track steps @ imaginary forces

begin project 1
click projects button
nothing says "web videos"
click back button
click on "Our Reel"
it wants to load Quicktime
run active x
go back
click projects button
click interactive (with Kathy's help)
click featured projects (doesn't load any)
click honda element web video
click one of the videos
quicktime window comes up
video begins playing

/end project 1
begin project 2
click company
click location
mapquest returns the following message:
MapQuest found a similar location for "530 w 25th, new york, ny 10001". Please select or revise your search.
/end project 2
begin project 3
this experience was frustrating. Cool-looking design, poor user interface. No search box. Not enough clues. Names for options unclear. Visual and interface design are beautiful but not usable. Very typical of Design firms (with a capital D). The site fails to meet expectations for usability, and therefore doesn't reflect well on the company.

Unfortunately, due to the tendency of the user to blame themselves (documented by Norman & Nielson), potential clients trying to review their site will probably assume that they just don't "get" design and that the Design firm knows more than they do.

more thoughts on cluetrain. . .

well, here's my quick take on the Manifesto:

*the 95 bulletpoints should be condensed to 10
*hyperlinks do flatten hierarchies: after I posted a piece critical of Quark to a public user forum, I received an email from Quark's director of communications. That would have never happened back-in-the-day.
*they were right about markets being conversations
*15. "In just a few more years, the current homogenized 'voice' of business—the sound of mission statements and brochures—will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court." Well, we might like to think so, but mission statements and brochures are as omnipresent as ever.
*like so many other publications of the late '90s, Cluetrain smells of internet hysteria. As we learned, the New Economy was subject to many of the constraints of the Old, including the need for sensible business planning. It's not enough to be loved by your customers and to "get" the internet.
*42/43/65. "As with networked markets, people are also talking to each other directly inside the company—and not just about rules and regulations, boardroom directives, bottom lines.
Such conversations are taking place today on corporate intranets. But only when the conditions are right." "We're also the workers who make your companies go. We want to talk to customers directly in our own voices, not in platitudes written into a script." Corporate blogging (both internal and external) has certainly started a new conversation between employees and customers, and some of the advantages and pitfalls are just now becoming apparent.

the law of unintended consequences

So industry-watcher and commentator Pariah S. Burke's website is launching a contest to redesign the icons.

"Quark VS InDesign.com Launches Contest to Design Alternate Adobe Creative Suite 3 Icons; Designers to present their visions of Adobe Creative Suite 3 applications in competition for an extensive prize chest. All entries to be compiled into a free library of alternate CS3 icons."

http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/25128.html

What I find most interesting about this whole icon controversy is that it would never have happened without a) the public beta of Photoshop CS3, which alerted designers to the new icon(s), and b) the blogosphere, where the rest of the icons were unveiled in advance of the product release. I can't imagine that the Adobe icon design team (at least in private) welcomes a public referendum on their efforts in the form of a design contest. Quite possibly a contest-entering designer will create a set of icons that are clearly superior.

Just another example of bottom-up, user-generated content turning the status quo on its head. If I were in charge of Adobe's branding strategy right now, I'd be reaching for the Excedrin. On the other hand, it demonstrates how passionate users are about their Adobe applications.

Is this what the Cluetrain Manifesto was talking about?
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.

the Adobe CS3 icons

So this week's reading about HCI (human-computer interface) brings to mind the tempest brewing over Adobe's redesigned icons for the upcoming CS3 (Creative Suite 3). When the original Creative Suite debuted, the beloved Venus icon from Illustrator was replaced with a flower, and the eye icon from Photoshop was replaced with a feather. (InDesign already had a butterfly metaphor, which was retained but updated). Go Live, Adobe's web design program (which has a very small market share compared to industry leader Dreamweaver), got a star metaphor.






Those icons were tweaked in CS2 (created with xray photography), and looked like this:







Users had mixed feelings about these icons, but Adobe's decision to release the products on a synchronized schedule as a suite certainly argued for an overall branding strategy.

