User Experience Design

Persuasion in Design

2012-01-19T06:29:00.002-05:00

I came across this article from a year ago that provides a nice summary of psychological techniques of persuasion.

Whether we're designing e-commerce or general product acquisition experiences, these techniques are important to keep in mind while designing.

Are you testing a page or product sequence, trying to improve conversion? These can also provide great ideas for alternative treatments that you can A/B test using tools I've mentioned in previous posts such as Optimiz.ly, Google Website Optimizer, and others.

Read more:
> Persuasion in Design | UX Magazine

Upcoming DC tech events

2012-01-18T07:45:00.000-05:00

There are a bunch of upcoming tech events and initiatives worth checking out; here's a list from Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo at Tech Cocktail:

What's Next DC Conference, Jan 23
DC Tech Meetup, Feb 15, 7:00pm ET, Social Media Week Edition
Tech Cocktail, Fed 16, 2012 630:pm ET, Washington D.C.
SXSW 2012, Mar 10th, 2012 6:00pm CST, Austin, TX

SOPA and PIPA

2012-01-18T07:21:00.001-05:00

You many notice today on sites like Wikipedia and Google that the Internet is protesting two bills in Congress; a summary from Wikipedia:

"SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively. SOPA is short for the "Stop Online Piracy Act," and PIPA is an acronym for the "Protect IP Act." ("IP" stands for "intellectual property.") In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet."

You can read more about this proposed legislation on Wikipedia and Google, among other places. Please take a moment to understand why these bills are so dangerous, and why so many oppose them. Each site provides a way for you to contact your congressional representative and add your voice. Although President Obama and his administration have opposed these bills, they are still in Congress and the threat has not gone away.

Infographic: Doctor Who Timeline

2012-01-16T07:42:00.003-05:00

Infographics are everywhere it seems, and sometimes aren't much more than a couple of facts blown out into a graphic that really doesn't add insight to the idea being conveyed.

There are, however, rich visualizations to be found. And, if you happen to be a fan of Doctor Who, this particular graphic packs an incredible amount of information into a journey that feels worthy of the Doctor himself:

Each season, when it aired, and the number of episodes
Each Doctor, and who portrayed the character
Each companion, and in which episodes they appeared
Each enemy of the doctor, with callouts for special characters like the Master
All laid out, in true time-lord style, by year

Check out the entire graphic with additional annotations on CableTV.com- enjoy!

> Doctor Who Timeline Infographic

Comparing Social Network Fan Audiences

2012-01-14T06:47:00.002-05:00

This article compares the fan audiences of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It recommends that media companies focus on Facebook and Twitter, while brands should focus on Facebook and Google+, where brands are growing faster than Twitter.

Read more, and view the complete diagram:

Which social networks should you focus on in 2012?

Personal 2011 AddThis Infographics

2012-01-11T16:35:00.000-05:00

We're in the process of sending out 2011 AddThis year-end inforgraphics to all of our publishers who receive weekly analytics reports. I thought I'd share a few excerpts from mine for this blog, and show off design and development work by Jeff, Foo, Aaron, and Greg.

Here's my month-by-month chart of shares and clicks back to my blog:

I clearly blogged a lot more in the spring than the fall; I'll have to work on that... Each infographic also includes a map showing which countries contribute the most sharing:

I learned that Facebook is the service most used to share my blog posts, followed by Twitter and Address Bar Sharing. However, Address Bar sharing and Twitter were more effective than Facebook at sending clicks – social traffic – back to my blog.

If you are an AddThis publisher and receive weekly analytics reports, you should be receiving your own 2011 report in the next few days. If you're a registered user but opted out of weekly analytics reports, you can change that in your profile settings so you can get a report next year.

If you don't use AddThis, what are you waiting for? Grab code for your site – and be sure to register with your email address to receive analytics – it only takes a moment.

Here's to an exciting 2012!

The Key to Privacy

2012-01-11T06:23:00.001-05:00

Privacy is always a core issue to experience design, and identity management is becoming more and more challenging as we interact with more websites and social networks.

This is a cool (though not new) idea: take your identity with you. I might have to try this out. I use a password system to keep track of the hundreds of passwords I use across sites, but this would be much more secure.

SplashID Key Safe - USB Drive with a built-in Password Manager for Windows & Mac OS

Page Flow Design

2012-01-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

Morgan Brown writes about Page Flow Design on Smashing Magazine, illustrating how designers can create better user experiences by designing sequences instead of just pages.

Read more:
Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows - Smashing UX Design

Designing a Classic Game

2012-01-07T07:30:00.000-05:00

I'm fortunate to have grown up at a time when I could experience the design of console and online games evolve from infancy. I remember playing 8-bit Pong and Adventure on my Atari console in high school, and watching single-player role-playing games move to a nascent Internet with Ultima Online and Everquest.

The article below is a look back at the original team and how Everquest came to be. It's a great story of a small group of people with a vision for a product, no budget, and learning quickly from mistakes. Working from an 80-page design document John Smedley and his team created a game that would inform and inspire enormous and incredibly varied worlds such as Dark Age of Camelot, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxies, and the upcoming and wildly-anticipated Guild Wars 2. Game design details like instanced missions, corpse runs, connectivity management, and a host of other design and technical challenges all started with Everquest, it's peers and predecessors. Fun memories.

EverQuest: The Making of a Classic

Ok, Just This Once

2012-01-06T06:29:00.001-05:00

I've written a lot about the benefits of keeping user experience simple. Here's something designed to be ridiculously, gloriously complicated. Enjoy!

Disruptive Innovation

2012-01-05T06:32:00.000-05:00

Article from Technology Review looking at how established companies are joining startups at creating innovation that disrupts markets.Read more:The Empire Strikes Back - Technology Review

The Joy of Stats: Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes

2012-01-04T18:22:00.002-05:00

Han Rosling describes how income and life expectancies evolved over 200 years, across 200 countries of the world, in 3D space.

