This comes back to a couple recurring conversations I’ve been having about our education system. I certainly think our education system in the States has, for the most part, failed us. I don’t expect everybody to be a super genius, but I do expect a base level of competency that simply doesn’t exist. A big part of that seems to stem from an inability to discern the difference between information and propaganda.

It is true that advertising has very little effect on the younger generation (kids just coming out of high school and younger). At least they aren’t effected by traditional advertising much. There is peer-based advertising, but I digress. People today don’t seem to understand the difference between a valid and rational documentary and one-sided propaganda posing as a documentary. Or news program. Or reality (as opposed to reality TV). I propose this problem is exacerbated in the schools, but I don’t know of evidence supporting that hypothesis.

Of course, that’s an important statement unto itself. I recognize, more or less, the limitations of my own knowledge. However, I try to apply a litmus test against any new knowledge to determine if it’s reasonable. Granted, I was the kid in class that corrected the teacher or book when an error occurred. The students I’ve seen the last few years don’t even consider a text book could be wrong. Hint: every text book ever written has errors.

I don’t have any solution right now, but I wonder if there are ways to encourage exploration and skepticism into the UXD at a fundamental level. There are some amazing UIs for children to explore ideas, gamers to access advanced tools from limited controllers, and professionals to accomplish complex tasks with few keystrokes. I’m going to try drafting up some concepts over the next few weeks and explore the question here (and perhaps another blog or two). Can design encourage appropriate skepticism?

Theater 11 or theater 12?

Here’s a great example. I was walking into a theater about a week ago and saw this brilliant signage.

At first glance I couldn’t believe I was reading that correctly. In the space of two or three minutes, there were several comments made by people walking into the theater. Ok, I’m not counting the people I was with, because they are big geeks like me and notice these things.

I glanced at a couple theaters on the way out and the numbers are supposed to be read down, which makes the signage much more useful. All they have to do is put a vertical line between the numbers to help the eye differentiate between them.  In the case of theater 11 and theater 12, the numbers read correctly top-down or left-right. Perhaps an edge case, but pretty important for at least several hundred patrons every day.

Despite my focus on software usability, we a bombarded with bad design everyday. Wouldn’t it be great if people spent just a little more time thinking things through the rest of us could get through the day with a little less frustration? Nobody is perfect, but how many people signed off on this? The architect, the contractor, the person applying the signs, the investor(s), the manager(s), the rest of the staff, etc. etc. etc. Remember, if one person complains about something, there are probably 50 others that noticed it and just didn’t say anything.

What bad designs have you been victim to today?

This is a problem that has come up many times in the last few years. In fact, there are a couple social networks I’ve worked on that discussed rating-style solutions.  I, ultimately, agree with the article that this is a problem of accountability, but I don’t know if something like rating really solves it.  After all, we don’t really go around rating people in the real-world.  We might internally denote good or bad experiences, but I doubt many people have given me a solid one to five star rating (not counting the occasional employer of course).

Perhaps, the underlying problem is in the technology itself. We simply don’t internalize text the way we do other forms of communication. We’re not wired that way biologically.  Text is a somewhat dehumanizing medium, which leads to a perception of no accountability. Rating systems might work as a stopgap measure, but probably won’t create a lasting solution (after all, people will game any system given the opportunity).  Crowd sourcing does have limitations, because crowds have a tendency of turning into mobs.

I suspect this is a growing pain of social media (or even the Internet as a whole). Consider the rapid increase in available printing presses during the mid-18th century. The pamphlets and propaganda published by our founding fathers wouldn’t exactly pass muster today. They frequently “trolled” one another via call and response on their respective papers (go back and read some if you have time, it’s quite entertaining when they break down to name calling). The only difference is there was a week or more lag between call and response. Even up through the early 20th century, news papers were the premier form of mass communication and left much to be desired (take Hurst of example, modifying news to sell product is hardly new). Hurst famously said, “Give me the pictures, I’ll give you the war.”  Today, responses occur within seconds and the negative feedback loop becomes an almost self-sustaining torrent of hate (and then somebody calls you Hitler).

My point is this, it took us the better part of 150 years to develop some form of decorum within the modern paper medium – and that’s debatable.

What if our technology outpaced our social development too much? I’m just thinking out loud here, but these solutions presume that people are generally polite and respectful. However, that might be a construct of physical interaction… a throw back to our biological need to avoid pissing off the alpha male , being the weakling left behind or getting injured by a predator. Those are survival instincts I can get behind.  Text, whether on the Internet or in print, removes you quite a bit from the consumer of the information. Without the gates inherent to print (cost and risk of using limited resources to print and distribute something), perhaps we just begin to realize how twisted people really are. Ayn Rand would be proud (although I’m more of a John Stewart Mills fan… never cared for Rand much).

