Agility and the User Experience

It’s easy to think of a web site in terms of the teams who participate in the project: content, design, information architecture, hardware, platform, application development. But it’s the user who ties all the parts together: the user experience is the end-product of a web application.

This is why people freak out about user experience design, or UxD, these days. We can define and justify and normalize everything we do during the course of a web project by referring to the user experience, and we can keep this experience in mind as a theoretical model to help us make decisions along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Flash and HTML layers: still a problem

Update, April 2009: Change.gov seems to have changed their video player size, so the working example in this entry no longer has a strict correlation between the video player and the image replacement.  The principle still holds, though, and it would be an easy fix to create a new replacement image using the naming conventions below. — msh

Happy 2009!  OK, back to work.

Note to developers and designers: you still can’t layer HTML over Flash, and you still need to design around it.  Sad, but true.  For instance, this page on change.gov has the classic problem: a Flash video player at the top of the page, and a menu that draws a layer on rollover.  The two are not friends.

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Common Information Architecture Documents

What’s in a web page design, anyway?  If you abstract away the colors, textures, imagery — all of the elements we call the “look and feel” — what’s left?

• Words
• Links
• Buttons
• Input fields
• Columns
• Boxes
• Scroll bars

Mmm, boring list.  That’s good, though: this should not be the exciting part.  The exciting parts should be the purpose and content of the web site, and the look and feel that give it life — the struggle and the glory of web design. The elements in the list above should be the basic tools, not the wheels you’re going to reinvent in order to make your site the greatest thing ever to happen to the web.

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Dangerous Phrases: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Now, we at Helen Marie think the web is very cool. That’s why we’re in this business.  We get excited on a daily basis about all manner of new design and interface ideas and technology.  (Personally, I discover a new way to love jQuery almost every day, and that’s exciting.)  It’s this constant fascination that energizes each one of our projects, and that we hope to find reflected in our clients.

Part of our job is to focus this enthusiasm into disciplined decisions about how best to serve a particular client and a particular project.  We have a lot of healthy arguments that start with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”  The question is often followed by, “I agree, but we shouldn’t do that in this case because….”  Or, just as often: “That’s great — but let’s consider that for phase 2.”

We go through this in order to avoid three big pitfalls: building more than the client needs or can immediately use, rejecting new approaches or techniques because we’re unfamiliar, and committing to unreliable approaches or techniques because the coolness factor affects our judgment.  We wrestle with these issues so you don’t have to.

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