I was having an interesting conversation with Alex Jones the other day, remarking about the usability studies by Peter Steen Høgenhaug around the ‘link’ iconography in CMS software. Alex touched on this in his blog with Usability of the Link Icon and earlier with Replacing the Save Icon. It’s interesting when we encounter patterns in systems that other designs tend to perpetuate and we create learned patterns that users who interact with our systems get used to over time.

As Alex points out, Høgenhaug did test with users unfamiliar with the CMS software and were not used to patterns in those systems even though many systems use very, very similar iconography. It would be interesting to see that case applied to frequent users (a simple pattern learned once, to be sure).

I’m a big fan of re-evaluating systems on a regular basis because I think it keeps UX professionals fresh. I’m always worried that too often, as technology changes, as systems become more complex and evolved, we rely on older iconography, older user patterns, and the ‘traditional’ ways of thinking. I feel that we should be looking deeply at the user base to come up with new and innovative methods to teach users new structures rather than relying on old habits and patterns. Saving to a disk may no longer be a useful user action, versions could be closer to the path you want users to take. Sharing, Tweeting, Manipulation – new and interesting actions have cropped up for users. It’s up to designers to take a step back and look at how these actions are taken in the system and craft designs which encourage these actions but are not confusing.

John – Agency Creative Director

• 38 years old, married with children and a dog – enjoys painting in his spare time.
• John has been the creative director of a mid-sized agency for 3 years.
• John’s looking for an online portfolio, attention to detail, and some idea of style and taste.
• In addition to creative samples, John wants to see a good knowledge base, experience, and contact information .
• John spends a fair amount of time on the Web and as such can appreciate good design and the latest trends both in Web development and design. He speaks the lingo and is on the forefront with best practices to fulfill a wide variety of customer/ client needs.
• John takes an analytical, critical approach to sites. The need to find information quickly and effectively is important as he is constantly judging the interface.

Andrea – Local Web Designer

• 31 years old, has a boyfriend and a cat – enjoys indie music and good beer.
• Andrea is a local tech/ design geek who keeps up her relationships in the industry.
• Andrea enjoys reading tech and design blogs (mostly through her Google Reader) to stay on top of the latest tools of her trade and also for inspiration for her next design.
• Industry news is very important and she keeps up with what’s happening with her peers by attending several professional events as well as discussions online. Beer Summits are her favorite.
• She is most likely to find a new blog to read through her contacts in the industry or through meeting with the authors at professional meetups

Any and all thoughts are welcome, I’m still kind of fleshing the personas out as I begin to focus on a new information architecture that I’ll post within the next few days. I’m still looking to see if, in fact, I need another persona or if these two would capture the majority of those who would look at my site.

Many thanks to Chris Harris for helping me out with some amazing logo sketches. I’m really loving the one on the lower right. I’m trying to go for a bug that will work over several themes and still look pretty bold on the Web.

I’m still going through a lot of the Web stuff too – I’ll post some of the personas and wireframes I’ve been playing with. I’m really trying to pull myself above the project (one of the reasons I asked for Chris’ help). I feel that my last design was a long time coming because I was knee-deep in the design and moving farther from treating myself as a client. I really want to go through the motions to do this redesign differently. I think it’s also a more ‘true’ redesign in that I’m changing everything and slightly repositioning myself more towards interaction design and user experience at a higher level.

I’m hoping that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I know what types of planning and design make interfaces work for clients and the like, I’m just trying to apply all the same steps to my design, trying not to be as personally wrapped up in the nitty gritty and following a design plan I’ve set out for myself.

I’m opening up comments on this post and I’d love to hear some thoughts on the sketches, what you think of my ideas to process everything from a detached point-of-view, and pretty much whatever’s on your mind.

A conversation transpired the other day in which a colleague of mine remarked that he’d had it with “hacks” in our industry – that is, those who call themselves developers and designers but still use recycled code, un-secure scripts, and kludged together markup. He complained that there should be an education requirement (like that of doctors, lawyers and engineers) and that the lack of professional underpinnings was killing our industry. He argues:

“There’s such a low entry level to our industry, all you need is photoshop & wordpress to build a site”

“… [T]here are hacks in the webdesign/deve industry (like other industries) and education would help weed them out.”

