I was reading a post on Luke Wroblewski's blog recapping a presentation on "Designing Humanity in to Your Products" at the Web App Summit 2009 and it got me thinking about the tensions I often find in creating the text for the Web applications I build.

We have an interdisciplinary team responsible for all the educational and training content developed at my place of work. They're very smart, talented people who know a lot about their specific area of expertise. Over time, we've settled on a writing style that's, well, a bit formal. We're an academic institution, after all, and the Chicago Manual of Style is pretty clear on how words should be crafted for the page.

The problem with sticking to a standard like Chicago is twofold:

1. We're on the Web, not the page. The Web really is different from the printed page.
2. Web 2.0 experiences are fast becoming (if not already) the standard. Users expect to be referred to in the first or second person. Users expect to take center stage in all the activities available in a Web app. They expect the casual, conversational style of Facebook to be how all Web apps should work.

I'm not trying to single out the technical writers and editors that we have on our team. They're great and really know what they're doing. I'm also not abdicating the basic rules of academic writing to Facebook or IM style. (I teach an online course at a graduate institution, after all, and I see how lazy students can be when it comes to writing.) What I am trying to point out is that often when we generate the text for our Web applications, we're bound by a sense of obligation to "proper style" or "business tone" that's so formal it only reinforces the stereotype that computers (and by extension, the Web applications that run on computers) are so devoid of anything resembling personality or idiosyncratic style that we can't, fundamentally, connect with them.

Part of the success of Facebook or Twitter or any number of Web 2.0 sites is the way in which they approach the user: a friendly, conversational tone with human-readable (and understandable) messages. As pointed out in the blog post, we need to take a conversational rather than formal tone, especially when it comes to error messages or other "system guidance" to users. This may result in a site with a less authoritative (as in totalitarian) voice, but the benefit is that users feel assisted, not punished, when they need to ask a question or something goes wrong.

As I've been implementing newer apps, and those using my Contextual Guidance API, I've made a conscious effort to keep the tone less formal and more conversational. This has resulted in a few discussions about what's appropriate (contractions seem to be a sticking point), but I think the upshot are apps that are more approachable and, by extension, more human. People have such limited time to get anything that they don't see as non-essential done, it's important to make them feel that they're dealing with an app made by humans, for humans.

I realize that I've been posting a lot on user interface design for Web applications, but it seems that there are more and more excellent resources becoming freely available on this front every day. What's even better is that many of these resources provide simple, clear examples for best practices.

Thanks to the good folks at Ajaxian, I came across 30 Essential Controls, a page which lists frequently used Web UI controls (ie; multi-select box, rich text editor, autosuggest, etc.) and which RIA frameworks use them. So if you're prototyping a particular UI and want to know if the framework you're considering (because you are using frameworks and not trying to reinvent the wheel, right?) supports that type of control. There are handy links to many specific control implementations inline, so it's pretty easy to find some of these controls while others you'll have to go searching for.

The parent site for this page, which is for the book "Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions" has quite a few good resources itself, including a blog from the authors. If you haven't seen Bill Scott's presentation on Designing Web Interfaces on Slideshare, it's definitely worth checking out and making it through the 300+ slides. He just did a webcast on O'Reilly and should be posting the audio from the session soon. Take a look at the "Explore the Book" page as well, as it summarizes most of the content of the book into an easily usable page.

It looks like I'll be picking up their book shortly.

I'm rarely disappointed when the smart folks who put together Smashing Magazine come out with a new article on Web application design and information architecture. Their style is straightforward and remarkably jargon-free, especially when compared to other UI design-focused sites.

10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques is their latest posting on the subject (see that article for even more, related articles on effective UI design techniques). While I do get a lot out of reading these articles, and the tips and strategies are usually dead-on (and make good common sense), one of the things I love about what they do is that they provide visual examples for nearly every tip and technique. It's a great way to quickly survey what other sites are doing, and how they're working to innovate in UI design.