In much the same fashion, Adobe's 2005 purchase of Macromedia and resulting integration of the (now confusingly large) product line created the need for a consistent branding strategy.

Here's where it gets interesting. Adobe has traditionally been very secretive about upcoming releases, but decided to break tradition and join the public beta craze with Photoshop CS3. Designers who downloaded the beta noticed a new "PS" icon, and many concluded it must be only for the beta, because it was so minimalist and (some argued) poorly designed.

Lo and behold, John Nack's Adobe blog revealed that these icons are going to ship with the product, and published a link to the remainder of the icons, which can be seen here.
























The design user community's response has been overwhelmingly negative. On a good day, designers make Simon Conwell look generous, and they resoundingly gave a thumbs-down to the new design.

Reasons included the following: the two-letter abbreviations force users to perform recall rather than recognition, since the letters must first be interpreted, unlike a symbol. The squares do not differentiate products and therefore don't help the user. The colors do not map via product line (Dreamweaver is one one side of the wheel, Go Live on the other--both are web design tools). The icons may not be accessible to colorblind users. Many two-letter abbreviations might have two meanings: PS could refer to Photoshop or PostScript. The second letter is sometimes lowercase, sometimes small capital.

As an experiment, without comment, I put the wheel up for my design students who are learning the Adobe and Macromedia products, and asked for their feedback.

A sampling of comments: it looks like alphabet soup, how are we to remember what the abbreviations stand for, it resembles the periodic table (which in fact is the metaphor Adobe used), I like the color wheel, why aren't the symbols superimposed on the squares to provide reference, how will I differentiate the icons in the taskbar, why do products such as Flash and Acrobat retain their symbols. My students did solve the mystery of the lowercase vs. small caps: small caps are used for acronyms (FH=Freehand), while lowercase indicates the first two letters (Au=Audition).

One commenter to John Nack's blog (Brian Ellis, 12/28/06--you'll have to search John's page for his comments, as I couldn't link directly to them) did a heuristic analysis which gets to the heart of HCI.

Anyway, I thought the icon redesign makes a wonderful case study for usability analysis. Can't wait to see if the Adobe designers consider the feedback and redesign the icons before the product is released (rumored to be between April and June, so it's very late in the cycle to incorporate changes). It's worth considering that all this pre-release feedback wouldn't have happened without the public beta. Seems to validate the idea that the it's difficult for insiders to accurately analyze design usability. Team members are just too close to the project.

on great industrial design

I find myself vacuuming a lot lately, and I'm not an inherent clean freak. A few months ago a friend told me about a vacuum cleaner she'd bought that was just amazing. She offered to let me try it, and I was instantly sold. Went out and bought a $450+ vacuum cleaner (well, I shopped the best deal, and actually paid a lot less) the next day.

Why? This vacuum cleaner was so elegantly and simply designed, and so good at cleaning, that I actually find myself wanting to vacuum. I've been a pretty poor housekeeper for years, thanks to working full time, raising 3 kids, and being a perennial student. But the reward of actually seeing what you've cleaned (it has a see-through bagless system) and the intuitive design lead me to get the thing out at least once a week. My husband actually asked if something was wrong with me when he saw me vacuuming weekend after weekend. He thought I'd suddenly developed a case of germophobia.

Regarding Vaun's blog post about the pitfalls of design by committee, this brand was created by a lone inventor who spent years perfecting his design, and the result is a product I truly love to use.

week 3

So my 1st choice would be to usability expert (that's the title according to chap. 11 in last week's reading, but the "expert" part is a little premature in my case). I am buried in usability books right now, reading Nielson's 2006 Prioritizing Web Usability (which is the book I'll review for our book review), and also Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, Nielson's seminal 1999 Designing Web Usability and our class text, Web Redesign 2.0. For good measure, I'm also reading Digital Media: An Introduction, which I'm considering using as a text in a new Survey of Digital Media class suggested by our advisory committee which I'm developing for my program. It was cool to open this last one to a digital media timeline that discusses some of the thinkers, inventions, and organizations we met last quarter in COM546, including Vannevar Bush, ENIAC, ARPANet, and others. I learned that the term "computer graphics" was coined by a Boeing Engineer in 1960! It's amazing to look at the timeline and see how many technological innovations sit for 10 or 20 years before they become "overnight" sensations.