Check out more about his programme, The Joy of Stats, over on BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l

Web Usability Testing Tools

2012-01-02T08:10:00.000-05:00

I like to use a number of tools to evaluate usability, including basic strategies like heuristic evaluation, crowd-sourced tools like UserTesting.com, powerful tracking suites like Google Analytics, and A/B testing tools like Google Website Optimizer and Optimizely.com.

These kinds of resources help test everything from entirely new products to details as small as button labels, and are crucial to running a data-informed business. Small changes can create huge improvements if tested correctly; the key is figuring out what kind of test will provide the information you need early enough to make a difference (and don't forget about statistical significance!)

Here is a list of additional tools to check out; there are many others:

18 Useful Web Usability Testing Tools

Apple's Jonathan Ive Knighted by Queen Elizabeth

2011-12-31T13:07:00.000-05:00

"For services to design and enterprise" Apple's Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive has been made Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

I've been a huge fan of Apple's product design for decades; I'd mention that my first mac was an SE 30, but I'd be showing my age...

Read more about Ive's knighting over at CNET: Apple designer Ive becomes Sir Jony

So what's your favorite Apple product design?

For a look at Apple design through the decades, check out this infographic, "The Apple Tree" by Mike Vasilev.

A Guide to New Year's Resolutions

2011-12-30T14:14:00.000-05:00

It's time to kick off another year! Here's a fun infographic over on Visual.ly breaking down the kinds of New Year's Resolutions people make, and their success keeping them (it's not good news...) Enjoy, and have a very safe and happy New Years.

Check out the complete infographic:
A Guide to New Year's Resolutions | Visual.ly

Decision Architecture: Designing for Decision-Making

2011-12-27T11:11:00.000-05:00

Interesting article over on uxmag.com this week about decision architecture, and optimizing user experience for decision-making by utilizing various strategies to promote comparison.

Quoting from author Colleen Roller's summary:

A key aspect of designing for decision-making, then, is to design an environment in which comparisons can easily be made. This involves easing the inherent conflict within the goal of decision-making by:
Providing a reference point so people can assess value and glean meaning
Helping people determine the right things to focus on by making those salient
Leveraging the visual design and page layout to eliminate clutter and enable easy scanning
Providing the right information at the right time, while eliminating all unnecessary information
Read more:
Decision Architecture: Designing for Decision-Making | UX Magazine

User Interface Design in Modern Search Engines

2011-12-24T07:17:00.000-05:00

Quick article looking at contemporary UI trends in search engines, including branding, auto-complete/auto-suggest, and personalized profiles.

The first comment also mentions that Lycos was just relaunched with a responsive web design, def check it out. Nicely done.

Read more:
User Interface Design in Modern Search Engines

Can your cottage talk to Twitter?

2011-12-24T06:57:00.000-05:00

Some of my coworkers at Clearspring are into home automation and making media systems do things at their electronic bidding, so I thought of them when I saw this article.

Dr Andy Stanford-Clark, an engineer at IBM, placed hundreds of sensors in a 16th century cottage so his home can alert Twitter when a window opens or with the identity of a caller. Cool.

Sensors Allow House To Tweet

Awesome High-Tech Holiday Easter Eggs

2011-12-23T11:37:00.000-05:00

We techies love our easter eggs, and the holidays give website designers and devs an opportunity to sneak in some holiday cheer. Here are nine from Mashable:

9 Awesome High-Tech Holiday Easter Eggs

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the holiday illustration on the AddThis homepage above, which Jeff Wong put together using artwork from illustrator Josh Cleland.

User Interface/Interaction Design Position at Clearspring

2011-12-23T11:09:00.000-05:00

Are you passionate about how people use online social media tools? Does the idea of having a mountain of data and research tools to help inform your next design project sound exciting?

We're looking for an experienced user interface/interaction designer to help us grow Clearspring's behavioral advertising products, using data from the largest sharing platform in the world, AddThis. You'll work as part of a small, focused creative team developing interactive experiences used by millions of people all over the world. We value those with exceptional skills who want to work with others in a fun, challenging, and hard-charging environment, and make exciting things happen with technology.

Read more:

User Interface/Interaction Designer Position

Can Twitter Measure Happiness?

2011-12-22T06:30:00.000-05:00

Researchers at the University of Vermont studied Twitter data over three years and found that keyword analysis can indicate when Twitter users are happiest. They found that we tend to be most happy on Saturdays and in the early morning; January, Mondays, and late-nights not so much.

Another factor: Recently AddThis released an infographic for 2011 that showed how significant events like celebrity deaths can affect sharing; the researchers report that these kinds of events can also significantly affect our moods.

Check out the video above from Mashable that discusses the report, or if you'd like a deeper read for yourself, here's a link to the original study, Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter.

Twitter’s Early Growth Was Fueled By Traditional Offline Networking

2011-12-22T06:08:00.000-05:00

This study explores how an internationally popular company started first with just a few cities. Twitter's early growth began first in San Francisco, then Boston, moving from city to city.

The researchers cite the geographic closeness of participants – essentially face-to-face networking – that resulted in what today millions of people can use to tell the world about their breakfast.

Read more:

Twitter’s Early Growth Was Fueled By Traditional Offline Networking [STUDY] - AllTwitter

Megatrends in Social Media

2011-12-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

Forbes article looking at social media and business trends for 2012, including:

role of "transmitter ecosystem" – essentially sharers on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere
globalization of social media (check out the AddThis Service Directory to see globalization at work!)
social media going vertical and local
brand-driven social media

Megatrends in Social Media and Social Business - Forbes

New AddThis Live Analytics

2011-12-20T09:03:00.000-05:00

Check out the live analytics we released this morning over on AddThis.com. The whole team worked incredibly hard to consolidate all of the live features that we've been working on separately this year. The result is one report where AddThis publishers and bloggers can watch content trend in real-time, all over the world.

