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Archives for May 2009

Experience Architecture in website designing

Sunday, May 24, 2009 By John Garner

The importance of experience architects in creating or updating a web site is often underestimated. There is a general tendency to fudge the initial user experience phase (sitemaps, personas with their specific user journeys and wireframes) or even skip it and jump straight to concept designs that are then fleshed out to ‘wow’ the client. The whole rationale that consists in understanding what functionalities and services are required on the site and structure them in a coherent manner, hopefully even test them before designing commences, is omitted. Defining the main functionalities of a site, then having an experience architect (who worked on that first phase) to sketch it out and analyse it should precede the functional specifications but most of all the design phase. Designers that have extensive web design knowledge as well as experience architecture knowledge are few and far between so you are unlikely to obtain the optimum result by starting with the design.

Card Sorting
The initial phases, when analysing the structure and organisation of an existing site in view of updating it ‘can’ benefit from card sorting. This consists of taking the different sections and seeing how users sort the different sections / areas into groups. It can help you understand how users would expect these different areas to be organised and therefore, where they would expect to find them. Different logical taxonomies may appear following the analysis as different user groups may sort cards in different ways. There are also 2 different types of card sorting, ‘open’ where no structure is predefined and ‘closed’ where participants are asked to place the cards in a pre-defined structure. Card sorting is not recommended to simply test a current site but should be considered as part of the process involved in defining the structure of a site that is being created or updated / redesigned. It can also help when adding or updating a new area to a site. As Nielsen explains more users are required in card sorting than in usability testing though. A fair amount of analysis is required to obtain useful findings.

Sitemap, user journeys, wireframes
By creating the recommended set of ‘sitemap / user journeys / wireframes’ you are capable of seeing black on white the optimum route a person will take. The organization and categorization of content blocks should be logical but can be modified to optimise the user journey outcome. A site should usually provide several optimised user journeys for the different types of target users / personas that have been identified.

Simplify the site and structure
Generation Y as opposed to generation X and the baby boomers are more net fluent and savvy online, capable of delving through content until they find the information they feel relevant and trustworthy. Their experience and knowledge provides near instantaneous gut feeling about a site. Uncluttered, simple pages with straightforward navigation principles just feel good. A pleasant experience on a web site that easily allows you to find what you are looking for is memorable simply because it is unfortunately a rare experience. This new generation and generations to come are a primary targets, neglecting them is not an option.

Simplify the design and content
Simple ways of communicating, avoiding the “noise” traditional designers want to apply in order to personalise or own their design can complicate things. Twitter, like SMS are two extremely simple ways of communicating, their restrictions simplify the communication.
Now is this to say that design is just powder in your eyes? Well, when applied by talented designers that know their target audience, how to play and innovate with the chosen medium and how to further optimise the previously crafted user journey, then obviously no.
A friend of mine works at the “Musée des Arts Décoratifs” in Paris, we discussed this concept when applied to modern decorative art. I was comparing the concept to artists capable of choosing specific material(s) and their ability to amplify the user experience and overall design through the selection of specific material(s). The technology but also the interfaces mechanisms of web sites are in this perspective key elements that a great designer will know and use to further his / her design.

Accessibility, standards, usability and web 2.0
Web applications are becoming more and more complex to the extent that they are starting to compete with desktop applications (ex. Google Maps and Mail, Flickr etc.). The interaction provided as well as both usability and accessibility when relying on standards are far better. Although the ‘web 2.0’ term is often used as a buzz word (see Zelman’s web 3.0 article) the term has undoubtedly helped spread the idea of more savvy websites, thought through and help improve user experience.

Filed Under: Code, Design, Experimental, Software, Thoughts, User Experience, Web Tagged With: Design, Software, User Experience, Web

Windows 7 64 bit on Dell XPS M1210

Saturday, May 23, 2009 By John Garner

Well here I am, writing about how great the Windows 7 RC1 operating system is, directly from my Dell XPS M1210 64 bit version. Although I went through a fair amount of trial and error and one complete re-install I’m happy to say nearly all the core elements are recognised and no more yellow triangles with exclamation marks in the device manager.

The 2 most difficult where the Ricoh car reader and the Logitech QuickCam / webcam drivers.
The Ricoh card reader came up as a “base system device” issue. I solved this by downloading the driver from this site then installing the application that installs the x64 drivers.
The Logitech came up as an unrecognised USB device driver issue and Windows 7 OS itself allowed me to download the solution R151795 from the Dell site. When you try to install it this fails, you then just need to point the device manager system to the folder where this solution/drivers were extracted, so that it can install the drivers. This does not however install the software that you usually get from Logitech since it only picks up the drivers, which means other software can use it, but you won’t have the Logitech suite you usually get (personally doesn’t bother me but may be a problem for others)!