Given our team size, it's unlikely that I could choose something so narrow in scope as a usability expert, so I'm also willing to write, project manage, assist technically with graphic & image creation/optimizing. What I'd like not to do is be the Dreamweaver/HTML person. I don't think I have time to adequately get up to speed in the timeframe we have, given my other responsibilities. I just learned that my colleague & I will be presenting a prototype of our faculty development class on Effective Online Teaching at a statewide conference on May 1.

I'd like to talk more with my team about our goals before posting URLS of sites, as I don't know what type of site we're interested in creating.

Standards and adoption re: last Tuesday--it was difficult in the timeframe to figure out a common IM tool. In fact, I have AIM only because that's what my kids use and as I mentioned before they're the reason I took up IMing, only to find I much prefer email or cell phone and my college sons we not too interested in IMing their mother. None of my teammates were using AIM, so during Tuesday's class I learned that my Hotmail account has IM. I set it up, but am reluctant to use it because of my experience with irritating AIM popups, automatic launch, and annoying messages about who's online. I have a pretty high technology filter in that I juggle so many things that I don't like distractions, and IMing's negatives outweighed the positives for me. I will say this for the standards and interoperability issues tho: Blackboard, the learning management software I use for my online and face-to-face classes, has a chatroom which obviates the need for students to find a common provider. I haven't used it but can see now how it would be useful for enabling synchronous discussion.

On to the reading Notes on Design Practice article: the "messy, indeterminate" world of design is familiar to me, although I haven't heard it described that way before. The communications underpinning is key to teaching aspiring designers: no matter how beautiful their design, if they are not designing with the client's message and target audience in mind, they are unlikely to be successful. Likewise, the discussion of the social process of design gets a lot of attention in our program--we constantly remind students they will often be working in a team. His use of the term design artifacts I find a bit puzzling, as an artifact strikes me as almost a byproduct. In industry we use the term "digital assets" to describe pieces which are assembled to create a graphic communication, whether they be images, words, artwork, or video. I like his reference to stories, as I see the design world evolving this way. My colleagues who teach video production and animation are acutely aware that the story is the foundation of what their students are trying to create. Perhaps we don't think so much in terms of a website telling a story, but in some sense it defines who an organization is, and therefore it does tell one.

As for the Shedroff piece, I've been (subconsciously) interested in information design ever since my days in technical publications many moons ago. Which reminds me: I'm also reading Edward Tufte's new book, Beautiful Evidence. This book is truly beautifully designed and written, and one I'll refer to often in my own evolution as an information designer. Shedroff laments that meaningful interaction is rarely taught, and I concur. One of the keys to teaching online successfully is to interact with students in a way which engages them and inspires them to think, develop, dream, and create. In the rare moment when this connection happens optimally, teaching feels like a privilege, and that's what keeps me in the field. Regarding sensorial design, in both teaching theory and design theory we encounter the need to engage all the senses to hit multiple learning styles and provide rich content. Thinking about tactile sensations, here's a link to a clip which took the design world by storm about six months ago (my Apple-computer-centric colleague was all over this when it came out). Now Apple has included some multi-touch features in the new, and pricey, iPhone.

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
click on the "demo reel" on the right side to see the video

The 4th assignment

I just discovered this piece @ 9:30 pm. I'm not able to address these adequately tonight, given the hour and my early icy commute tomorrow. I can speak to the first one--I think I answered it in the previous post, and I'm somewhat flexible about the actual role. I'll revisit the others later in the week.

