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"Lowering the barrier of entry" should not be equated with "one form or many"

When considering registration/sign-up with clients, there is a spectre floating about the room, the "Lower the barrier of entry in order to prevent drop-offs" spectre. This is a very good thing. Just ten years ago, I remember being told in no uncertain terms that we had to "force" users to give us as much information as possible. What is interesting to me now though, is that this "how to lower the barrier of entry" question has started to become synonymous with "should we do one long form or multiple short forms".

Don't Lose Sight of the Single Most Important Principle

Before I give my answer to that question, I would like to take a moment to remind folks that the single best way to lower the barrier of entry is to -- ask only for the absolute minimum amount of information you need. Honestly, every other form consideration is secondary to that single guiding principle.

Think you already are? Try looking again. Or have a relative or neighbor look with you. None of my relatives create websites. They are very helpful for seeing sites with fresh eyes..

Common Reasons Folks Use Form Processes

Now, back to one form versus multiple.... Let's start by looking at the thinking behind using multiple short forms rather than one longer form.

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I have often been asked by clients about the better order for the OK and Cancel buttons. Finally, Jakob Nielsen has published an 'official' answer To sum up:

• Either is perfectly fine.
• The question is not of great concern as neither poses a big threat to usability.
• If you need a tie-breaker, go with the platform convention that most of your users are known to use.
• Generally on the web, most users are on Windows, so "OK" then "Cancel" is the platform convention to follow.

Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, he points out:

• There are questions in usability that are, perhaps, not worth the time spent debating them

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Have you ever read something that resonates so loud to your experience that you want to run around and share it with everyone you know? I found such a passage today in Jared M. Spools "UIEtips: 4 Design Lessons from the Flip".

"We want to make designs simple, but we don’t want to make them dumb. There’s a difference. The goal is to simplify the design by keeping only the most valuable bits, eliminating everything else.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials." -- Jared M. Spool

Honestly, I have nothing really to add... Amen...read more...

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Check out Hugh MacLeod’s excellent post on being creative.

1. Ignore everybody.
The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.
Being good at anything is like figure skating- the definition of being good at it is being able to make it look easy.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.

14. Dying young is overrated.

15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

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"It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."
- Jackson Pollock

Thought this was relevant to what we've been working on lately. Although we think our latest release (coming soon) looks good, the statement really lies in how much easier it will be for the target audience to use. Stay tuned for the launch...

The FootJoy: MyJoys program is undergoing a visual upgrade. The first step in the upgrade was the redesign of the MyJoys logo.

The handwritten typeface reflects the personalization and customization that go into making MyJoys shoes. The individual "signed" feel clarifies the concept of the MyJoys brand. With a desire to respect the quality and tradition of the FootJoy brand, JOYS, set in all caps, is taken from the FootJoy logo.

Along with the new identity, we delivered the MyJoys team a usage guide. The guide covers specifics such as colors, size recommendations, space requirements, and more.

It’s great to be able to see the FootJoy brand come together, and implement it over the interactive side of their business.

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PhizzPop Design Challenge - Creating a winning application in 3 days

Turning out an application using new software with only three days to do it is quite a challenge, to say the least. But that is precisely what we were challenged to do in the Microsoft sponsored, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Boston.

PhizzPop posed a particularly interesting challenge regarding process. No one builds applications in three days. So the challenge isn't really how do you produce a quality application, but more how do you squeeze weeks/months worth of work into three days to produce a quality application?

To answer this question, I thought it might be interesting to bring folks into our PhizzPop War Room and explain how we did it.

PhizzPop Design Challenge War Room

Brainstorming:

Moments after the challenge was presented, we opted not to go out for Microsoft-sponsored drinks and chose instead to take over a quiet room in the Microsoft offices to brainstorm. We immediately began to review the personas for user tasks and discuss what we believed would be possible with current technologies. Then, prompted by Jon, Outsight's Creative Director, we talked about "If the application was magic... what would we want it to do?"