“Anyone can participate even if they’ve never built a site before or their a seasoned vet.”

These arguments (and I hear them frequently amongst professionals in my field, especially after a few years of making a good, honest living doing this) are worrisome to me. I myself did not earn any degree in my industry (for those that don’t know: I have a B.S. in Microbiology and Immunology. NOT Web development. NOT Advertising. NOT Computer science.) and in fact, most of my most trusted colleagues didn’t either. Ours is a very, very young industry and we should do well to remember that our pioneers are not so old yet. Even surgery was once the domain of the barber. I think the low level of entry is amazingly effective in bringing in new talent who really want to understand and change the industry in new and powerful ways. What first got you into the Web field?

Education, to me, seems a horrifyingly poor way to “weed out” those hacks in the industry. High-powered ADAs who help put away mass murders, rapists, and pedophiles went to law school. The ambulance chasers and DWI-Dudes also went to law school. Education seems to be a rather poor way to separate the hacks from the pros – there are plenty of diploma-factories out there who are all to happy to give you a slip of paper giving you a degree in “Web Paging” in exchange for cold cash. The education is nice, but it’s my belief that Mark Twain was right: “I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” I myself teach classes on development and accessibility, I give back by posting on forums and message boards, I try to attend meetups and conferences to learn and share my knowledge with others because it keeps my skills sharp as well as opening me up to learn something from those with different life experiences.

The last point really gets under my skin. I feel that an argument like this is birthed from time removed from a time when the professional was starting out. I will be the first to admit I came in through the hobby and hacker route – I was a little script kiddy doing my best. I learned from stealing source code, playing with scripts from other sites and honestly hacking crap together until I understood how it worked. Tim Berners Lee started this little experiment to help researchers publish content to a hub. This isn’t the Sorbonne, it’s the Wild West – it’s open and free and it’s what we all love deep down in our hearts. I feel the day that we treat this as an elites-only walled garden, is the day our profession will have fallen to so much accounting and pixel pushing. I know the concern is that it lowers professionalism for those of us who make money doing this professionally, but it’s true for any industry. There are those who will prefer the cheap suits at Sears, but there are plenty who respect and want a bespoke piece from Savile Row. The cream always rises to the top, so they say.

So I welcome all the hackers, hacks, script kiddies, punks, and noobs. There’s always more to learn, more that noobs can teach us about ourselves and our established modes of thinking and that’s frankly better for all of us.

So much has happened in the past few weeks (both personally and in the tech world) that I’m updating twice this week to make up for last week. I wanted to write about the iPad, but I’m going to save it for another day. I had to comment on my friend Mike Melanson’s (@rwwmike) Read Write Web article (read the full thing, especially the comments).

Because I’m a friend to Mike, and I like RWW, I subscribe to their RSS feed via Google reader. I therefore missed all the amazing comments that ensued from users. I’m now very sorry I did. Here’s just a small sampling of what comments a post called “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login” got:

ok cool now can I get to facebook (fuccinwayne)

The new facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN. (John Blair)

I WANT THE OLD FAFEBOOK BACK THIS SHIT IS WACK!!!!! (Nicole Gray)

What is going on? You are totally confusing me. Knock-knock. Anybody there? Let me in. Katherine (Katherine Radway Hegedus)

By now you get the idea: There are somewhere in the range of 200+ comments like these. It took me a while to understand what was going on, but it dawned on me that the RWW article ranked higher in the Google search rank than did the Facebook login page. This means someone did the following steps 100% blindly (or autopilot):

1. typed “login facebook” into Google
2. clicked the first link without looking at the link or description
3. ignored the red color scheme of Read Write Web
4. dismissed the huge article in the middle of the page until they found a Facebook icon (Facebook connect)
5. without looking at the address bar or any authentication, logged in as if to Facebook
6. finding the comment field the only place to post, ignoring all other comments, posted an angry or confused question as if Facebook were a person

David Hayes (@drhayes) has a beautiful shot that it’s much more than Facebook on his blog.

