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.

So Chris made these two all pretty-like! It might be cliched, but I’m a huge fan of Helvetica (can’t you tell?), and I plan on using modern fonts in addition to the bug. Evenly spacing the letterforms in the name helps block out the design. Chris threw in some color after looking at the black-and-white and chose a few at random (I’m still looking through PMS swatch-books), the final one will come a bit later. After discussion, I wanted to go with the combined letterforms, keeping a more ‘angular’ look. I wanted the ‘Y’ to stand out a bit, so we talked about differentiating with color.

Chris knows that I’m a huge drooling fan of International Yves Klein Blue (IKB). This will pose some issues as there’s no way to (100%) properly display that color exactly with RGB hex values, but that’s one reason I love it. The color is very interesting, Klein had to create a new color that he felt would best represent his artistic interpretations (he had chosen, early in his career, to represent air and the sky as his elements). It blends a brilliant amount of chemistry, color theory, and amounts to something like super-science in color. Of course, all this means much longer drying times as well as costs surrounding the pigment, but what can you do?

Chris and I are both huge William Gibson fans and having both worked in advertising, can readily identify with the brilliant, eccentric Belgian: Hubertus Bigend. The character owns a suit in IKB simply because the blue makes others uncomfortable.

In addition to exploring color, we discussed the shadow of the letterform (would removing the shadow in favor of a border ruin the effect – making the logo bug too ‘flat’) as well as emphasizing the ‘Y’ shape (through adding color in the branch of the ‘W’ – would it ruin the ‘a-ha!’ of the ‘Y’ or would it harm readability of the ‘W’?) or leaving it the hell alone. Here are those concepts:

I’m still thinking over color choices, I’m looking into swatches of oranges to pair with the IKB. I’ll post the finished product when I finally choose a few colors and then decide on the ‘Y’ shape. I’ll also post my new site personas later on today. I needed to move through those before hitting the wireframes.

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.

I’ve started work on a redesign of everything.

I don’t just mean this site, but my resume, my cover letter design, my branding, my business cards, invoices, my Tumblr, my Twitter, everything.

I’ve not gotten to really get involved in my personal projects in a while so I’m deciding that I’m going all out on this project. I want to model everything after early-mid 1960s style ‘golden age of air travel’. I love the aesthetic that was produced at the time, but more importantly I love the concept of a user experience I’ll never be able to enjoy.

Air Travel used to be grand: everything was branded just so, every need was catered to, and the airlines encouraged an experience rather than just a service. I wasn’t alive to enjoy it, so I’m sure I romantize the experience a bit; but I’m enthralled with all the good design from huge companies really pouring money into a hard sell. I wish more companies would put that kind of money into their user experiences again, but with travel, sadly, I worry those days are long long gone never to return. Flying is now an uncomfortable chore, a thing you have to remove clothing to do, something that makes you feel flustered, and generally user-unfriendly.

I’m looking through lots of old inspiring tags, boarding passes, and materials from that era, trying to pick out graphic design elements that I can put my own twist on, update and make modern. I want to showcase how important every facet of the user experience was to the continued success of an industry and hopeful the exercise will make me a better user experience designer for it.

I’ll post wireframes, sketches, personas, and designs as I make them, so watch this space for big changes!

My buddy Devin Price (over at WPTheming) turned me on to a really near magazine concept, called COLORS. The site is really, really well done and the magazine is published in two languages of your choice (want a copy in French and Portuguese? Done.) with brilliant layouts and well written articles.

I was really drawn in by their use of Meta-Serif, it really works as an accent for them. They have a very clean and open layout that brings the content front and center, so their choice for typography was unobtrusive and clean.

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.

Put This On, Episode 2: Shoes from Put This On on Vimeo.

I’ve been a huge fan of Put This On since I saw them on Boing Boing for their first episode. It’s a Web series about “dressing like a grown-up”. I donated to them when they crowd-sourced the funding of their first season and have been blown away by the quality of their blog. More than just being a sartorial blog, it’s an amazingly well produced video series. Adam Lisagor (of You Look Nice Today) and Jesse Thorn (of Sound of Young America) help produce a stylish guide to style that is frank, accessible, and fun to interact with and I wish them the best.

Just remember:

As the wonderful Mr. Fry points out, the secret to being gorgeous is in one’s attitude of mind. By being mindful of good design choices and good interactions, users will tell us that we are wonderful. The secret is really in mindfulness – the more time and effort we put into designing quality interactions with touches and flourishes of UX goodies, the better our products become. The late, great John Slatin once told me that he felt that those who were mindful of accessibility and usability were so often far and away better than their peers at those areas. Because the Web is a mutable form, because users are constantly interacting with the implementation, and because feedback is easier and faster than ever before, we need every facet to gleam, every seam to be stitched and everything to look, well, gorgeous.

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention to details, something I’ve always struggled with (even though I know when I do it I’m so much better off because I take more pride in the thing I’ve created), and I’m making a larger push in my design and development to really focus on those details and little things that don’t so much make people notice them, but feel at ease because everything is just right.

Thinking about little details in a broad way helps one understand the full scope. If, for instance, a user is making a purchase on a site for the first time and there are lots of well done photos of the object or all the buttons fit the site look or the breadcrumbs show the steps a user needs to take; then there is a slow building of confidence – the user now trusts the seller because if the process was so tight on the details, the worries of shipping, security, etc are lessened (for better or worse) and customer confidence improves.

So let’s take some of Mr. Fry’s advice – the more we pay attention to making our interfaces and processes gorgeous, the more people will tell us so, which is the secret, really.

I’m a fan of good art. I’ve got art in my home, I love going to galleries in every city I visit, and I have friends and family as accomplished artists. I like art because it allows for everyone who views it to have just a second of meditative contemplation on how a piece affects them personally.

One of my good and dear friends, Andrew Tolentino, is one such amazing artist. Andrew really got fierce into his art in high school, derived amazing cultural and artistic inspiration in college, and then started turning his passion into a movement after graduation. Andrew uses mixed media to bring to life Bosch-like landscapes, cartoonish sketches, and all around wonderful things.

I’ve commissioned art from Andrew before (when we were in college he did an oil on canvas of a stylized Sumo wrestler that now hangs in my office) and I felt it time to do it again with a piece based on his interpretation of my personal company, match head creative. I wanted it to be a large piece, something that he had full control over, using the logo as the launch pad. Andrew brought up an interesting notion: he needed his own website for a portfolio, and proposed a trade, my craft for his

I normally don’t do work for trade, but being able to create a piece of functional art for an artist in exchange for a piece of art? Yes, I think I can do that. Please have a gander and explore the twisted, fun mind of my dear friend Andrew. GET TOLENTINOED.