A less buzzwordy title for this book would be "The Neurosociology of Effective eCommerce Design," but I suppose that's not as pithy as "Neuro Web Design." This brief, clearly written and surprisingly obvious book by Susan M. Weinschenk examines the neuroscience behind effective Web marketing and design, focusing in particular on eCommerce.

Quite a bit of the book covers how the "old, mid and new" parts of the brain affect our decisions to buy and act in the ways that we do. (I'd argue that you could interchange those three terms with "id, ego and superego," but there are physical parts of the brain which map to these concepts.) Weinschenk focuses quite a bit on socialization and how we need to be a part of a group, especially when we make decisions about buying. She focuses on the effectiveness of public reviews, reciprocity, immediacy, and threat in designing your Web commerce and marketing strategy.

It was interesting to read that psychologists are now demonstrating, though data, the effectiveness of "chunking" content — a practice that my work has put to use for over a decade now in long-form online educational content. Learners provided much anecdotal data about preferring chunked content, but Weinschenk points to studies that back this up with numbers.

A lot of what she says makes great common sense and is, honestly, pretty obvious when you think about it. She presents things in a very easy-to-read and understand style. I did find, though, that the overall book is a bit thin as the core concepts are repeated in a number of different ways over 132 pages (padded with elegant spacing, pictures, and reminder boxes throughout). It also ends rather abruptly, providing very little wrap-up, but this isn't fiction.

Slideshare is a great learning resource. There are presentations from top-level presenters in a number of fields (particularly Web design and development) posted there, although you sometimes have to wade through the litany of "Hot Brazillian Girls" slideshows that never quite seem to go away. You can subscribe to their very convenient RSS feed of latest presentations submitted to the site, or the most viewed presentations within a given day or week or month, and so on. I usually review one or two presentations a day on the site.

Bill Scott, the Director of UI Engineering for Netflix, posted a great and detailed presentation on "Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction." What's really useful about this presentation is not just the depth of examples but also his pointing out anti-patterns in Web application interface design. Anti-patterns aren't well discussed in this area, and I think he makes some great points about common approaches to interaction which may be less helpful than we expect them to be.

The presentation is below, but you should definitely head on over to Slideshare if you haven't already, as there's a wealth of useful presentations there.

Protoshare is a full Web application that enables Web application teams to collaborate with clients and customers on prototyping Web sites. I'm a big proponent of prototype-based development, but one of the drawbacks to this methodology is that there aren't a number of really good tools to facilitate the process. Those that do exist are desktop-only and somewhat expensive. Protoshare enables you and your team and your clients to build out protoypes completely online in a surprisingly rich, drag-and-drop environment with smartly integrated commenting and discussion.

Where Protoshare really shines is in the wireframing layout process. They've done some very impressive work with JavaScript on the browser, and the very rich UI is fluid and responsive. Even more impressive, you can make your wireframes fairly interactive, utilizing RSS for dynamic data display, or menu drop-downs or flyouts that really let you and your clients see the workflow, rather than just talk about it. You can certainly build HTML prototypes that do the same thing (and we do!), but Protoshare helps to automate that process.

I've been looking at it as a way to enable our team and our clients to work remotely and still collaborate effectively, and I think it meets that requirement. However, as most of my team and our clients are all within a short walk of each other, I'm not sure that the fees (which are not steep) and the lock in to the product are worth the investment. We can also generate richer prototypes on our own, but certainly not as fast. If our designer/developer team and clients were more geographically dispersed, Protoshare might be a great tool for us to use. I think the product is really excellent for smaller design shops or independent designers who want to collaborate with their clients without driving around (or flying to) a lot of meetings. I don't know if you'd use Protoshare to protoype a fairly large corporate intranet, but I think that aside from not being able to handle the full scope of AJAX-based interactivity (though you can address that by building Flash movies and inserting those in to the Protoshare wireframe), it's a very capable tool. (Though I would like to see real-time audio communication built in to the tool. It's very, very useful to talk through the workflow with collaborators, rather than just post comments asynchronously.)