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Outsight recently participated in a unique interactive design and development challenge - The PhizzPop Design Challenge. Microsoft, looking to stir up interest Silverlight and Expression Blend, approached 6 firms in each of 6 metropolitan areas in the US - New York, Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Each firm could send a 2-3 person team for two days of training, a challenge would be issued, and each team would have the remainder of the week to create a solution using Expression Blend.

Outsight was invited, so we went.

Our team was comprised of Jon Reil, Brandon Goldsworthy and me, Denise Preston -- a designer, a developer and an information architect/project manager. We were up against some great folks from Digitas, Molecular, Cramer, RDVO, and PixelMedia.

The challenge? Create the interface for a home automation system. Details can be found here (DOCX).

Outsight architected, branded, designed and developed a system called Varlet (a knight's page, archaic form of Valet) that could be accessed via touch screens mounted within the home, via television screen and via a smart phone interface.

The competition culminated in an event held at the Saint Lounge where each group had to present their solutions to an independent panel of judges. The Boston panel of judges included representatives from Monster.com, Burnt Sand and 3 Comm.

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Outsight Interactive is very pleased to announce that it has been selected as a winner for the 2007 MITX Awards. Outsight was awarded the top prize in the category of Applied Technology for their work on the FootJoy "DryJoys Microsite".

The DryJoys micro-site was created to highlight the latest in FootJoy shoe technology -- the new DryJoy’s Stability Pod™ outsole. The new outsole places each of its seven spikes on a hard plastic “pod” surrounded by soft plastic allowing the pods/spikes to move independently of each other, thus maintaining a better grip on the ground especially over uneven surfaces.

Outsight took a three-fold approach to present this complex technology: Animations were created from details of the shoes to highlight the product features. In addition, a full swing was presented, showing key points of the sequence where the pod technology really comes into play. Lastly, within the swing sequence a “heat map” was shown of the bottoms of the shoe to show how the pressure moves to various parts of the outsole through the swing sequence to further demonstrate how the independently moving pods can help afford greater stability.

But that was not the end of the DryJoys story -- a style carousel was created to present all 11 diverse styles and a Team DryJoys area was created to highlight the product's acceptance and use by PGA tour players.
Finally, a contest was created to create buzz around the new product and site.

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Outsight is pleased to annouce the launch of a new site design for Craft, Inc. In addition to creating a new, clean and elegant look and feel for Craft, Outsight also made their product detail page more robust, assisted in simplifying their product categorization and implemented keyword search functionality. To learn more about this project -- take a look at our portfolio.

Outsight is pleased to announce that the DryJoys Micro-site, developed for FootJoy, has been named a finalist for the 2007 MITX Awards. Thanks go out to the whole team at Jack Richmond for the fabulous Photography and to FootJoy for the opportunity.

We have been hearing from a number of folks lately who have very similar needs -- they need a professional web presence that is readily updated but have a very small budget to work with.

Our advice? Consider a blog (web log).

Although blogs won't work, for all companies, many businesses today are leveraging blog technology as a part of their web site or even the whole of their web site.

Blogs can offer a number of distinct advantages over more traditional web sites:

• Minimal upfront investment - often blog software is free or inexpensive to use. Top blog platforms include: WordPress, Blogger, & Movable Type
• Readily updated - blog platforms offer easy-to-use Microsoft Word-like interfaces to add and format your entries so you do not need to know HTML in order to post your content on the web.
• Very short time to market - if you don't need any customization, you can have a blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Obviously, if you want your blog to be unique, professional and express your business personality, you may need to invest more time and money, but at base you can start in a matter of minutes.
• Readily Searchable - blog platforms are developed to be readily searched by the top search engines, some are even developed BY the search engine companies (Blogger, for example, is owned by Google).
• Multiple ways to browse content - You can “tag” content (label content with key words or categories) and those "tags" serve as navigation as well as categorization for your content. Visitors who enter your site through a search engine, for example, can readily find other postings of interest by clicking on that posting's labels.
• Organic growth of the site - Building content can be one of the toughest parts of doing your website. Websites with pre-defined navigation often yield "Coming Soon!" messages as a result. If you use tagging/labels as your navigation, then your navigation grows as your content grows and for your site visitors, there is no sense that something is missing. If you do it right, what's there, is there -- properly categorized, searched and labeled.

