Jackson Fox’s Weblog

This Monday marks my last week as a designer at Lulu.com. I’ve been there about 3.5 years — including the time I spent doing work-study as part of my master’s degree — and I’ve had a fantastic time. I’ve had the chance to work on virtually every corner of the site at one time or another, and I’ve worked on a few pieces more times than I can count. I’ve been lucky to work with a pretty great group of designers and developers, and I’ve learned an amazing amount in working with them. It’s been a really hard decision to leave — I think Lulu has a pretty bright future — but I’m pretty excited about what’s next.

In July, I’ll be joining Viget Labs as a User Experience Designer at “Viget South” in downtown Durham. But before that happens, I’ll be taking two weeks off to recharge my brain, including a trip out to California to see my brother before he moves to Australia.

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This is the poster Alla Zollers and I presented at the 2008 IA Summit.

Abstract

Tag clouds are becoming increasingly popular with websites that utilize social tagging to categorize ever expanding collections of digital information. Tagging has been found to be more adaptable than traditional classification, as well as more prone to serendipitous information discovery. The flexibility of tagging systems allows users to rapidly adopt new terms and engage in extremely dynamic tagging practices, yet tag clouds are not able to represent agile shifts in tagging patterns. Over time, semantic and linguistic changes can modify the meaning and form of tags, and changes in tagging behavior can create disconnects between related tags. By conceiving tagging as a triad: object, user, tag, we completely miss the critical notion of time. Time leads to changes in semantics, vocabulary, behavior, and syntax. In order to address the problem of aging tags and aging folksonomies, we really need to include time as a critical facet of tagging: object, user, tag, time. The adaptive behavior of tags requires that there is a constant influx of new descriptive data about an object, but time-related changes have to overcome the weight of the pre-existing tags. In this poster we propose a new tag-cloud visualization technique that attempts to address these issues by including a dynamic factor: the changing weight of tags over time.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally got around to making a stencil of little people to use at work.

Download OmniGraffle People Stencil

To Install: Copy the stencil file into /Users/username/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils/

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Slides from my presentation on Research Driven Design at the DC Design Talks at the Viget Labs HQ in Falls Church, VA.

So, while I might be pretty awful at posting here, here, or here, I’ve started posting over on the official Lulu blog. My first two posts focus on some of the widgets I helped build while with the community team at Lulu:

• Customizing the Lulu Mini-Storefront with CSS
• Meet the Lulu Mini-Storefront Widgets

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Slides from my presentation on remote usability tools (UserVue and Ethnio) at the last TriUPA event of 2007.

Note: Since I gave this presentation, Ethnio has re-launched focusing on live recruiting. While Ethnio doesn’t really facilitate remote usability tests anymore, it’s a very nice complement to tools like UserVue.

I gave a talk last week at the inaugural meeting of Refresh the Triangle called “Building User-Centered Web Apps in a Crunch.” The main part of talk was based on Jakob Nielsen’s “Guerilla HCI” ideas, with a sprinkling of ideas from the Agile UCD movement. It was, more or less, my first public speaking gig, and I don’t think it was too bad. I need to talk a bit slower, and I could probably do better than this for a closing statement:

So, um, yeah. That’s it… Thanks!

The slides are online on Slideshare:

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You can also check out photos from the event on Flickr.

I realized after the fact that my slides don’t stand well on their own, so I though I would share some resources and references I used in compiling everything. So, I’m putting together a page over on Jottit with notes on the talk.

Khoi Vinh:

There’s also another, more formal idea at work on A Brief Message: the notion that online publications don’t necessarily need to be decorated databases. They can be art directed, too.

This past week Liz Danzico and Khoi Vinh launched a much lauded new site called A Brief Message. The goal of the site, as stated on the about page, is as follows:

A Brief Message features design opinions expressed in short form. Somewhere between critiques and manifestos, between wordy and skimpy, Brief Messages are viewpoints on design in the real world. They’re pithy, provocative and short — 200 words or less.

As one would expect from a site founded by designers, written by designers, and featuring writing about design, A Brief Message is well illustrated, impeccably typeset, follows all of the modern thinking on grid-based web design, and even features tasteful ads from The Deck. The first piece touches on a subject near and dear to the hearts of many designers: The Death of Print. Honestly, I feel somewhat unworthy of writing about the site. I find myself pondering every punctuation mark and scrutinizing every sentence a dozen times.

The problem is that I don’t feel welcome at A Brief Message. I don’t mean to say that I feel unwelcome at just this site, in fact I feel the same way about Design Observer and many other design-oriented sites. Nor do I mean to imply that the individuals that write, run, and comment at A Brief Message make me feel unwelcome. I feel unwelcome because I don’t understand their Design. It simply isn’t my design.

Recently, I’ve noticed a marked change in the language that is used on the websites that I frequent. “Art direction” seems to be popping up everywhere now, names like Michael Beirut are getting dropped, and everyone seems to be a member or leader in AIGA. Maybe it really isn’t the discourse that has changed, maybe it’s me, but I’m finding it harder and harder to relate. I have never worked for an “agency.” I did not go to design school. In fact, I majored in Computer Science. What I know of typography, color, and grids I learned from the web (much of it from Khoi’ s blog).

I consider myself to be a designer. I have called myself a web designer, a user experience designer, and an interaction designer, but regardless of how I couch the term I consider myself a designer. My job is to create a pleasurable and usable experience for our authors. I spend a lot of time creating page flows, wireframes, reviewing alternative designs, collecting feedback on designs, and then communicating the sum of those parts to our development team. I work for a smallish company, so I get to do my fair share of coding as well. Honestly, I’ve come to dislike the term design because it is so hard to define and because it belongs to so many traditions (old and new).