Perhaps we just need to learn a new decorum of respect in an age when publishing is freely available to anyone. It took more than 150 years for news paper reporters and press owners to learn some respect (and they occasionally forget it still today). We don’t have that kind of time to figure this one out though. Once society begins to internalize social media and the Internet as an extension of yourself, things like trolling will be limited to people that actually behave this way (e.g., frat brothers). I don’t think simple ratings will a) create an accurate enough picture of the interactions or b) effectively minimize trolling in the first place.

Omaha.com is one of the few sites that consistently degrades the experience with each “upgrade”

Let’s just ignore the poor content for a moment and focus on the design (text included, but not specific content).  I don’t know who the “designer” was (and I’m using that term loosely here), but I do know that he needs to look for a different line of work (or at least learn how to do his chosen line of work a bit).

For the sake of convention in this post, I’m going to call our designer friend Tim the Designer or Tim for short (if, by some strange coincidence, the designer’s name actually is Tim, I apologize; if the designer happens to be a woman, I apologize… to women everywhere for such a poor representation of work).

Header

This might be the worst header I’ve seen since 1997.  It is way to thick.  There are about 170px of wasted space (light blue with gratuitous ads) before we get to the real header.  I understand Tim the Designer (or more accurately, his boss the Paper) needs to have ads displayed to support the Paper… after all, with the Paper’s lack of quality control I wouldn’t expect people to actually pay for it.  However, it’s important to temper those ads with some reasonableness.  Cracked has better ad placement, and they aren’t exactly the typical aspiration of “legitimate” news sites.

Examining the header of Omaha.com

I’m not sure why the navigation is so small on an overly thick gray bevel.  I  don’t know why Tim the Designer chose a serif font for the navigation either.  At this size and weight serifs make letters look smudged and difficult to read.  Why do  designers like Tim insist on making important navigation all CAPS?  Don’t they realize people read by recognizing word shapes?  The high and low points within a word help define those shapes and make it easier to read.  This is typography 101 stuff, Tim (do you think Tim knows a big word like typography?).  Maybe I’ll send a copy of Helvetica to Tim.  It might help get him on the right track (different line of work?).

Where are the tabs?  It looks like Tim tried to create a tab metaphor, but then forgot to actually include the tabs.  This leaves us users oblivious to our current location within the site.  No big deal when we’re on the homepage like the above example, but it is pretty confusing once we dive into a section or article.

This is a site supposedly interested in content, yet I have to look for the search mechanism.  There was a great survey done just a few months ago about search location patterns.  Thanks Tim, you’ve completely destroyed that UI pattern we’ve all grown accustomed to.  Why?  Does Tim bother to ask questions like, “why?”

Secondary navigation

But why stop there?  Tim certainly didn’t.  We’ve also been given secondary navigation that drops out of the primary navigation on roll-over.  Tim, there’s a nifty concept in UXD (or HCI or whatever you want to call it) called discover-ability.  Those primary navigation links don’t even really look like links; they certainly don’t look like additional options are available.  On top of poor discover-ability, those navigation links have elusively small target areas (putting your cursor above the text won’t activate the link or secondary navigation, but below the text will).  Just in case we were wondering what we just moused over, Tim has included large duplicate copy of what we just moused over.  I especially like how mousing over the correct area of primary navigation tells me what section (metro/region in this case) my current article belongs in *dripping with venomous sarcasm*.  Thanks for helping, Tim.  Why does this site make me feel as though I’m being treated like a tw0-year-old?

More secondary navigation?

Left navigation bar

So Tim created second form of secondary navigation… sorta.  The really bright blue thing along the left side (that breaks into the main navigation bar implying a strong relationship) is one form of secondary navigation.  Well, it’s more of a weak attempt to create quick connections to areas of interest.  A very weak attempt.  As we dive into articles and actually attempt to find content (gods forbid anybody wants content from a news site), the role and importance of that blue bar becomes increasingly strained.  In fact,  this makes it apparent Tim the Designer started with the homepage rather than the content page.  Apparently, Tim doesn’t think much of promoting content on the Paper’s news site (I realize the Paper is probably equally guilty of this poor product vision, but Tim’s job is to help keep the Paper on track… clearly, we can’t count on news papers to know anything about new  fads like the Internet).

I especially like how the links separated by bars (e.g., Today | Activities, etc.) only have a single space of separation.  That makes it easy to read and click to navigate the  small links (at least I think they’re links… they don’t look any different than the text, so I can’t be certain!).  Some of the links become slightly brighter when you mouse-over them (and I do mean slightly).  Some actually bother to add an underlying, which at least makes those links easy to identify.  In fact, there are at least five or six different ways links are treated throughout the page.

