There’s a Package For You

January 11, 2008

I just opted in to our design documentation standard, to do the right thing. I mean, we always do the right thing, but we’ve not really defined the ‘right thing’ very well up to this point. However, we’re just getting our design process rationalized across the team, including the technology we use to interface with other teams, vendors, agencies etc. We’ve always had the super web design component standards out there, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, but internally, well, it probably isn’t a surprise to anybody out there who is part of a reasonably sized design team to know that there’s always been a number of different ways in which we initiate, manage and deliver our design projects

Not any more. No sirree. The few good people here that have been tasked with coordinating our activities are just starting to cement some of the pieces in place. These are not new ideas. We’ve talked about the need to do this for about 10 years, and in that time, the size of the organization has grown many times its original small, lithe, sexy size. Now, more than ever, we need to be able to track and tune projects on a predictable path, to set expectations, engage the multiple teams you need to engage with these days, and even just understand what the project we’re currently working on actually is (surprising how often you stop in the middle and realize you have no idea what it is you’re supposed to be delivering. That’s not just me is it?. Oops.).

Which brings me to documentation. I’ve always been the kind of rapid prototyping kind of person. If you want to see what the web pages will look like, I’ll write them, and then you can tell me what you think. Context, you see. So what if it takes a bit of work to do the initial set up and a few frantic nights of html hacking to make it look like it will fit seamlessly into the Solutions section, when you know really that it won’t actually look like that because that section is actually implemented on a hack of a content management platform and none of those components will really sit together like that? At least you see it in context. Trouble is, you can’t, as I often found, take that development site to the publishing and engineering teams and just say “I want that one”. They want to know things like “what happens when I click this”, “how many of those can you have”, “has this been reviewed?”. How unreasonable. Its just a mockup, its not supposed to actually work, you know.

Which is where the new documentation standards come in. Some sickeningly efficient folks in our team have been doing this kind of thing the right way for years. You know, they’re the ones who have actually qualified somehow to be a designer. People like me, however, just have never had a clue. So, how serendipitous it is that Creative Suite 3 finally gets delivered to me (after protracted supplier delays), and I get my hands on InDesign, for that is the tool of choice. Our friends at Eight Shapes did a grand job, a while back, of working on a design documentation framework that supports our component set and incorporates “mapping & annotation standards, artifact modularization, and tricks of the trade learned over years of experience” (their words, but they’re the right words). What this means in practice, is that I can now develop fully annotated design specifications, with consistent wireframes, nomenclature, and interaction definitions, which are understood by clients, designers, publishers and engineers alike. This is nothing short of a revelation to me. I mean, it doesn’t actually do the designing for me, so I can still get that hopelessly wrong, but its a huge change for the better on the project and process management front, and its a self-documenting exercise. I also get to learn a new application, which is nice. Oh, and, of course, I get new friends on Facebook, so I now know what Nathan’s Star Wars character is, which is always useful.

Listening Post: White Stripes: Bone Broke

Small Design Nicety

January 1, 2008

I only wonder how uncontrollably out of shape I am when I’m looking for a new pair of Levis. In the UK they have a few ranges that I like and then they discontinue them without warning. When I’m out in the US, I look for cheaper versions of the same ranges only to find that they don’t do that range, but they do a 5xx boot cut which may be like that, but I really don’t know, sir, I’ve never heard of a 5xx. I usually come away with 17 pairs of 501s and a spare new suitcase, but they don’t quite fit right. The 501s, not the suitcases. Actually, the suitcases aren’t too bad a fit right now

When I find myself drawn to the Levi store in the mall, when I really should be buying a battery for a dead submarine or something, the only thing that really foxes me (apart from how old I seem in there), is trying to remember what size I’m looking for. I mean, I know it’s 2 sizes bigger than it really should be, but I don’t know quite what state my protruding guts and stubby bow legs are in, and so when someone half my age asks me what size I’m looking for, I can’t say. Most embarrassingly (for them), I end up asking them to look at the label on the pair I’m wearing to see what size I need, as I can’t actually rotate my head around far enough to read the feet and inches, upside down at the bottom of the label.

It seems that Levis have been following enough old forgetful fat people with wonky heads around to realize that this is a problem. When I was looking around at my own backside to see what I’d sat in on the picnic bench at the Marsh Larder at Holkham the other day, I happened to notice that at the top right of the label on my Levis (518s) are the W and L measurements that I so often am looking for. Nothing unusual there maybe, but they are now printed upside down. Which means that I can now look over my shoulder and read the label to see exactly what my waist size and leg measurements are (and then cry a little bit, obviously). This is genius. It’s like when, as a child, you first realize that they’ve printed ECNALUBMA like that on purpose, so you can see it in your rear-view mirror. Even my hairdresser does it on their gowns now, so that when you’re looking at your woeful lack of hair in the mirror, you can also see ‘Croppers. Since 1974′ in there as well, because it’s printed backwards on the unreflected version.

Its only a small design update, and they might have done it ages ago, but I only just noticed it, and it made my day (sadly). I’ll buy another pair of Levis as a result. After I’ve been to the gym a bit. Well, a lot.

Listening Post: XTC: Respectable Street

Are We Ready Yet?

December 21, 2007

Web ready? There must be some simple process to make sure that all this product data is stored somewhere, so that we can access it it when we’re rendering product content on sun.com? No? Ah. But there is a process. There’s a few.

Designing interactivity based on product taxonomies is really interesting stuff. There’s a number of ways you can slice the data which enables you to present compelling experiences that drive to conversion. It’s even more interesting when you’re designing on an assumption of what those taxonomies look like, rather than what they actually look like. There is a point up to which you can make sensible design decisions, based of top-level and subcategory branching, for example, but there does come another point where, without the data, you really don’t know whether you can entertain alternate experiences, through, say, filtering across common product attributes. If you don’t know what attributes there are, you don’t know if they are common.

But designers like challenges. The challenge is often to get folks to lust after the design so much that they’ll give you whatever you want. I’m asking for the data.

Listening Post: Public Image: Public Image

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

sleater-kinney presentation

September 12, 2007

I got that new template the other day which is a bit like the old template except now you can have multiple curves because that’s what’s there and insert picture from file here its some beach huts in southwold but it doesn’t matter copyright on brand I think. now I have to add another orange box which is fine but I rather liked the symmetry of those four across the middle but hey five is just as nice in fact it breaks up the three below in green marvellous (red underline?). can’t really understand why the spell checker thinks a block of text on a box only has one word though when there’s clearly seventeen. I’ll happily put an ampersand in there but spell out twelve numbers, yes, its a style I’ve been doing it for 15 years & I’m happy with it and I’m not going to change it now

only speaker notes. I’ll make the font bigger so it lasts longer. everything in hare 50 pee.

by the time its gone into the collabspace (red underline) I’ll have grown my hair back. the revised version is here if you have any questions let me know it occurs to me that in the current context the expectation is pretty low it doesn’t really matter how far we go. on the way back we talked about everything and so now it’ll end up in arial 24 but nobody will know because you stripped out the meaning which is perfect you can’t fail basis of mediocrity but look you’re still there you can hide forever if he can do it and still progress to that level there’s hope for all of us remaining just where we are I’ll do that forever there’s 2 minutes of this outro.

all that glitters ain’t gold

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?

Things what I writ