For an antivirus/firewall solution the latest ESET Smart security 4 works just fine on the 64 bit Windows 7 operating system.

For codecs I highly recommend either switching to VideoLan (but this is not yet available in a 64 bit version) or/and as I did, install the great Windows 7 codec package from Shark that can be downloaded here and 64 bit components to take advantage of your 64 bit Windows Media player for example here.

I’m also running the Office 2007 suite and even though it’s a pity that Windows itself hasn’t got at least a beta version in 64 bit out yet, it works fine and just installed the SP2 for Office 2007.

At the moment it seems easiest to use Internet Explorer 8 (not the 64 bit version) or another 32 bit browser like Chrome, to be able to view Flash content as there is still no 64 bit version of Flash player. For example the release candidate of Minefield, Firefox’s codename for the 64 bit version of their browser doesn’t have a Flash plug-in.

The main idea is that you can try drivers that are indicated as being for the specific hardware you have if they are supposed to work on Vista 64 bit, or wait untill another user explains that they have found what you need, if you don’t want to risk having to reinstall Windows 7 again…

Hope this helps other XPS M1210 owners out 😉

Update: Windows Update just informed of 3 downloads for the Ricoh Host Contoller (Memory stick, SD/MMC and xD Picture card) released in July, October and November 2008 along with the opportunity to download Silverlight!

Update 2: ‘Stir’ kindly provided the link for the Synaptic x64 driver here:
http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/15103-synaptics-driverver-v13-2-6-1/

Links
Download Windows 7 Release Candidate (both 32 bit and 64 bit versions available). Note: make sure you read the “Read this first” section.
The Windows 7 upgrade advisor

You should also know:
– When the final version of Windows 7 comes out you will not be able to upgrade to it so you will have to do a clean installation
– You can upgrade from Vista 32 bit to Windows 7 32 bit but you cannot upgrade from Vista 32 bit to Windows 64 bit. You cannot upgrade from any version of Windows XP to Windows 7 you’ll need to do a clean install. I would recommend a clean installation though ONLY after having backed up all your data as you will erase everything on your hard disk and I would recommend backing up your data even if you upgrade as you never know what can happen.
– The Windows 7 RC will stop working on June 1, 2010

Filed Under: Software, Step by step, Tech, Windows 7 Tagged With: Software, Step by step, Tech, Windows 7

The first impressions of website designs

Monday, May 11, 2009 By John Garner

Designing sites is a great opportunity, especially when you are lucky enough to be surrounded by clever and experienced people. When you can combine extremely talented people at all the different levels you require to build a website the results can be amazing. Although traditional advertising agencies are starting to learn that they need to further integrate the technical implications of the production of a website into projects, user experience is just as important and often overlooked by so many agencies. Design is considered the Holy Grail but this can hide some ugly surprises when the user experience aspect of the website is overlooked. Experience architecture when used in a rigorous way can really help to understand what will help the end-users of a site will be looking for, how and where to include it in your website.

While reading an article on SearchEngineLand I was happy to see that the experience architecture aspect of a site build was nicely touched upon. First impressions count. It really does give you an extra insight into the way the site can be successful when you try to understand how people will react to a site, what they are looking for and how designing it differently can help you help them find what they are looking for quickly without compromising the design.
The gut feeling is an important factor with today’s fast moving generation Z, the same gut feeling can be tested with various personas you have identified as your key target population to make sure that you don’t alienate your other personas from previous generations.

Filed Under: Advertising, Design, Marketing, Thoughts, User Experience, Web Tagged With: Advertising, Design, Marketing, Thoughts, User Experience, Web

No backward compatibility for iPhone 3.0 OS

Monday, May 11, 2009 By John Garner

Developers of iPhone Apps were told by Apple this Thursday that:

“If your app submission is not compatible with iPhone OS 3.0, it will not be approved”

As explained on techradar all application submissions will need to be compatible with iPhone 3.0 OS. I’m guessing this means quite a few applications may need to be upgraded, and some nice news for iPhone App developers and probably some extra revenue in some cases unless they were nicely coded to begin with…?

Filed Under: Smartphone, Software, Tech Tagged With: Smartphone, Software, Tech

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