We've also introduced several new data types, including search and copied keywords, to help viewers understand what is bringing their audience to their site, what interests them, and what keywords are then taking them away to search, email, IM, etc.

Read more in my blog post over on AddThis.com.

Can your iPhone make you coffee?

2011-12-19T08:48:00.000-05:00

Yes, it has nothing to do with user experience design. But it's just so beautiful.

Understanding and Designing for Cognitive Styles

2011-12-16T06:45:00.000-05:00

Are your users bottom-up analytical thinkers, or top-down holists? This article explores strategies to design experience for both, including:
• designing for learnability
• providing "information scent"
• providing wayfinding

Read more:
Cognitive Styles | UX Magazine

P.S. for more on information scent and findability, check out Morville's most excellent book, "Ambient Findability"

It’s Here! Facebook Timeline Now Available To Users Worldwide

2011-12-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

A bunch of us here at AddThis have had ours turned on for a while, but only now has Facebook enabled the much-discussed Facebook Timeline for the world, so now everyone (well, my friends) can enjoy the handsome mug of my hound mutt Whistlebritches.

Read more:
It’s Here! Facebook Timeline Now Available To Users Worldwide | TechCrunch

And a reminder to consider the privacy ramifications of this new view:
Facebook rolls out Timeline feature worldwide, it's time to untag some old photos

Creative and Unusual 404 Pages

2011-12-15T07:53:00.000-05:00

Lots more:

50+ Most Creative and unusual 404 error Pages | Smashing Buzz

Online Sharing: The How, What and When of 2011

2011-12-15T07:13:00.000-05:00

Our resident design wizard Jeff Wong's latest infographic got a write-up on the New York Times website. Nice!

Read more:
Online Sharing: The How, What and When of 2011 - NYTimes.com

The original infographic on the AddThis blog:
Sharing Trends in 2011

Clean Button Design – Tutorial

2011-12-15T07:07:00.000-05:00

Download the source files:

Clean Button Design – Tutorial | Ui Parade – User Interface Inspiration

The New, New Twitter and What It Means to You and Your Business

2011-12-11T16:50:00.000-05:00

Brian Solis reviews the Twitter's latest redesign:

The New, New Twitter and What It Means to You and Your Business - Brian Solis

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer

2011-12-11T16:39:00.000-05:00

Solid strategies for making an impact on your organization – and the best part is, you don't have to be an executive to put these ideas to use:

focus on the bright side
change negatives to positives
act and keep moving

Three Tips for Becoming an Energizer via Harvard Business Review

Hat tip: Ramsey McGrory @nycmcg

Ui Parade: User Interface Inspiration

2011-12-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

Nice site for interface design inspiration.

UI Parade – User Interface Inspiration

Designing for the Mind

2011-12-10T13:04:00.000-05:00

Francisco Inchauste (@iamfinch) writes about the psychology of aesthetic experience.

Designing for the Mind - Design Informer | Design Informer

The Films of Bill Murray (Infographic)

2011-12-09T13:39:00.001-05:00

The Films of Bill Murray, a tribute poster. (No, he's not dead.)

Check it out:
Bill Murray Tribute Poster

Nine Awesomely Geeky Spots Where You Must Check In

2011-12-09T10:36:00.000-05:00

...if you like that sort of thing.

9 Awesomely Geeky Spots Where You Must Check In | Underwire | Wired.com

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

2011-12-09T09:35:00.000-05:00

Profiles, timelines, search and more...

Twitter Just Fired A Cannonball At Facebook And Google+

Five Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci | UX Magazine

2011-12-09T08:21:00.000-05:00

Personally I'm pretty awful at drawing, so any help is welcome. This article from UX Magazine takes a page (ha!) from the master to improve sketching and paper prototyping skills:

5 Sketching Secrets of Leonardo Da Vinci

The Psychologist’s View of UX Design

2011-11-05T20:12:00.003-04:00

This article has been around for a while, but it's chock full of great advice for designers, from a psychologist's point of view. Here's a synopsis:

People Don't Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
People Have Limitations
People Make Mistakes
Human Memory Is Complicated
People are Social
People are Easily Distracted
People Crave Information
People Act Unconsciously
People Create Mental Models
The Relationships Between Perception and Cognition Matter

The Psychologist’s View of UX Design | UX Magazine

The "Human Spirograph" Uses His Whole Body To Make Huge, Swirling Art [Video] | LinkedIn

2011-11-05T20:04:00.002-04:00

Art and a workout, all at once. Cool./

The "Human Spirograph" Uses His Whole Body To Make Huge, Swirling Art [Video] | LinkedIn

Why conviction drives innovation more than creativity

2011-11-05T19:58:00.000-04:00

Mixing passion and conviction with creativity to push ideas to market faster.

Why conviction drives innovation more than creativity - Fortune Tech

It's been a while

2011-11-05T19:57:00.001-04:00

It's been a while since I've blogged. It would be easy to say that work has been exciting and busy, which it has, what with AddThis turning five years old, getting a new CEO, and acquiring XGraph. But truth be told, I seem to blog in fits and bursts.

So, please enjoy the new design, while I catch up on a bunch of quick posts.

Sense of Patterns: Data Visualization of Taxi Traffic in Vienna

2011-09-12T07:07:00.000-04:00

From the author: "Sense of Patterns is an on-going project, a series of printed data visualizations aiming to depict the behaviors of masses in different public spaces. The visualizations have a focus on the patterns of moving entities in public like commuters, cars and public transportation vehicles as well as the interaction between these entities and physical structures like roads, sidewalks, buildings and parks. The project intends to provide strong visuals on what we all experience in our daily lives in different cities."

StumbleUpon Introduces New "Explore" Box

2011-09-07T08:24:00.000-04:00

StumbleUpon recently introduced a search field that can be used to discover content by topic, with related suggestions and partial string matches.