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Outsight announces the launch of a banner campaign promoting the new colors and team logos (Collegiate and Major League Baseball) FootJoy is now offering for their MyJoys Shoes. Subtle animation is used to show the changing colors and logos on the shoe, showcasing the new product enhancements.

This is the latest in a series of banner campaigns FootJoy has done to promote their new products and keep interest in their site.

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A few days ago, Jakob Nielsen posted a summary of some eye tracking studies, verifying or reiterating things we've known or suspected for years. In Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings, Nielsen reminds us that users don't see banners. In fact, his heatmaps below show that users don't even see content that looks like banners.

It turns out there are three things that attract readers' eyes more than anything else when they're reading a page:

• Plain Text
• Faces
• Cleavage

We probably could have guessed as much. There are two lessons here that we already know, but for which we can be thankful to Mr. Nielsen for reminding us.

First, content creators: make your content look like content and not like advertisements. Separate it visually AND spatially; readers are going to breeze right by it if they even suspect it's an ad.

Second, advertisers: make your ads look like cleavage, but you know this already.

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The DryJoys microsite is the Adobe Site of the Day for August 16, 2007. It feels great to get our first award. A huge thank you to Jack Richmond for the photo shoot that made it all come together, as well as our client: FootJoy!

View the DryJoys microsite.

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Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of the DryJoys banner campaign.

This is the latest in a series of sweepstakes FootJoy has done to promote their new products and keep interest in their site. Each contest is supported by a Flash banner campaign, a targeted email campaign, and a homepage hero image on FootJoy.com. Each contest has attracted tens of thousands of entrants, roughly 85% of which are return users to FootJoy.com. This demonstrates a growing, loyal following for FootJoy.com.

Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of Licensed MyJoys, an extension to the award-winning FootJoy MyJoys application. The application was extended to offer Major League Baseball and Collegiate licensed shoes and gloves.

Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of the FootJoy: DryJoys microsite. Read more about the DryJoys project in our Portfolio or visit the microsite.

Challenge
You’re working on an animation in Flash on your main time line. You then decide that you want to convert your animation into a movie clip. Should be easy right? You select all of your frames on the main time line, copy them, insert a new symbol (in this case a movie clip), and paste them into the new clip. Should be set to go, but what happens? All that wonderful animation that you spent so much time on goes wonky. Frames that once ended at frame 50 now continue to play until the end of the movie (frame 300). Now you have to go back in and delete the frames in each layer that extended to the end of your time line, and hope that you don’t forget anything as you fix your animation. What a waste of time and energy. Drives me nuts.

Solution
It’s so simple… finally figured it out last week. All you need to do is insert a blank key frame at the end of each animation layer before you copy and paste your frames into a new movie clip. Inserting a blank key frame will keep your tweens in place, end frames and all. No more images overlapping, no more deleting frames, and no more wasting time.

If you have had a similar problem, I hope this gives you back some time (Flash always seems to steal mine). If you have another solution for this problem, I would love to hear about it.

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Most modern web designers are aware of web standards and their positive impact on the web. Although the importance of using web standards isn’t an issue for many of us, how we talk about them, especially to potential clients in a sales pitch is.

The Pitch

Imagine the following: You’re pitching to a prospective client that is in need of a site redesign.

You’ve got one hour.

You talk through your prospective client’s challenges, maybe even solve a few along the way. You discuss look and feel, messaging, and how the site will work. The excitement builds as you both begin to “see” the site.

Twenty minutes to go.

You present your process and your work. Time line and budget are discussed, and the potential client begins to feel like a new client. You should feel happy, but the meeting isn’t complete.

What’s Missing?

