Category Archives: Design

Slideuments

Posted on by David
Reply

Garr Reynolds has good advice on why you should avoid creating slideuments for your presentations.

Slides are slides. Documents are documents. They aren’t the same thing. Attempts to merge them result in what I call the “slideument” (slide + document = slideument). Much death-by-Powerpoint suffering could be eliminated if presenters clearly separated the two in their own minds before they even started planning their talks.

Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support our point quickly, efficiently (good signal-to-noise ratio), and powerfully. The verbal content, the verbal proof, evidence, and appeal/emotion comes mostly from our spoken word. Our handout (takeaway document) is completely different. We aren’t there to supply the verbal content and answer questions so we must write in a way that provides at least as much depth and scope as our live presentation.

He has a very good point about how a lot of conferences create a dynamic that encourages slideumentation.

NYT 1024, Georgia!

Posted on by David
Reply

The New York Times launched a new site design yesterday. You can read an introduction to the redesign from Leonard M. Apcar, the editor of the online version of the paper. Among notable changes, they have expanded the width of the site beyond 800 pixels to take advantage of higher resolution monitors that are out there now and they have switched from their font from Times New Roman to Georgia to improve readability. The font switch blew me away. I can just imagine how challenging it must have been to push that through the powers that be internally. The site design also makes minimal use of tables and employs standards-based techniques for their menus.

I like the new look quite a bit based on my initial experience with it.

Usability and Branding: You Can Have Both

Posted on by David
2

Kevin Holland provides a thoughtful response to my critique of the Chiptole web site. Here is his summary:

David raised a very good point about the importance of making key functionality usable. I’m just saying it’s not the only point. The purpose of a website is not just to make it easy to find things. It’s representative of the whole experience offered by an organization or company. It is, in fact, your organization. As we are giving our organzation’s website a much-needed redesign, that point is very much on my mind.

I don’t disagree that the web can be an extension of your brand and/or experience for your customers. However, I think you can have both usability and brand consistency (whatever that may mean to you) with a little thoughtful design. Chipotle fails in this area, I still believe.

In fact, Kevin’s post actually contains the core of my rebuttal. He discusses the experience of going to Chipotle as part of their brand: simple, easily understood food selections; rapid service; and a tasty product. All in all, a highly ‘usable’ restaurant experience that is presented in a ‘hip’ way. Why can’t the site mimic this core part of their brand while being hip at the same time? Answer: It could without having to limit its usefulness by burying key features under gee-whiz flash animations.

See Apple’s web site for an example of a company that makes its big margins on the hipness of its highly usable products. No flying iPods, you’ll note.

In reality, this discussion is a bit of a shot in the dark, since we don’t know what Chipotle really wants their site to contribute to the organization. I do assume that selling burritos is in there somewhere, however.

It would be interesting to see a survey of their web site visitors, asking why they came to the site that day. I would bet a free burrito that the single biggest reason is to find a restaurant and/or place an online order, not to see what this hip burrito experience is about. I don’t see how an organization is doing itself any good if the branding gets in the way of providing core services.

Burritobility

Posted on by David
1

I thought I would share an example I used in the Web Site Usability Workshop that I conducted with Dave, Frank and Joanna earlier this week at the ASAE Tech conference.

I started off by asking anyone in the room who likes burritos to raise their hand. 90 out of the 100+ people in the room shot their hand up. I had the right crowd!

What is the number one thing a freshmex burrito restaurant chain’s web site should do? Get you into one of their restaurants to buy a burrito. Simple enough.

Now, go look at BajaFresh.com. The store locator has a convenient search box right at the top to put in your address or zip code and find the closest store. Simple and effective.

Now go to the Chipotle.com web site. Look out for the flying burrito zeppelin! What is that spinning tomato/tortilla chip/hot pepper thingy doing in the middle of the page? How can I find a store? No way to tell without mousing over the chip and then futzing with an animated menu with no labels displayed by default. The only plain text link on the home page is to the privacy policy. (For once, a lawyer has a positive usability impact on a web site design!)

Both sites have a store locator feature. Only BajaFresh makes it easy to find and use that key functionality.

I asked the people in the room, “Who has the more usable site?” Answer: “BajaFresh!”

Then I asked, who probably paid more for their web site? “Chipotle!”

A usable burrito site doesn’t have to be an expensive one.

The lessons here include:

  • A great product can be undone by poor usability;
  • Usability can be a competitive advantage if your site makes it easier to do business with you;
  • If your product is sub-par, making it usable alone won’t help much;
  • Flying burrito zeppelins are kind of distracting.

Behind the Scenes at an Apple Keynote

Posted on by David
Reply

Here is a great article by Mike Evangelist in the Guardian that talks about what goes into one of Steve Jobs’ apparently effortless presentations:

With the demo set, my role was to stand by in case of technical problems with the software, or if Steve wanted to change anything. This gave me the opportunity to observe what was going on around me. The big keynotes require a very large crew with separate teams for each major task. One prepares the room to seat several thousand people. Another group builds the stage with its motorised pedestals, risers, trap doors, and so forth. A third manages the stage lighting, audio and effects.

Yet another sets up and calibrates the state-of-the-art projection systems (complete with redundant backup systems), and a huge remote video truck parked outside has its own crew handling video feeds for the webcasts and playback of any video needed during the show. Then there are the people who set up all the computers used in the keynote, each with at least one backup that can be instantly brought online with the flick of a switch.

It takes a few hundred people a couple of months to prep and deliver one of those presentations. The fact that Steve’s demos always just work is a big part of Apple’s brand. This is not by accident. (Via Presentation Zen.)

Lean XHTML and Precise CSS

Posted on by David
Reply

For those of you employing or exploring standards-based designs using CSS (and this should be all of you!), check out this post on Lean XHTML and Precise CSS. Looks like a good method for organizing your stylesheets. CSS files can get pretty complex as your site develops, so having some organizational method will make life easier down the road. The article also reviews the benefits of keeping presentation code in CSS and out of your page markup.

(Via 456 Bereas Street blog.)