Check it out for yourself

Getting the Word Out: Promoting New Features Inline

2011-09-03T07:34:00.000-04:00

When you're designing a few feature or mobile app, at some point you'll need to promote it as part of the rest of your site or product. You might have a "News" page or some other type of promotional space, but here are some clever promos that promote new features to visitors in context.

Not only are these approaches more interesting, they are much more likely to get visitors to notice all the hard work you've done. Here are a couple of examples from Facebook's design team.

Facebook Messenger App

Facebook released a new app that makes it easier to send mobile messengers to friend. When a Facebook user visited their Messages page, this promo was inserted at the top:

If the reader clicks Get the App, they get the usual links to the Apple and Android stores, but also a very clever feature to text a link for the app to the user's phone. Slick.

Facebook Messaging Privacy Controls

A while back Facebook added more explicit controls to their messaging interface, in response to concerns about how much control their customers had over the privacy of their messages.

They could have left visitors to discover these new features for themselves, but of course they wanted people to understand and use them right away. The first time someone experienced this new interface, Facebook presented a short "tour" of the new features.

Rethinking the Common Receipt

2011-08-06T13:10:00.000-04:00

One design team's take on redesigning a basic sales receipt, to provide additional features and richer information.

It's an interesting idea, although I'm not sure I want to know how bad the donut is that I just bought...

Can't help but wonder if this couldn't be much simpler... but, an elegant design.

And, a heck of lot more fun than the typical sales receipt. What do you think?

The UI Geniuses At Berg Rethink The Common Receipt

DC Metro Area: Looking for An Interaction Designer

2011-08-06T11:34:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, I work at Clearspring Technologies, and lead the creative team working on AddThis.com, the largest sharing platform in the world.

We have the privilege of creating design work presented to over 1 billion people a month all over the world, on 9 million domains in over 70 languages.

We're looking for an excellent interaction designer to join our team, so if you're in the DC area and are interested, or know someone else who might be, let me know. Check out the job posting below and drop me a line at jim-at-clearspring-dot-com.

Here's the job post:

http://www.clearspring.com/about/careers/user-interface-interaction-designer

Looking forward to hearing from you!

P.S. the picture to the left is from a team outing to go karting. Good times!

Principles of Good Programming Applied to Interaction Design

2011-08-06T11:13:00.001-04:00

The link below is a nice summary of programming best practices, and as I scanned the list it occurred to me that many of these are applicable to interaction design, particularly with regards to web applications.

For example:

Don't repeat yourself: think about similar interactions and how you can streamline the experience to provide fewer choices to the user. Don't make the user learn multiple ways of doing more or less the same task.

Don't surprise me: following the train of thought above, the user should be able to do similar or related things in consistent and predictable contexts. I shouldn't have to guess where to look for a setting or task, and interface elements should act as I expect them to.

KISS: Simplicity always wins, period. I've seen this in user testing and research over and over again. Understand your users, prioritize tasks, make smart decisions, and remove complexity and choices that aren't directly relevant to what the user is trying to do.

Don't add features until you need them: Design for "now", measure everything, fail (or succeed!) quickly, and iterate. A coworker of mine at a previous startup had a favorite saying, "Don't build a cathedral when an alter will do."

There are lots of other great interaction design best practice parallels in the article below:

The Principles of Good Programming

Google Design Changes (finally!)

2011-06-30T08:36:00.002-04:00

There have been a lot of changes in Google products of late, particularly long overdue design updates of core products and the release of Google+ which isn't a Facebook competitor (they *swear*...)

Google Calendar is one of the products with a new look, and the product team describes the rationale of these changes to their product designs:

Focus: clear out clutter and focus on what matters
Elasticity: make transitions between products, and between desktop and mobile, seamless
Effortlessness: make things easy while providing powerful features in the background.

The result is a much cleaner experience. Google's products are now connected by a global product navigation bar providing easy access to the most popular products, as well as account information. The calendar interface is streamlined and more graphically sophisticated, with CSS-based controls instead of links. The end result is polished and highly usable.

You'll discover similar design treatments in search and other Google products, which helps to tie the products together and create overall cohesion that Google has lacked in the past. Kudos to their design team.

Read more:

Changes to the look of Google Calendar

Visualizing a Virtual World Using Player Interactions

2011-05-29T11:24:00.001-04:00

This is a video that overlays instances of a player interaction, in this case player-deaths, onto the 3-D virtual landscape. 11 million points "draw" the virtual world in which the interactions took place. Fascinating.

Read more:

• Infovore » The System and The World

Hat tip: @DataMarket

OT- Acoustics in Pictures: Stringed theory

2011-05-28T10:13:00.002-04:00

When I was studying music, acoustics was one of the cooler classes I got to take. Check out these images that show how instruments resonate:

"Researchers at Cardiff University reporting at the Acoustical Society of America meeting have presented striking images of stringed instruments made using 'holographic interferometry', which allows them to visualise precisely how and where the soundboards of instruments."

Read more:

• BBC News - In Pictures: Stringed theory

Dotting the 'i's: Annotation Applescript for Omnigraffle

2011-05-27T06:32:00.003-04:00

I'm a big fan of Omnigraffle for wireframing and concept diagrams; we use Omnigraffle at Clearspring when we create UI deliverables for AddThis.com. We don't always develop detailed docs – often we're rapidly iterating and work directly in code – but when we do, there's always the job of writing the specs for the wireframe.

This post by Meredith Noble from Usability Matters outlines using Applescript to automatically add, increment, remove, and decrement "wireframe dots" in a wireframe: those little numbers providing labels to each of the specs. Changing all the numbers because one was added or removed during the design process is a pain, why not let a script do the work?

Read on:

• Annotation (“Wireframe Dot”) Applescripts for Omnigraffle | usability matters™

RefreshDC: Using Data to Inform Design

2011-05-22T11:34:00.001-04:00

At Thursday night's RefreshDC panel, "Data-Driven Design", I had the opportunity to talk about the various kinds of research and tools we use at Clearspring to design the AddThis sharing platform. Using data to inform design is fundamental to how we approach user experience at Clearspring, and we do our best to incorporate different kinds of information to inform decision-making.