9.00 pm Final assignment has three parts:
Make sure you have a blog post that specifically outlines your goals and the roles you are willing (and not willing) to take for the team. This is very important -- it may result in a realignment of the class.
Find two or more sites that reflect the end product you think you'd like to produce (or be able to produce by the time we conclude in June) - either as an individual or through group effort. Post these to your blog by Monday (when reading is due). Give us the URL and your reasons for selecting them.
Finally, think about standards and adoption (fall quarter lessons!) as it relates to interoperability of instant messenging clients. Why do you think IM is not as seamless as e-mail? Share your arguments for or against interoperability in IM.

7 pm blogpost

[this is starting to feel like a race. . . can I make the 8 pm deadline??]

Well, here's what comes to mind having read my teammates' posts. (I'm unable to locate Kai-Chen's or Mini's, so I'm referring to Vaun and Randa). Wanna start a business?

Vaun has amazing creative talent. And someday I'd like a personal tour of his studio. The glimpse of the pine cones and knick-knacks in his photo reminds me of a card game and books my kids used to have called I Spy that have intricate photos of all kinds of pieces of childhood. He could be our creative guy.

And Randa will make an A-1 project manager. Me? I dunno, I can cheerlead and connect people. I don't see that in any of the roles we read about this week, but it's something I believe is necessary to any project.

As far as job titles that I could actually "sell" to a client (and coincidentally get paid for), I'll go with usability expert--because I'd like to become one, and project manager--because I kind of do a lot of that in my job. I could also serve in a technical role, altho my knowledge is strong in some areas and curiously lacking in others. One of my goals of being in this program is to remedy that. . . I've spent so much time maintaining expertise in the print publishing world, teaching online, and co-managing my program, that I haven't upgraded my web skills as much as I'd like. I teach navigation, designing with metaphors, and interactivity in my Acrobat class, where students create a multimedia project. I teach optimizing Illustrator and Photoshop files for web. I teach typography for web. I learned HTML a zillion years ago and haven't done much with it, although it reminds me so much of the typesetting coding of yore that it's not intimidating at all. But I haven't learned Dreamweaver and Flash, and I hope to take care of that this summer when I'm not teaching.

Project manager for intranet redesign scenario

[for some reason, I'm unable to copy/paste from the class website. Wish I could copy the writing prompt so I don't have to keep switching between windows.]

This is actually a good exercise, as both traditional print-based graphic designers and web-development teams now interact online, sometimes never meeting face-to-face.

As the project manager for the intranet redesign, and assuming I'm not able to bring stakeholders together for a live, face-to-face meeting, the first step I'd take is to arrange a meeting via Microsoft Live Meeting or Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Macromedia Breeze). Finding a time to schedule when all stakeholders are available would doubtless be an issue, but some form of synchronous communication (where everyone is online @ the same time) is important to set the tone, build the team spirit (if that's not too hokey a term), and reduce what distance learning researchers call "iterative email strings" where a relatively simple question/issue takes forever to resolve because no interactive communication is available.

I've participated in several meetings/software seminars conducted this way, and they have pros and cons. The "pro" are that they require some level of concentration and thus the members are relatively engaged; questions can be posted and answered by the moderator or other participants; video feed or screen shots may be available, and they are relatively easy to set up technically. Cons are that technical glitches are inevitable ("i.e.--help! I see the screen shots & video, but have no audio!") and participants may get distracted. It's not quite the same as spending face time in a room where the cell phone is turned off and everyone at least has the appearance of being engaged in the discourse.

As the project manager I'd ask everyone to introduce themselves, establish their physical location, put up a screen shot of themselves (humans attach a lot of importance to the face, and working with people whose appearance is known makes them seem more "real"), and describe their role in the project. Then I'd outline the project goals and directives, intended audience, budget, schedule and deliverables (sorry, Vaun, there's that word!). We'd establish a mode to work together (at this point I'm kind of interested wikis or chat room as opposed to email--an email string quickly gets unwieldy), and set a regular schedule of interaction, whether synchronous or asynchronous (meaning meetings that happen in real-time, or where contributors post @ their convenience).