The calendar is bloody confusing.  It’s the 15th, but it shows me the rest of the week (so we can presumably see the future).  When I click on the 19th, I get a list of events for the 19th.  Okay, I can see a use-case for this one (congratulations Tim).  Unfortunately, despite being on a page all about the upcoming events on the 19th, my calendar still has the 15th subtly highlighted.  The calendar only shows me a week into the future, so I must not think much of yesterday’s news.  Sorry Tim, looks like you’ve failed again.

I’ll have another installment to continue describing how badly Omaha.com and Tim the Designer have failed.

Perhaps not as clever following René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, yet still valid (I would have said that back in 1928, except I wasn’t invited to the French exhibition and webpages weren’t in common use yet… and my parents hadn’t been born).  Consider René’s point for a moment.  The image of a pipe cannot be smoked; therefore, it is not a pipe.  Surrealism has always fascinated me as a topic of philosophical discussion (which, I confess, might have been encouraged by my favorite college pastime – screwing with inebriated philosophy majors).  Regardless, the topic seems to have some weight in the world of user experience design (UXD).  But first, allow me to expand on my initial observation.

The Treachery of Images - 1928-1929

How do you define a webpage?  Is it the rendered output of the browser?  The content contained on the page?  The underlying code such as HTML, CSS, javascript, Flash and such?  The underlying ones and zeros representing ASCII and various compressed media files that store and transfer that code?  Is it the local copy stored temporarily for the browser?  The copy on my server (and if so, which one)?

As you can see, the whole concept of what we call a “webpage” gets pretty convoluted when you try to nail it down.  We all (or at least I hope all of you) understand implicitly what a webpage is.  But the definition seems to be a bit elusive.  Now, I’m pretty confident several of those proposed definitions could suffice, but none of them would really be complete.  That’s why, no matter how you define it, I can refute your definition and say “this is not a webpage.”

What’s the point of all this babbling about semantics?  How does it relate to something real (as opposed to surreal)?  I’m getting to that.  Don’t worry, you’re not the first person to suggest I over think things occasionally, so bear with me.

The activity of thinking this through forces you (or at least me) to think of things from a mindset that I wouldn’t normally consider.  As a practitioner of UXD, I consider a website the culmination of technologies and content delivered to your browser when a super special URI is accessed.  As an entrepreneur, a website is little more than one delivery vehicle for a potentially valuable solution to some problem a given group of people have.  As a businessman, a website is a potential asset created and maintained by the firm to increase revenue, decrease costs or maintain existing clients (assuming new clients will increase revenue).

Here’s the problem – These are all valid, yet juxtaposed, concepts.  Each of those definitions are valid for a website, but reconciling them is nearly impossible.  This is what UX designers deal with on a regular basis (perhaps it’s just me, but I’ll assume that at least some designers are like me).  The act of design is frequently an attempt to reconcile inherently incongruous juxtapositions (i.e., surreal).

Good design sometimes requires us to look past temporarily incongruous juxtapositions, so long as they cancel out in the end.

Frequently, to design a good experience, the designer must put himself or herself into a mental position that hasn’t been (or can’t ever be) directly experienced.  For instance, when I was working on Plum Keeper, I had to consider the experience from the primary user group’s perspective, which is pretty typical.  Unfortunately for me, the primary user group are mothers of small children with moderate computer skills. Being a single male (yes women of the Interweb I’m a single geek, how original) with no children (last I checked), the whole young mother thing is a bit unlikely to ever happen and certainly hasn’t occurred yet.  Furthermore, I’m hardly a computer guru, but I’ve been around the block a few times (I started on a C64 and have been online since the early 90s… good ol’ BBS’s).  I know plenty of mothers who I interviewed for the project, but as much as I sympathize with their situations I can never truly empathize.  This is where understanding (or at least pretending to understand) surrealism can help in reality.  The same skills used to digest those incongruous juxtapositions of surrealism will help feel out alternative design possibilities (e.g., me mothering a couple young kids).  I think the design Kyrie Robinson (who has the unfair advantage of being a mother of young children) and I came up with will work out pretty well, but only time will tell.

It reminds me of electrical engineering.  For those of you that haven’t studied the topic, it can get a bit confused.  Imaginary numbers supposedly simplify the algebra (if you insist on calling that mess simplified), but they have to cancel out in the end (seeing as we live in the non-imaginary world).  Now, when dealing with trivial cases, this seems obvious and is pretty easy to do.  My class was a bit different.  Hard doesn’t begin to explain it, but I’ll tell the story of my migraines and C+ worthy 17% another day.

So here’s the grand wisdom (or at least a good idea) that I’ve garnered from surrealism, which I use in product design:  Good design sometimes requires us to look past temporarily incongruous juxtapositions, so long as they cancel out in the end.  Although I might not be able to empathize with a mother of young children, I can attempt to sympathize.  In doing so (if I do my job well), I create an experience that will effectively solve a problem for those mothers.  The imaginary number of my design efforts (me as a mother) cancels out (real mothers like it too).