It’s your duty as a web designer to explain the importance of web standards to a potential client. The problem is, if you try explaining web standards during a sales pitch, there’s a good chance that your prospective client’s eyes will glaze over.

Why?

It is my belief that it comes down to two specific reasons:

1. Client Expectations During a Sales Pitch

   Prospective clients more than likely will hire you for your ideas, and not for your knowledge about web standards.

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Outsight is pleased to announce the launch of a new homepage for MobileLime, now Modiv Media, a leading retail media delivery company. Read more about the MobileLime project in our Portfolio or visit MobileLime.com.

The crew at 4 Guys From Rolla have come through for me again (as they frequently do in matters of ASP, .NET and SQL). In building a new webservice, I wanted to be able to pass in a comma-delimited list of ID's to a SQL stored procedure. Unfortunately, there isn't a SQL datatype for something like "comma delimited list". I could have taken the "easy" way out and built the SQL query dynamically in C# instead of calling a stored procedure, but then I would have been mad at myself for breaking the rule that we agreed on that all the webservices would strictly call stored procedures. I figured I'd have to use SQL to parse a passed in string into ID's, and build the SQL query from there. However, this seemed like something someone else probably would have done in the past. I found a few techniques online but this one seemed the cleanest and best-implemented. You basically pass in a big varchar string of id's into the stored procedure and then call a SQL User Defined Function called "Split" which returns a table of the ID's which you can join to. It's simpler than it sounds...instead of having something like

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE id in (--lots of convoluted code to parse out the ids--)

you just call

SELECT *
FROM table
WHERE id in ( SELECT convert(int,Value) FROM dbo.Split(@list_string,',') )

The complete code for the function and examples of how to use it are listed in the article. Thanks to "4 Guys" for saving me a couple hours and some headaches with this nifty technique!

In the testing phase for a recent release, I received an email from the client's third party development team stating that there was no way to return to the homepage once they clicked on any link off of it. They were having to reload the URL. No way home? How could I have missed that?!

I didn't know what to think. I had run through all of the changes myself, paying particular attention to the navigation just the day before. I immediately loaded the site and checked it out. It was fine, the corporate logo was successfully linking to the homepage on every page I tested. What could the developer have seen that I was missing... JavaScript error? Browser-specific problems?

Then it occurred to me...

In reworking the utility navigation, we had removed the explicit "Home" link. We opted instead to have the corporate logo serve as the link to the home page. We were adding a "Subscribe to Company" link and the area was already pretty full, so we decided to simplify things. It was a convention that we have employed countless times and seen employed countless others. The Utility navigation, for those who use different terms, is what we call a group of global links reserved for user actions (rather than content) grouped together in the header -- things like "Login/Logout", "Subscribe", "Contact Us".

I re-read the developer's email and suspected that I had found the problem. The developer was looking for the "Home" link, not finding it, and reporting it as a bug. I looked down at the signature in the email and saw that I was dealing with a Senior Systems Analyst.

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If you're real quiet you can hear it: the sound of everybody and their dog talking about Silverlight. It's big, exciting news, sure. It will change the face of RIA development, sure -- if only to create some more competition. But will it take over the web? I'm not so sure.

The video demos are impressive, though I fear the DRM hoops that a Microsoft backed content-delivery platform will enable. The "drop in your javascript and see exponential speed increases" claim is a strong pull as well. Plus, I like Python, and I like anything that will give me an opportunity to write in it more often, so there's that.

I'm still not drinking the kool-aid regarding managed code in general, though, so .NET in the browser on top of a mini-CLR isn't so appealing to me. Also, I cringe every time I have to open Visual Studio, so I'm really not looking for another reason to tie myself to it. There's always text editors, I guess (incidentally, your only option if you're developing on a Mac). Lack of Linux client support is the deal breaker for me, though, as I've made the transition to Ubuntu at home, and have no intention of ever installing Vista on any machine I own.