The tools we use could be placed into two groups:

Quantitative tools, such as internal reporting, Google Anaytics, and Google Website Optimizer
Qualitative tools, such as surveys, user testing, and field research

The real power of this suite of data-gathering methods, however, is when multiple tools can be used together to accomplish a larger objective.

Here are a several themes that we discussed on the panel or were brought up by the bunch of great questions from the audience:

Start with a question or hypothesis: any statistics can be interpreted multiple ways, so know what question or problem you're trying to solve and make sure your empirical design is sound
Use multiple techniques to more thoroughly understand a problem: I described a project where we used a combination of field research, A/B testing, multivariate testing, user testing and event tracking to optimize the process we have that allows publishers to get AddThis code for their sites.
Not all tools are created equally: Paul Koch of Vigit Labs demonstrated how heatmaps can be used to understand how users are utilizing pages in ways that wouldn't be obvious with other tools
Beware of local maximums: optimizing one particular stat can be a rabbit hole preventing you from stepping back and recognizing a much larger opportunity – be sure you're solving the right problems.
Be data-informed, but use common-sense: data and research are powerful tools in your arsenal, but there are also reasons to choose not to follow the data; these include brand identify, business strategy, user interests, external forces like regulatory bodies, and other reasons. I included this topic in my November Refresh DC talk, Designing for One Billion People, and you read/listen more about this from Jeff Gothlef, Julie Zhou, and Adam Mosseri.
Many tools are free or inexpensive: so there's no excuse not to be using data to inform your next design! I've included links below to some of the tools we discussed.

More about the event:

Pictures from the event
Panel participants, from the Eventbrite page for the event

Here are links to some of the tools we discussed:

Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds

2011-05-20T10:43:00.000-04:00

Sharing information may thwart "wisdom of crowds", suggests recent research.

Read more at:

Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds

Demographics of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter

2011-05-17T08:48:00.001-04:00

A detailed breakdown of demographics for Facebook, Twitter, blogging and other social services from AdAge:

• Demographics of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter

Over at AddThis.com, we track usage of social services across our platform, in over 70 languages, in our Service Directory. There are some interesting differences; for instance, on the AddThis platform, users from the Philippines beat out those from Indonesia:

• Facebook Details

These differences could suggest that certain demographics use Facebook differently – some using more of Facebook's social networking features, while other sharing more content.

We use this kind of information to help optimize our sharing tools for those sharing in different languages and locales, so our publishers don't have to worry whether their visitors are being presented with the most appropriate sharing services.

Using Data to Inform Design

2011-05-14T16:37:00.003-04:00

Back in November I gave a presentation at DC Refresh titled Designing for One Billion People. One of the strategies I mentioned was being data-informed, rather than data-driven. The idea is that research and testing should be used to test hypotheses and inform decisions, but at the end of the day a designer has to base his or her decisions not just on numbers, but also other priorities like brand identity, business strategy and common sense.

[If you haven't already read it, Jeff Gothelf wrote a great post about this topic: "You vs. The Data: When to Stop Optimizing and Start Thinking."

This week, I have the privilege of joining Craig Green (web strategist at Network Solutions) and Paul Koch (marketing specialist at Viget Labs) on a DC Refresh panel moderated by Motley Fool's Greg Robleto to discuss data-driven design:

"This month’s event focuses on the science of making data-driven design decisions and the art of knowing when to listen and when to ignore the numbers. Join us this upcoming Thursday at Viget Labs for a panel discussion with seasoned experts in design, development and strategy as we discuss techniques, tips, and helpful tools for making calculated design decisions."

If you're interested in attending, we'll be at Viget Labs this Thursday evening at 6:30pm, May 19th. You can register (it's free) at Eventbrite:

http://refreshdc-may2011.eventbrite.com/

Hope to see you there- be sure to say hello!

The Maker's Schedule

2011-05-08T11:12:00.000-04:00

Came across this article recently – it's been around a while – which does a nice job of capturing the difference between managing time when you're an individual contributor or a manager. For creative folk (and I include my engineering brethren in that category, as programming is just as creative as wire-framing), interruptions just murder "flow". You're deep in a problem, you have a bunch of information in your head or a great idea how to solve that tricky snag and then... there's a meeting.

Personally, I try to group meetings together in my calendar as there's nothing worse than a day with a bunch of meetings with 30 minutes or an hour between each. That day's pretty much a wash. I also like working early mornings, because I can usually get a few hours in before sprint standups and other meetings start.

At Clearspring, we instituted a "quiet day" on Wednesday when we try not to have any meetings at all, so there's an uninterrupted day at least once a week. Another trick it to avoid checking email constantly; tackle it in batches several times a day.

So how do you manage your time to maximize productivity? Check out Paul Graham's original article here: Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Designing with Purpose

2011-04-21T11:52:00.000-04:00

Bill Buxton, a software design specialist at Microsoft, talks about product design and innovation.

He asks creative folks to think about focusing efforts on improving the human experience, and not just creating the next whiz-bang technology. He describe "renaissance teams" composed of computer scientists, social scientists and industrial designers.

Today's question: where have you found greater purpose in design recently?

Read more at Technology Review:
Designs with a Deeper Purpose - Technology Review

Where did my tax dollars go?

2011-04-19T08:45:00.000-04:00

And now the winners of Google's "Data Viz Challenge"! The Grand Prize went to Anil Kandangath for the visualization above. Here's a description of the competition from the site:

"Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but it is also a lot of money. Where does it all go? Using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com, we challenged artists, coders, and the general public to create data visualizations that would make it easier for U.S. citizens to understand how the government spends our tax money."

Try out Anil's winning entry and the rest of the competition here:

Google Data Visualization Competition Winners

Web Design Evolution

2011-04-17T18:33:00.000-04:00

Infographic from KISSMetrics exploring the history of web design over the last 20 years.