Interestingly, Protoshare requires that you use Firefox 3. While IE is almost fully supported, Firefox is what you need to be using to fully engage with the application. It's unusual for almost any Web-based application to require Firefox over IE, but that's what they've done. I'm not sure that this isn't a problem, as home business or corporate clients may not want or be able to install Firefox just to collaborate with you. They may just ask that you meet with them in person instead.

Robert Hoekman Jr. has written two quite excellent books on user interface and interaction design. I read these books earlier this year, but thought I'd finally get to blogging about them as part of my ongoing book reviews.

Designing the Obvious was the first of the two books and, for me, the more successful of the two. It's rich with UI design aphorisms that simply make good common sense. Written in a simple, conversational style that draws heavily from actual Web application development experience, this book, and its counterpart just make sense. The book deserves to be read by anyone who actually builds any kind of Web application user interface, no matter how simple or complex. One of the things I really liked about his approach was the whole concept of turning beginning users into intermediate users quickly. That was the inspiration for my whole series of posts on the Contextual Guidance API. His outright demand that you make it simple, eliminate anything unnecessary in the app and in the design, and focusing on how you accomplish a task at every moment within the application is great advice. My team has taken that advice to heart and has begun designing our new applications around much of Hoekman's advice in this book. The result has been applications that visually make more sense to our clients, and clients that are really happy with what we're developing.

Designing the Moment is focused on very common, very specific moments of interaction with a Web application and how they can be made better. It's less cohesive as the previous book, which took more of a big-picture view to the art and process of designing user interfaces. In this book, the examples are very specific, somewhat less generalizable, but many of the same principles from Designing the Obvious come in to play. My sincere feeling is that a number of the solutions presented in this book will become outdated over the next couple of years (ie; blog and social networking site design) but, again, the basic principles of clarity, task-orientation and removing all but the essential are more than sound.

Designing the Obvious should be mandatory reading for all Web application developers, even those who rarely work on the UI. At the end of the day, the interface is the application, no matter what application you're using. Knowing how to create great interfaces is key to building great applications.

Smashing Magazine is a great site that frequently provides inspiration and illumination about all things design (and technology design in particular). I stumbled across the site a couple years ago and I'm always impressed with the quality of inspiration they provide.

They recently put together "10 Futuristic User Interfaces," a look at where user interfaces might go in the not-too-distant future. Interestingly, a lot of the interfaces point (no pun intended) to heavy use of the original pointing device: the finger. Of particular note are the interfaces for Futuristic Glass, Motorola Sparrow, Composition of the table, and Ringo. All of these interfaces rely primarily on hand-based motor skills to grab and manipulate information in a meaningful way.

Pointing as the primary means of communication isn't exactly new, or futuristic. We can see lots of implementations of "touch" devices in use today. Microsoft has Surface and its various, manufactured-real-soon now incarnations. There's the Wii. There's a number of new multi-touch computers, including the well-advertised one from HP. And there's the iPhone. A combination of devices are making touch-based interaction (computing) a reality.

My question, though, is this: will people forgo a century or more of developed typing skills for a touch-based interface. Touch-based interfaces are largely serial input devices. You can't type more than one letter at a time on the iPhone. Multiple touches signifies a single, special action in multi-touch interfaces. I suppose you could make the argument, however, that keyboards work the same way: a machine only accepts one key as input at at time. However, keyboards are fast. You can use all 10 pointing devices on your hands at an incredibly rapid rate to generate input. Touch devices expect that you'll be using a single input . Given the range of motion required for or the limited space available in touch interfaces, it's nearly impossible, at this point, to provide input at the same rate as a keyboard. A common complaint that Blackberry device users have about the iPhone is that it's much slower to create responses/entries on the iPhone than it is on the Blackberry because of the keyboard and because you're able to provide input at a much faster rate.

This is a problem that time and ingenuity will probably solve. However, the miniaturization of technology prevents a major barrier to rapid input via touch. The average finger size of our species isn't going to get smaller any time soon.