As a user experience developer, this brings up all sorts of questions, concerns, and feelings of dread. As a user experience developer I certainly know that I’m not my audience or even close to it, but I do think I have an understanding of how things work. I had no idea how heavy the reliance on Google to get a user where they wanted to go was. I wasn’t sure that so many users had gotten so adept at filtering out such amazing amounts of noise, they saw Read Write Web as Facebook.

Users seem not to use the address bar, they don’t use bookmarks, and hardly read anything. This isn’t bad, it’s not saying these users are dumb, but it brings up a need to fix these interfaces for users. This is just a time where I feel like a priest in the Dark Ages: preaching the only written word through a language no one understands. It freaks me out when I peer into the actions of users who are using the sites and I can’t begin to fathom the thought process or the use case.

Talking with less tech savvy friends and family, they are amazed that I “know all this stuff” when I myself feel I don’t know much at all until I look at it from the other end: this is my job and my life – I am of the priest class, talking in cryptic language, trying to navigate the dark for my flock. I try my hardest to treat these things as material to learn, to grow in my understanding of the philosophy of the user.

Part of me can’t help but think – did users learn the behavior that caused them to act that way because we trained them that way?

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

Why do we fuss and preen over this stuff? Because it works. A recent A List Apart article by Keith LaFerriere details why we need to educate the client on IA, it’s place in the construction of their Web project, and what it does for them down the road. Bringing the client in at this stage allows them to see what the shape and functions of the site will be ahead of time.

This doesn’t mean we sacrifice flexibility of the project – we all know change is good – but it allows the flexibility to be controlled: the sitemap needs to be changed and re-signed every time a change is encountered, navigation schema is signed off on once taxonomy and site map are decided, etc. We use this framework to teach the client why it’s important. One of my favorite Creative Directors put it this way: “You don’t do design without a plan. It won’t matter how pretty, how amazing and flashy your site is; without a clear navigation and structure to your content (one that your users will enjoy using and find intuitive) your site will always fail.” I like that way of thinking, it puts the client in a frame of mind that A comes before B comes before C, even if all they understand is C.

DESIGN CHANGES

Let’s face it – design changes suck. Knowing that, these are most common, but often easiest to quench. Because every client’s a junior designer, they all want little tweaks. It’s important as a designer and developer that the client understand that every comp and wireframe is its own entity: every piece of that comp works with every other piece of that comp to make a working model. I know tons of creatives and they all say the same thing: don’t change the design, don’t tweak anything. Tell them what the root problem is and they’ll find the best solution. Often times clients want to make changes because things present deeper problems. Why did the client change the color? If it was hard to read, then there might be a better solution than the awful crap they did.

Because changes will and do happen, what is to be done? If the changes are page level, sure (barring a design destroying idea) it’s not too bad. A template level change is much worse – we’re looking at much larger, time consuming changes. Education, again, is the best medicine. Ask why a client likes or does not like an element. Explain why you made the design choices you did. It’s a shame that many designers must justify their designs, but there are a lot more people who don’t get it than do.

INTERNAL ISSUES

This is what the clients never see. This is the changes that get made in house. These are many times beneficial to making a great product go live, but often times the team cannot get a party line, cannot get with the whole program. In these times it’s best to follow workflow protocol. When good workflows are put in place this step rarely gets bogged down. Being as buttoned-down as possible internally with reflect on the work you do for the client as well as the perception of the group in the marketplace. Keep a consistent workflow and procedure in place and this will be the least of your worries when it comes time to change.

I’ve launched a couple little sites since I last posted and I’m working on some rather large new sites that I’ll be blogging on as it gets closer. We’ve got an e-commerce/ ticketing/ multimedia site launching ASAP.

I was brought on as an advisory board member for Knowbility and I’m super excited about that, I won second place in this year’s AIR Austin competition (October) and I’ll be on a superstar team for this year’s SXSW AIR Interactive! With SXSW rapidly approaching, I’m at once gearing up for the competition as well as teaching classes for it and helping to set up the SXSW booth and awards party.

As such, if you or someone you know is an artist (music, multimedia, painting, film, etc.) and they live in the ATX area and want a bad-ass site done for them by March, tell them to give me a shout out! We’re still looking for artists and developers to join teams, so come out and be a part of SXSW for a great cause