Read more:

Web Design Evolution: Two Decades of Innovation [INFOGRAPHIC]

No, The Check-In Isn't Dead

2011-04-13T09:32:00.003-04:00

Blog post highlighting the argument whether check-ins are an important component feature going forward, or a passing fad (I'd argue the former.)

The author proceeds to posit that a check-in feature is just that – a feature – that exists to tell the app you're doing something, and to share that something with your friends. I suspect there's an affinity component as well – I'm going to be less likely to check-in to a place I don't like, or with which I don't want to associate myself.

Thus, the inverse is true: if I check-in, I'm expressing at least a neutral and more likely positive regard or relevance to me for the "brand" of that place.

Do you agree? Are check-ins a passing fad or here to stay? Do you think checking in means more than just passing along information?

Read more on Business Insider: No, The Check-In Isn't Dead

Adobe's New Photoshop Touch Apps for iPad

2011-04-11T09:33:00.000-04:00

Today, Adobe announced upcoming apps and updates to Creative Suite all aligned with the iPad. Check out this video of Adobe Senior Vice President John Loiacono discussing the updates.

Read more on AllThingsD:

Adobe Recasts the iPad as High-Tech Palette for Photoshop

Why Apple Succeeds: Users, Not Designers, Have the Best Ideas

2011-04-04T20:52:00.000-04:00

Frog Design writes about creating ecosystems in which users and developers can grab the reins and be creative – and why that's a better strategy than trying to control the design yourself.

Read more:

Why Apple Succeeds: Users, Not Designers, Have the Best Ideas

This Is What Skype 5 For Mac Should Look Like

2011-03-30T18:08:00.000-04:00

Seems there are some very angry Mac users of the latest version of Skype. One person took matters into his own hands, and redesigned their interface for them.

Read more:

This Is What Skype 5 For Mac Should Look Like

A little bit of history repeating

2011-03-25T08:32:00.000-04:00

I like to use Things, a task management application, to wrangle all my day-to-day todos and projects. After trying several different applications, I chose Things largely because it seamlessly syncs to my iphone, ipad and mac laptop, and has just the right mix of powerful features that don't get in the way of just wanting to quickly manage todos.

This post from Cultured Code's blog describes the team's approach to designing just one dialog: creating repeating events. This potentially complex interaction has been done very well, and very badly, in various calendar and todo applications. Here's an example of a team that got it right, and how they approached the design process.

Habemus Dialogum – We Have a Dialog

P.S. For those recognizing the lyrics referenced in the title of this post:

Lean UX: Getting out of the deliverables business

2011-03-21T20:54:00.001-04:00

Great presentation from SXSW by a former co-worker and all around great guy, Jeff Gothelf.

Lean UX: Getting out of the deliverables business

View more presentations from Jeff Gothelf.

A Sneak Peek at Much Needed Blogger Redesign

2011-03-15T10:50:00.000-04:00

Blogger gave SXSW attendees a sneak peak at upcoming (and much needed) Blogger redesign work. As a Blogger user, I'm very much looking forward to giving this new interface a test drive.

Read more at Blogger Buzz: What’s New With Blogger

Bring The ’80s: VHS Retro Skins For Your Every Gadget

2011-03-05T12:15:00.001-05:00

Ah, memories of my old VHS player, and don't even get me started about 8-track tapes. Little bit of retro for our oh so modern gadgets.

Bring The ’80s: VHS Retro Skins For Your Every… | Bit Rebels

Pizza and the Empirical Method

2010-12-20T17:48:00.001-05:00

This is a fun article that started as an argument about the best Chicago-style pizza. This led to a full on taste-off and careful scientific scrutiny of the results.

Finding the Best Chicago Pizza in San Francisco

Behind the Scenes: What it Takes to Redesign a 12 Million User Website

2010-12-20T17:48:00.000-05:00

Mashable takes a look at the re-design process behind Thrillist.com.

Behind the Scenes: What it Takes to Redesign a 12 Million User Website

Visualizing Friendships Using Facebook's Social Graph

2010-12-14T15:26:00.000-05:00

Paul Butler, a Facebook developer looks at a data visualization exploring the locality of friends.

"When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them."

Read more and find a high res image here:

Visualizing Friendship

24 ways: An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms

2010-12-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

Check out some intriguing 3-D transforms that are possible with CSS; unfortunately, browser support is mostly limited to Safari but fascinating what's possible.

Read more:

24 ways: An Introduction to CSS 3-D Transforms

Fun with Birthdays at AddThis

2010-12-10T12:08:00.000-05:00

Today is our CTO's birthday, and the team had some fun decorating his cube. Here's a time lapse of the process:

And the final result:

Web 2.0 Summit 2010: "Point of Control: Location Based Services"

2010-12-01T15:42:00.000-05:00

Panel discussion of location based services, from the Web 2.0 Summit 2010. Hat tip, Joel.

A World of Tweets

2010-11-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

Geography mashup using HTML5, the Twitter API and Yahoo Places. Be sure to scroll down the page for lots of interesting stats.

Twiddle the knobs yourself at:

a world of tweets

The Lost Principles of Design

2010-11-08T14:49:00.000-05:00

Nice reminder about design fundamentals such as balance, contrast and proportion.

The Lost Principles of Design | Fuel Your Creativity

What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York

2010-11-05T07:28:00.001-04:00

New York's 311 line handles an average of 50,000 calls a day. This article discusses what those calls tell us about the Big Apple, people who live there, and maple syrup.

Gripes by zip code:

Read more at Wired.com. Hat tip, Charlie:

What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York | Magazine | Wired.com

Google and the Digital Disruption

2010-11-05T05:58:00.000-04:00

Google's CEO and Director of Ideas discuss their essay "The Digital Disruption", the role of connectivity and information technologies in foreign affairs, and the inherent issues of promoting these kinds of technologies in countries like China and Iran.

