June 16, 2006

I won’t be going out again for a while anyway so what’s to say that we can’t just have a week where you just sit in a dark room – like you do all day anyway – and work out what it is you’ve been doing for the last 5 years and then just do a presentation or something so that at least you can say you’ve thought about it really hard even though you know that it’s based on an ecommerce deliverable that doesn’t even have goalposts and a posiedon-sized mandate to deploy on the partner platform so actually, what we’re saying is that we know it’ll never happen but we’re saying it will in 2007 so that we can score at least once even though we’re ending up considering that we just do what we were doing 5 years ago anyway and just let everybody else do whatever they like, as long as we’ve collaborated on that decision and that, well, it’s their decision, not ours, even though we might actually be one and the same thing these days, and you know, I might just want to do something else.

tweak that thing you did before and we can use that anyway because it’s not really changed, right? I mean that’s still valid, right? well, if we say so, it’s valid. I’m not really sure whether that means it’s desirable, sustainable, or even implementable, but it’s certainly believable and of course, it’s got loads of pictures in so it’s also undeniable so I’d suggest we park this in the repository, put a link in the email, and then we’ll get together to work out what we’re doing next year instead before we find that we’re sucked into the black hole of interoperability or tripping over the cracked pavement of platform alignment or just getting a nasty chaff on the thigh of ARPU. either way, I’d say we call this an opportunity and just deliver a load of stuff. people like that.

you can draw

May 10, 2006

thaas_loomoo_89 — thaas loomoo 89 by Tim Caynes

yeah, so, like, essentially its like a, well, you know, you can just go do this right? try and think about it. it can be a really useful tool to drive the concepts and describe the real scenarios and investigate the problems we have along the way, right? or maybe you could have some intellectually overbearing dissection of the whole genre in relation to what you actually do when you sit munching doritos and hacking e8s which is porbably as valid an argument as saying that we can rationalize our toolbox while we add about 3 more and then just see how the whole thing scales when we drop the bomb onto the product IA and step back while the korean xerox machine goes into overdrive with dayglo ink and clown music in the background while a sober dutchman just sits in the corner saying ‘what the hell?’ to a box of matches that might just be struck up on the big fat cigar you’ve been saving for this moment. click. pull. remember that in the end the way that things are set up right now means that we can be totally random and we’re actually headed in that direction and however polite we are about scraping the business intelligence from under your chatting fingernails then actually you’re just going to have to respect the fact that we’ve already defined your key purpose today so thanks for your question, but you’re not allowed to ask that so get back in your hole and try buying something for once you cheapskate.

it does that to you. and I’m not even in trouble, except with myself

lindsay lohan’s xbox 360 ban

March 9, 2006

utilizing web traffic methodologies and integrated scoring systems to mine the unknown customers that we know we don’t know should allow us to create evaluations for known prospects across campaigns to develop cultivation programs and be able to categorize and influence the rating after we capture them to drive to specific microsites to nurture them and cumulatively compile the feeds into the algorithm across campaigns and keep that data centralized in the single repository but maintain the sub-tier for increased clickthrough. so you’re also adding the layer between followup and interest and so yes the possibilities for the visitors you don’t have are critical even though they’re not really invested in the interest curve but we could provide it. but that’s probably only to do with the acquisition process but we have to progress on the cultivation and revenue generation but I might say that being the vp.

the time you spend on that thing will be appended to the incremental data that forms part of the discovery process and brings us to the qualification where we’re going to understand and be interesting to know about the specifics of how we want to manage the feeds and we are able to do that lookup but if we don’t use it then we’ll rate it but we’re not going to lose it so let’s not think about missing the deal but we have to wait and wait and wait until you tell us as much as we need to know just to know who you are and so what you’re likely to do. so we’re not going to do it because actually, well, we’re just not going to but you’re not asking me the right way so I don’t know whether you’re asking me for it even though we know that between this and that you’re most likely to have been asking for something else, but in a different way, which we haven’t worked out what to do about yet.

next time we’ll be learning about funnels, but on mute

salma hayek collabspace accident

March 7, 2006

so I’ll set this up and we can drive it across all the strands of stuff because I mean we know just what we need to do but I’m not really sure that we quite know if there is a particular page we’re supposed to be colliding on because excuse us if we’re used to the morris 1100 haynes manual but we’re gonna have to get something straight by the close of business or we’ll all be at different layers. and yes, I’m still here.

I really didn’t expect to be ready to do any of this stuff yet but I understand just how critical it is to somebody somewhere because you’ve started to find out exactly what it is that they think their requirements are so I’m thinking that if we get something set up for 8am tomorrow then I guess we’ll have a strategy. oh, I know that’s not really a map to the standards but actually, in this case, we’re allowed to get it horribly wrong, so let’s just continue with the circles because they’re presented in a really logical order. if you’re still on the phone, I guess we can recap at this point. we dunno.

by this time webex is flashing my life before me, but with a 3 second delay, so I manage to pick out a couple of bits that I’d always wondered about and pinch myself before the virtual truck hits and maybe I’ll catch the end of the champions league or maybe say hello to the rest of the family as they close the bedroom door that I opened the last time I saw them this morning.

I’ve still got an hour on thursday I haven’t filled. how about that?

Things what I writ