The Buzz (well, mostly TechCrunch) is declaring everything else dead. AJAX is dead:"a bicycle next to a ferrari"; Flash/Flex is dead: "an absolute toy". And everybody else really seems to be chomping at the bit to praise Silverlight and to turn it into a golden hammer for web apps.

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It gives me great pleasure to announce that Aya Goldman has joined the team of Outsight Interactive as a Quality Assurance Analyst.

I first met Aya in 2002 working in the QA department for a large retail company. There I developed an immediate regard for her work, her process and her capabilities. She has proven to be one of the most dedicated, professional individuals it has been my pleasure to work with.

Aya earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. Since then she has been working full-time in the Quality Assurance field testing hardware, software and, more recently, complex community-based internet applications.

Aya brings a broad understanding of the underlying technologies, a proven QA process and a keen eye for detail. That coupled with her affable nature make her a pleasure to work with and a most welcome member of our team.

Outsight announces the launch of a banner campaign showcasing the new Spring colors that FootJoy is offering for their SciFlex gloves.

The banners are running for a week beginning 4/20/2007 on Golf.com, Golf Channel, PGA Tour, Golf Week, Golfstat, and Junior Golf Scoreboard

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The ancient board game Go is the most popular board game in the world, and yet few people in the United States have even heard of it. Go is a game of metaphors: it has been compared to a fine art, a martial art, war, a conversation, life itself. Whereas Chess is a game of capturing prisoners, Go is a game of securing territory.

At it's core the rules of Go are incredibly simple: Two players (Black and White) alternate in placing a single stone on a 19x19 grid. Touching stones of the same color form a unit, which can be captured if all of the unit's neighboring spaces in both the horizontal and vertical directions are occupied by opposing stones. Grid points which are completely surrounded by stones of a single color become territory for that player. The game ends when both players pass their turn (because further moves would be of no value). The winner is determined by adding the number of points of territory plus the number of prisoners taken for each player. You can check out the American Go Association's rules page for a more detailed discussion of the rules of go.

Despite its simple rules, Go is at least PSPACE-hard, and could be as hard as EXPSPACE-complete, and the best Go programs consistently fail to perform much better than an experienced beginner. Though interesting, the computational complexity of the game of Go is not the purpose of this entry. What struck me, somewhere between the comment "software projects are like many other things in the world, like many other things in the world." on a recent entry by Jeff Atwood, and a blip about "writing code as art" by Jeremy Allison, is that the game of Go, like many other things, has something to teach about software development.

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The Setup

You have a double formatted as a string with the decimal part separated from the whole part by a full-stop, e.g. "1234.9". Of course, not all cultures separate their digits the same way, and in fact, the site you're working on has a locale setting for a locale that uses a comma to separate the integer from the decimal, and vice-versa, e.g. German:"1.234,9" or French "1 234,9" style digit grouping. For the sake of argument, let's also say the decimal number is being parsed out of an XML file input by a US or UK user and that a full-stop is meant to separate the whole and fractional parts of the number.

The Problem

ASP/VBScript's clever and useful FormatNumber and FormatCurrency functions which solve oh-so-many related problems are no help:

SetLocale("de-DE")
'This is what we want (notice no quotes below)
FormatNumber(1234.9) '-> 1.234,90

'This is what we get (when using a string)
FormatNumber("1234.9") '-> 12.349,00
FormatCurrency("1234.9") ' -> 12.349,00 €
'ARGH!

When in a German locale, FormantNumber sees the string "1234.9", it assumes that the full-stop is merely a misplaced thousands separator and drops it. Though I was confused and angry at this behavior at first, I have come to see the sense that it makes (consider interpreting "1.234" in a German locale).

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Outsight announces the launch of a banner campaign showcasing FootJoy's latest development in golf shoe technology -- ReelFit.

By incorporating a BOA lacing system into their golf shoes, players can achieve a truly custom fit. FootJoy needed a banner campaign that was as "edgy" as their new product and that ties in seamlessly with both the print campaign and the Microsite.