My job as project manager requires me to be a cheerleader, so behind the scenes I'm probably meeting with upper level executives to make sure we are creating a product that meets the organization's needs; talking to individual contributors/stakeholders (writers, designers, programmers, database administrators, IT managers, and most importantly, USERS!) on a regular basis by email, posting to any common area such as chat room or wiki. To return to the users for a moment, hopefully some kind of reliable data has been gathered about how information has been gathered disseminated, what the roadblocks are, and how this project will address the needs of the organization's employees.

As the project approaches completion, prototypes should be available online, perhaps with a "public" (i.e. stakeholder) area where features can be tried out and commented on.

I could go on in much greater detail, but in 30 minutes, this is my start. The most important aspect of the project manager's job is to talk to the stakeholders and be the cheerleader and designated go-to person. If enough employees know this is your project, they'll approach you with useful ideas/suggestions. Even if you can't implement them all in the current go-round, you've got a solid base to work from and constituents have bought into your product.

If it sounds like I've "been here" before, it's from a) teaching online, and b) being involved in our college website redesign, and c) being completely frustrated with how our own intranet works. . . or doesn't!

metadata

I meant to define "metadata" in my blog post and forgot. Metadata is "data about data." An example of metadata is information attached to a Photoshop file. The Photoshop file is made up of data--in a color image, this would consist of pixels composed of values between 0-255 for red, green and blue (for a total of 16.7 million possible colors). The metadata attached to the file indicates what kind of camera shot the image, what the f-stop (aperture) and exposure length (shutter speed) were, focal length of the lens, whether the flash fired, document file format, file size, date created/modified, and keywords added to assist in searching. (This list is not complete, and is an example for just one kind of file.)

job titles in the digital age

Well, this week's readings cause me to revisit a topic from a previous post, in which I talked about the trouble I had researching alternate names for various programs within our two-year multimedia education offerings. Part of the problem is that the field is so new that generic titles are not yet standard. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is one source we use to predict employment trends, trails rather than leads in defining digital media job titles.

Our program's advisory committee consists of people working in industry (Microsoft, Nordstrom.com, Amaze Entertainment to name a few), non-profit, and education sectors (Seattle Art Museum, Bellevue School District). Our program allows students to specialize in the following areas: game design/animation, video production/streaming media, and web/print design. So our committee is a varied group. At our last couple of meetings, we've spent a fair amount of time discussing how we can prepare students to become web designers. In the early days of our program, web design evolved from the print design world and was pretty straightforward, provided the student had the aptitude for HTML. Today's environment is much more complex, and we commonly find employers asking for skills which encompass both design and coding.

The problem is that good design aptitude and good coding skills rarely exist in the same individual--in fact I often joke in class that most of our multimedia students are math-phobic. Math and logic skills certainly are a prerequisite for dealing with HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, database programming, and other web development tools.

So how to reconcile the two? One suggestion from our advisory committee was to have students take an intro-to-programming class that would at least teach them which design features can and can't be coded by a developer.

I appreciated the review of job titles in the two articles (Web Team Roles and Publishing Team) as it helped clarify for me where responsibilities might lie in a large team. Unfortunately, too often employers want an unrealistic skill set in a single individual. For example, I was recently asked to serve at the last minute on a hiring committee for a new website manager. The long list of job requirements included a) writing/marketing/branding skills, b) development/management of all aspects of website and intranet, c) design/implementation of UI, streaming media, special effects, and new technology, d) budgeting and regulation compliance, e) data/market analysis. Preferred qualifications included a 4-year degree and experience in graphic design, knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, XML, ASP.net, best practices for web site architecture, and several other areas.

My thinking was that with luck, we might find a candidate with skills in two of the three primary areas: marketing/branding, web development, or graphic design. Expecting a single individual to have skills in all three areas is unrealistic, in my view. But I was not surprised at the job description, as I've seen many like it.

The takeaway for our Digital Message Design class is this: employers may ask for the moon, and you may feel you need to become expert in a wide area to even qualify for an interview, but don't discount the experience and skills you already bring to the digital media arena. More knowledge is certainly better, but everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and none of us can be good at all of it.