Another major obstacle to input interfaces like Ringo (which is pretty dang cool) is the need for small, inexpensive and completely proliferated holographic projectors. That day is probably coming too, with the march toward technology miniaturization.

So touch input, glass-as-the-computer, and the proliferation of holographic projectors. Maybe Minority Report had it right all along.

I've mentioned Robert Hoekman, Jr.'s excellent book "Designing the Obvious" a number of times in previous posts. Hoekman devotes an entire chapter ("Turn Beginners Into Intermediates, Immediately") to the subject of getting users up to speed with applications as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. He argues that most of the users who stick around long enogh to use your application don't ever get beyond being "intermediate"-level users, and that:

So how do we do this? How do we know someone is a real beginner, an intermediate user, or an expert user (for those rare people who really want to take the time to learn all the nooks and crannies of the application)? How do we then track they they are gaining experience with the application so we no longer treat them as beginners but as intermediate users (or advanced users, as appropriate)?

I'm working on a simple API to help provide the appropriate level of contextual guidance to users of an application. The focus here is really on the backend tracking and determination of a user's experience level with an application. The contextual guidance API would be called before a page-view is rendered and the view itself would determine what to display based on the "experience level" of the user that has been passed along to it. With this system, we can hopefully begin to provide users instructive text (aka help) in a way that's useful and appropriate to their experience with the application, and that adapts over time to get out of their way or change to show them new tools at their disposal.

The core function would look something like this:

The arguments would be:

• userID (numeric): The PKEY userID of the user.
• applicationName (string): The string name of the application, so that multiple applications could be tracked within the same table, if appropriate. This could also be an applicationID value, if you have an applications table to work with which defined each application and gave it an ID.
• Optional: applicationSection (string): The string value of the section of the application in which the user is working. This is useful in larger applications, where a user may spend most of their time in sections A and B but not in C. The user would need more help in section C of the application, and less in A and B. You need a way to be able to discern this, and this is the proposed way.

The function would return a string containing one of three values:

• beginner
• intermediate
• expert

You could return a numeric value that somehow translated in to a range (eg; 1-10 = super noob, 10-20 = inexperienced, 20-30 = lower intermediate, and so on), but that level of granularity is probably more trouble than its worth — especially in the view where you'd have to write a whole lot of conditional logic to handle the appropriate display for each of those value ranges.

So those are the basics of the method. In the next post on this topic, I'll talk about internal logic and the fact that we can't reduce experience to simple numbers. We have to take in to account the fallibility of memory in our business logic.

If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them!

The title of this post is a wee bit binary, but it's a topic worth discussing. I was just reading a post by Rob Adams, who is working on Adobe's Thermo project, about the value he finds in paper prototypes, and some of the problems.

I'm in the middle of developing a new application with my super-great team, and we're moving from paper prototypes to a clickable, HTML prototype. There's a lot of discussion with the client during this time, and they've now seen four versions of the application on paper. At one point in his post, Adams makes the following salient point:

It's very, very easy when settling in to a routine of back-and-forth and discussion with a client to easily explain away a question they have about the interface (and therefore the workflow) without realizing that this, in all likelihood, is a design problem that needs to be solved. If they're asking you "How will this work?" or "What is this for?" or "Will it do [x]?" when that task is represented on the prototype (or is supposed to be represented or implied in the prototype), then you've got a design issue that you need to handle. If they're asking about how data is stored or background workflows not covered by the prototype at hand, then that's not necessarily a design issue that needs to be addressed.

Sometimes you're so focused on just getting through the key aspects of the prototype in the hour that the client allows you to meet with them that it's easy to quickly explain something they don't understand in regards to how the application will work. Have a second set of hands with you to note all the questions (something else that Adams recommends) so that you can go back later and say "They didn't understand this, and it's supposed to be self-evident. Let's take a look at how we can improve the design."

If someone in the prototyping process has a question about how the app is supposed to work, then you can be sure that there will be lots of people who use the app who have the same question. By listening to the workflow or application operation questions being asked and not quickly explaining them away, you'll find the design flaws and be able to fix them before they become a headache in production.