The banners are running the week of 3/19/2007 on Golf.com, Golf Channel, PGA Tour, Golf Week, Golfstat, and Junior Golf Scoreboard

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In an Extreme Programming environment, continuous, merciless refactoring is a way of life. Though the concept of refactoring isn't woven so tightly and explicitly into the workflow of most software developers, knowing when to stop what you're about to do and take an extra hour to rewrite a few methods or a few classes instead of adding yet another condition to that logic block could be the difference between 6 hours of head scratching and a simple in-and-out update when you see this code again 6 months from now.

If you're already working with a well written project it's frequently completely appropriate to add a few lines of code to a method or two, to pass in a new parameter, or run out and grab some additional data, and be done with it. Sometimes a bug is really just a bug: a loop is off by one, a boolean expression is incorrectly nested, some little bit of business logic was overlooked, whatever.

Sometimes though, a bug (or the process of fixing the bug) is an indication of a bigger problem. Here are 5½ signs that the patch you're about to make will cause you bigger headaches down the road if you haven't already considered and dismissed refactoring:

1: A new component doesn't seem to fit.

When you're holding a square peg and looking at a round hole, you should be asking yourself why the hole is round, instead of looking for a sledgehammer. Forcing a component into an archicture where it doesn't belong is going to cause problems now, while you try to trick the current architecture into supporting the new functionality, and it's not going to make it any easier in the future when you revisit the new component or add more new components.

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Call me old school, but I like all my projects in Visual Studio .NET to be standard class library projects rather than "web" projects. I am sure the Web Projects wizard is very useful for creating quick applications, but as with any wizard, it decides some things for you during set-up that might be hard to edit later. So, what happens if you inherit a solution file that is a Web project, and you have no idea how the virtual directories and references are set up? Unfortunately, you cannot open this project in Visual Studio to edit those settings! What I forgot today was this : "The Project files is just a text file, that you can edit in notepad". Once I figured that out, I was able to change "ProjectType" attribute from "Web" to "Local". Magically, I could open the project, update my references and compile about 2 minutes later.

I have a love-hate relationship with the "SetLocale" function in ASP. A recent challenge was to build several international versions of a website. We wanted it have one code-base with different settings and translation files. ASP's "SetLocale" function was invaluable in getting this working correctly, but here are a few things you may want to pay attention to in a similar situation, especially in regard to setting currency display :

* Currently there is no "Euros" locale. With a Windows XP 2003 server, the only locale setting that shows Euro format for currency is "es-es" (which is Spain). So, if you want your German site to show currency as Euros using ASP's "FormatCurrency" function, you have to set the locale to Spain. It works, but doesn't seem ideal. Perhaps have a setting for "Currency-Locale" which you set before displaying any currency on your site, and then switch back to the original locale once you display?

* Notice above I said, "Windows XP 2003" as the OS...If you happen to have an older OS (in our case, one of our TEST servers is an older OS), your road is more difficult...you just have to trust that Euros will work on a properly updated server...either that or the headaches of trying to write your own CurrencyFormat function.

As long as you are aware of the above issues, you should be all set. A great summary I found for this issue is at this site.

Of course Visual Studio 2005 doesn't compile for .NET Framework v1.1. Of course you can't (easily) buy Visual Studio 2003 new. Who would want to do that? Well, me for one; at least until Adobe releases some Flash Remoting components for .NET v2.0.

In lieu of any built-in backwards compatibility support from Microsoft, there are a number of community solutions for Flash/Flex developers who through one circumstance or another are using VS2005 (or, of course, anybody else who wants to target v1.1 from VS2005). Microsoft has adopted MSBee as a VS Powertoy, so I guess that's as close to official as you're gonna get -- It's even got a fancy .msi installer. Jomo Fisher's blog entry explains what I suspect is going on under the hood of MSBee, and Gustavo Guerra created a build targets file that includes Mono and .NET Compact Frameworks, though it seems to be missing from Gustavo's link in that forum entry.