Summary from the original essay:

Increased connectivity allows for the spread of liberal, open values but also poses a number of dangers. To foster the free flow of information and challenge authoritarian regimes, democratic states will have to learn to create alliances with people and companies at the forefront of the information revolution.

About the authors:

ERIC SCHMIDT is Chair and CEO of Google. He is a Member of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology and Chair of the New America Foundation. JARED COHEN is Director of Google Ideas. He is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Children of Jihad and One Hundred Days of Silence: America and the Rwanda Genocide.

Read more:

The Digital Disruption (essay)

Unsubscribing, and the Power of Guilt

2010-11-02T06:13:00.000-04:00

I tried out Groupon a while back, while I was checking out different services for local online coupons. Finding myself just deleting the daily emails, I decided to just unsubscribe to help keep my inbox empty.

When I unsubscribed, I stumbled upon a clever idea for getting folks to resubscribe:

Now, I'm not normally a cruel person, but could *you* resist punishing Derrick?

I didn't think so.

His coworker then proceeds to berate and attack him:

Poor Derrick, lying on the floor, suffering. Don't you feel badly for punishing him? Just a little?

Wouldn't you feel better if you... resubscribed?

Yeah, I didn't either, but still very creative.

If you feel Derrick still hasn't suffered enough, you can give him his just desserts here:

http://www.groupon.com/washington-dc/unsubscribed

Taming My Email Inbox

2010-10-31T15:27:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine recently asked me to send him the system I use to keep my inbox empty and manage the huge number of emails I get every day. I get asked to share this every once in a while, so I thought I'd just post it here for everyone.

First off, I can't take credit for the foundation of this system – I adapted it from a fantastic book called Getting Things Done. Over the years I found myself streamlining the suggestions in that book, and the end result below is what I use every day.

Second caveat: I also use a task management application called Things to manage all of my work todos by project. The tricky bit I always seem to run into is, a lot of my todos come through email, but not all of them. I either needed to get my other todos into the email system, or at least some of the email todos out into Things. I ended up opting for the latter.

So here's the system. This may sound complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it, it's easy to use and can plow through a pile of email in not time at all.

Folders, Folders, Folders

First, I create some additional email folders:

Inbox
Now
Watch
Waiting
Archive

Project 1
Project2
...
ProjectN

I also set up rules for automatically filing various AddThis related messages that I track separately, like translation submissions and product feedback. Check your favorite email application for more information.

Taming the Inbox

When it's time to sort through the messages in my inbox, here's how I use each folder:

If a message can be immediately acted on, do so now; my rule of thumb is 10 secs to a minute tops.
If it needs to be done today or very soon, move to Now. If it's something to be done much later on, I suggest moving it out of email and into your favorite todo application (mine is Things.)
If it's event-related, or something occurring for which there's no action but helpful to have the information handy, move to Watch (party, company meeting, offsite, holiday event, etc.)
If the email is waiting on a response or an action from someone else, move to Waiting; I cc myself on messages so if I'm waiting for a response, I have a copy to put in this folder.
If the message is project related and there is no action to be taken or pending, I Archive it into the appropriate Project folder.
Otherwise, I delete it.

How often you sort through messages is up to you. You can do so frequently and keep your inbox empty most of the time, or set aside certain times of the day to plow through a longer list, avoiding the more frequent distractions.

Housekeeping

Here's the important part that keeps the system working:

Each day go through Now for things that need to get done that day. Archive or delete items that are completed or no longer need to be addressed. Waiting on a followup? Move to Waiting.
At least once a week go through Waiting. Done? Delete. Still waiting? Leave it. Should have heard by now? Send a followup email. Schedule time to do this, it doesn't take long.
Every couple of weeks, go through Watch and Later, and either delete things or promote them to Now or Waiting.

There you go. Even if you get hundreds of emails a day, this or a system like it can help keep things manageable. I also suggest unsubscribing to emails aggressively, but that's a different post.

I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me. By the way, I'd highly recommend the Getting Things Done book above for other great ideas for managing the huge amount of information that swirls around us every day. Cheers!

Breaking Up is Hard to Do (Unless It's Almost Christmas)

2010-10-27T11:37:00.000-04:00

When are people most likely to break up? Mathias Mikkelsen discusses David McCandless' TED Talk, "The Beauty of Data Visualization", in which McCandless describes insights from analysis of over 10,000 Facebook status updates.

Amazing Facts About Facebook And Breakups | Mathias Mikkelsen

Check out the original TED Talk here:

Understanding the Power of the Goldilocks Effect

2010-10-25T09:24:00.000-04:00

Offering alternatives can help make the option you want end users to select more desirable. This strategy can also help end users feel more in control of the selection process, and ultimately feel better about their selection. Be careful, however, of offering too many options or too much complexity. Check out over 20 examples of this design strategy at work.

Persuasive purchase behaviour – Understanding the power of the Goldilocks Effect

Map of Online Communities

2010-10-06T09:07:00.001-04:00

Here is a fun (and insightful) map from the folks at XKCD displaying online communities, measured by daily social activity over spring and summer 2010. See if you can find Kanye's Isle of Sadness!

Check it out at:
• xkcd.com/

What Twitter Learns from All Those Tweets

2010-09-29T07:44:00.001-04:00

Twitter generates more than 12 terabytes of data a day – that's a lot of tweets. Their head of analytics talks about the kinds of insights they look for in this mountain of information.

Read more at Technology Review India:

What Twitter Learns from All Those Tweets

Designing Search: Best Practices

2010-09-26T14:19:00.001-04:00

Back in July, Tyler Tate and H. Stefan Olafsson authored a great collection of best practices for designing search functionality: how a search box should be presented, how results should be formatted, and more. (Be sure to check out the section about faceted navigation.)

They reference Marcia Bates' landmark "berrypicking" article from 1989 about search and information retrieval – definitely worth reading if you are interested in search interfaces and interactions.