I don’t see my experience reflected in design writing online. Most likely I’m looking in the wrong places, expecting too much from people who have no obligation to conform their views to my own. It’s just that I don’t feel like it’s always been this way.

Of course, if I so rarely contribute to the discussion, how can I expect others to?

PS — My apologies to Khoi and Liz, A Brief Message is a wonderful site and it’s unfair of me to single it out like this.

PPS — This was probably the wrong time to ditch my old theme and revert to the Wordpress default.

I decided to jump on a bunch of bandwagons all at the same time, so I updated my homepage using jQuery for some amazing (stupid) animations and hCard to embed my contact info in to the page. Check out the site for yourself, or convert the hCard to vCard.

I once heard someone call South by Southwest “spring break for geeks.” Well, there’s nothing like empirical evidence, so I tagged along with the Lulu.com community team to investigate South by Southwest (SXSW) for myself. Held annually in Austin, TX, SXSW is a film festival, music festival, and “interactive” festival all rolled in to one multi-week extravaganza. Actually, only the film and interactive bits coincide. The music festival is so big it needs the whole city to itself.

What’s the appeal of SXSW for a designer? Well, the conference schedule is an interesting mix of themes, including web design, user experience, gaming, and business. Keynotes ranged from customer experience guru Kathy Sierra to game designer Will Wright. And then there are the parties. If you’re a large (and hip) web company these days, you’re sponsoring a party at SXSW. Sometimes more than one. Yahoo, Google, Mozilla, eBay, PayPal, and cnet we’re all paying bar tabs this year. Interestingly, there were a number of small and medium web companies banding together to put on parties as well.

I spent a good deal of time in the Lulu booth, but I was able to sneak away once or twice a day to sessions.

When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad

My first session was rather disappointing. “When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad” was a discussion of the “right way” to improve web user experiences with JavaScript. In particular, there was a lot of discussion of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement, with the speakers taking the stand that a website should always work without JavaScript. While I’m sympathetic to this stance, I would have like to see some acknowledgement that in practice it can be very hard to achieve. Overall the session was a good overview of enhancing web interactions with JavaScript, but didn’t explore the topic very far.

High Class and Low Class Web Design

The second panel I attended delved into the topic of class in design. Examples of “high class” design included BMW, Apple, and the NY Times while examples of “low class” design included Walmart, Fox News, and WWE. The topic quickly turned to the importance of context in design — know thy user. Khoi Vinh, design director at NYTimes.com stated outright that without a design “visionary” like Steve Jobs, you needed research and analytics to know your audience. However, it was noted that simply “knowing” your user may not even be enough, you had to empathize with them. The more emotional distance between the designer and the audience, the less likely the design is to succeed. The audience questions raised two interesting ideas: How do you take your audience outside of their design “comfort zone?” And is there an analogue to social mobility in design?

Why We Should Ignore Users

This session was largely a discussion of Donald Norman’s “activity-centered design” idea form his now-famous “Human-Centered Computing Considered Harmful” article in Interactions. More specifically, the panelists discussed the problems with eliciting user needs and motivations via self-report techniques. People are notoriously bad at knowing what they really want, and a large part of the user experience in any system is subconscious. There was a great deal of discussion about the utility of personas, though it was eventually conceded that the technique was god in theory if not yet in practice.

Valleyspeak

“Valleyspeak” was a panel focused on running a tech business outside Silicon Valley. The panelists were independent web designers by trade, and the discussion focused in large part on web tools for collaboration, billing, project management, and development. They also mentioned the benefits of events like SXSW for maintaining contacts with other independent designers and developers (your “tribe”), and touched a bit upon the idea of “co-working.” Co-working is where multiple small businesses or individuals share work space, as a co-worker you get to a out-of-the-house office, shared administrative expenses, and the opportunity to have office mates without the hassle of actually having to work with them. This was a 30-minute panel, and there wasn’t much time for questions or discussions. I was hoping for something more than a “my favorite web apps” session, but they did mention a number of useful tools, the list is available online at http://buildingblocks.pbwiki.com.

Create a Kick-Ass In-House Design Team

There was a lot of good discussion in this panel about building (and keeping) a good design team, and two points in particular stood out to me. First, that a design team needs a production support team to help build prototypes and explore design ideas. Obviously this isn’t feasible for a lot of design teams, but I can really see the utility in this. An alternative would be to give a smaller design team enough time to prototype ideas within the team — obviously this only works for teams with some development skills. The second point that intrigued me was the emphasis many panelists placed on the need for a high-level voice in the organization. This could something as high as a C-level executive, or a director who is involved in planning.

Spring Break For (Web) Geeks

So is it “spring break for geeks?” I have to say that’s a pretty good description. The panels I attended were generally good, but only one or two were exceptional. I like that almost half of the schedule was selected by the conference goers. The conference is very much of-the-moment (Twitter was everywhere), and very much web focused. “Design” in the context of SXSW always means web design and web user experience. The main theme of SXSW seems to be meeting people, catching up with friends from around the country, and parties. As someone who designs for the web and finds more and more of their time using the web instead of a desktop computer, I found the discussions at SXSW engrossing. I enjoyed my trip and would definitely go again given the chance.

Originally published in the June 2007 Triangle UPA newsletter