Of course, you could try to go the other way and fix Remoting instead of Visual Studio, which is what the developers of Flourine are trying to do with an Open Source (GNU Lesser GPL) Remoting library which supports both .NET v1.1 and v2.0. You have to build the gateway dll yourself, but once you do, you can use the wizard they provide for VS2003 or VS2005 to create and configure a project for your Remoting services.

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Iterative design is the process of making small but significant changes to improve your site after its launch. The source of these changes is usually based on feedback from your target audiences and usability studies. As great as it is, it is hard for designers and clients to actually use iterative design as a concept because we tend to be well… perfectionists. Further, we all like to see a “finished” product when it is finished. Even with these drawbacks iterative design has proven to improve your site and some would argue it a necessary concept in design.

Iterative Design can be Difficult to Implement

The perfectionist trait in designers often rears its imperfect head. What will the client and target audience think when they see this rounded-corner box or that dotted line? How will they respond to red? We as designers want it to be right on our first try. The truth is you aren’t going to get it right the first try every time. And that’s okay.

Clients may also expect perfection. After all, they are paying you for your professional services. A finished project should only need to be “finished” once. The key term is expectation. Make sure to set the expectation of iterative design up front so your team and client will know that sites and interactivity take time to get right.

How to Iterate

After you have released your design, you need to measure your results. Feedback tools do just that, and can take on many forms: an actual form, a simple link on your contact page, or any page for that matter. There are also sophisticated feedback tools found on sites like Adobe. Choose a way to display your feedback tool, with the idea of gathering real feedback from real users. You can cater your feedback tools to ask general questions on layout, or more specific details like color or shape. It really is up to you and the level of detail you and your clients wish to iterate to. Feedback should come in, but do not act on anything quite yet. Strive for iterative design, not reactive design.

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A warm topic these days. Along with other 2007 predictions, this is a great article and introduction into the ReadWriteWeb blog. I try to read this blog on a daily basis. It's always fun to imagine... also, Richard MacManus and crew are brilliant.

Think of CSS as synonymous to Web Standards Compliance?

A client just pointed out an error to me. I had been using CSS as a short-hand way of referring to Standards Compliance. The use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is such a large part of Web Standards Compliance, they have become almost synonymous to me, but they are not, in fact, synonymous.

Advantages to CSS

Sites will often use CSS to control content styling for things like fonts, headers, links, and tables. This separates many of the style attributes from the page content. There are a number of advantages to doing this:

• Pages easier for search engines to index and can be faster to load.
• Having style controls located in one place promotes stylistic consistency and makes it easier to maintain or change styles.

Advantages of Web Standards Compliance

It is possible (and even common), to have a site that utilizes CSS that does not adhere to web standards. Such sites, therefore, do not reap the full benefits availed through compliance to web standards. Benefits like:

• Better Search Engine Indexing
• Better Accessibility for wider range of browsers and devices
• Better accessibility for wider range of users
• Faster load times
• Ease of update and maintenance
• Ease of printing

Sites that use CSS will often use tables for layout

Generally, what we find is that although a site uses CSS for styles, the site layout is implemented using a complex system of nested tables.

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"Solutions" as a primary navigation item.

I recently had a meeting with a prospective client, a software company looking to make some strategic changes to their site. They had previously organized their site by audience and were now looking to focus on their primary audience and bring their product content a level up. "We are thinking that we want the navigation to be "Products", "Solutions"...

What exactly is a "Solution"?

I have seen solutions as:

• product packages
• product/service packages
• hardware/software/service packages
• vertical-specific product packages
• vertical-specific case studies
• product listings for a particular audience
• product offerings for a particular business challenge

What do users think of "Solutions"

I had the opportunity a few years back to do a usability study for a large hardware/software/services company who also offered "solutions". In fact, the goal of the study was to see why a particular division's hardware/software/services offerings were failing to satisfy their users. Part of the problem? Yup, you guessed it... solutions.

We tested both engineers and business decision makers from large and small organizations and found that generally users don't know what to expect when they see the word "Solution" so most shied away from that area, opting to try repeatedly to find the information they sought in the Products area.

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