Read more:

The Scent of Search Johnny Holland – It's all about interaction » Blog Archive

Making User Interface Elements Difficult to Use By Intent

2010-08-23T16:25:00.000-04:00

Nice write-up by Jacob Gube describing situations in which it makes sense to design an interface to be harder to use:

When using the interface element is costly to the user if used by accident
When there’s an overall improvement to the UI as a whole
When the cost of maintaining a feature is costly to the provider if used frequently

11 Principles of Interaction Design explained

2010-08-13T09:04:00.000-04:00

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

- Albert Einstein

Paul Seys, a UK-based user experience designer, describes 11 core principles of interaction design, including one of my favorites, Cognitive Load. Put simply, don't make users think.

11 Principles of Interaction Design explained

Your Design Is Wrong (And Here's Why)

2010-08-12T06:36:00.001-04:00

Mike Rundle explores the pros and cons of design critique on Dribble, and where design execution can go wrong. Mind that kerning!

Your Design Is Wrong (And Here's Why) ~ Flyosity by Mike Rundle

App Icons on iPad and iPhone

2010-08-12T06:32:00.000-04:00

Handy for those doing mobile application work for iPad and iPhone:

Technical Q&A QA1686: App Icons on iPad and iPhone

Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them

2010-08-07T13:16:00.000-04:00

Good reminder: 7-15 items is "ideal", although I'd go lower if appropriate for a given interface. Great suggestion about auto-completing large lists.

Drop-Down Usability: When You Should (and Shouldn’t) Use Them | UX Booth

Building Buzz and Audience Before a Launch

2010-08-05T10:52:00.000-04:00

Sachin Agarwal writes about how BlueLeaf created excitement around getting invited to participate on their site. Interested case study in experience design and marketing:

They make users request publicly to get in, and offer unlimited invites – but for a limited time-window
They use Facebook as their exclusive marketing channel; they don't blog about their product, and only announce features via Facebook notes.

Ten Steps To Ten Thousand Sign Ups Before We Even Launch Our Startup

Why I Use AddThis

2010-07-27T15:43:00.001-04:00

Here's a nice article by David Pierce talking about AddThis personalization and why he uses the AddThis sharing platform on his site. Couldn't have explained it better myself- thanks David!

Why I Use AddThis | Digitizd Plus

On Creativity and Design

2010-07-22T09:25:00.000-04:00

Matt Ward poses the question, can creativity and design be independent of each other? As designers, we can create beautiful, functional and highly usable experiences without necessarily being "creative", in the sense of bringing something into being that has never been seen before.

However, as the web is a shared medium where, in most circumstances, the user is trying to *do* something, is this a bad thing? Is the thoughtful construction of typography and visual elements using a grid, open standards and best practices "creativity", or just clever synthesis? Interesting questions, as we think through our roles as both artists and practitioners.

Read more:

On Creativity & Design

Follow: A New AddThis Labs Experiment

2010-07-21T09:46:00.002-04:00

This morning we released a new feature in AddThis Labs called AddThis Follow. You've probably noticed "Follow us on Facebook..." and similar links on various websites you've visited. We thought we'd offer our AddThis publishers an easy way to not only quickly add this feature to their site, but also track clickthroughs to their social profiles right in their AddThis analytics console.

I've added my own Follow menu to this blog, over on the right side of the page.

This new feature supports social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, YouTube and Flickr. Once visitors start using it, I'll be able to go to my AddThis.com analytics, switch from "Sharing" to "Subscribe/Follow" data and track how my visitors are connecting to my various social media profiles.

We'd love to hear what you think of this experiment; would you use it? Are there things you would add or change? Give us your feedback in the AddThis Follow forum.

Get a Follow menu for your own site here:

AddThis Follow Labs Experiment

Justin Thorp's official blog post

Twitter Blog: The 2010 World Cup: a Global Conversation

2010-07-16T13:59:00.000-04:00

Beautiful infographic displaying how Twitter usage and content evolved over the course of the World Cup. Enjoy!

Design Leadership

2010-07-14T10:52:00.000-04:00

This is a fantastic presentation from the creative folks at Frog Design, outlining what it takes to be a great design leader. Highly recommending reading for my creative brethren. Enjoy!

Work in Progress: Thoughts on Design Leadership

View more presentations from frog design.

Leah Buley at Adaptive Path references this presentation here:

UX Design Leadership Model

UX Myth #3: People don’t scroll

2010-07-13T09:14:00.000-04:00

People will indeed scroll to find what they want, and scrolling is more usable than breaking content up into multiple pages. Just be sure that content spans the fold, so readers know there's more below.

Read more, including a bunch of research links, one of which mentions a friend of mine Milissa Tarquini:

UX Myths - Myth #3: People don’t scroll

Great iPad Apps for Web Designers

2010-07-13T08:58:00.000-04:00

Here's a great collection of iPad apps for designers, including sketching tools, analytics, web development, and one of my favorites, Air Display, which turns your iPad into a second monitor. Great for OmniGraffle palettes:

Social Networks at Work

2010-07-10T10:59:00.003-04:00

Clearspring CEO Hooman Radfar (also my boss) appears on a Silicon Valley panel discussion about social media, security and the workplace. Is social media beneficial to the organization, or a risk? A bit of both?

My two cents: everyone in an organization is a brand champion, and social media can be a valuable resource to a company both as a communication channel and research tool. Organizations need to be smart about setting boundaries and expectations about the use of social media in the workplace, and embrace their power as official and unofficial opportunities to give an organization a face to its customers. Trying to block, or worse ignore, the enormous investment of time and social capital employees have in social media is not only futile – it's counter-productive.

What do you think?

Here's part one of Hooman's session; you can check out the other parts of Hooman's session at the link below:

See more at:

Social Networking at Work

Big Bang Wall Painting. Amazing.

2010-07-09T14:28:00.000-04:00

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.