“Twitterative Design”

Jakob Nielsen recently ran a Twitter post through 5 rounds of iterative design to get the impact he wanted. At first blush I was thinking, “That sounds like a lot of effort to optimize a Tweet!” But if you are using twitter as a marketing medium, I guess it makes sense. (Far as I can tell, these were just design rounds; he wasn’t running a user study or anything.)

See his article for lessons learned in each round, from concision to focus, impact, and re-tweetability. (There, I’m making up new words right and left.)

He finishes the article with a notable quote: “Text is a UI. It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. ... In fact, the shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.”

posted by ted on Monday, Aug 24, 2009 · 2 comments

Review: Balsamiq Mockups

In an unrelated post, Jamis Charles asked, “I know this is totally unrelated, but you mentioned some time ago you started using Balsamiq Mockups. I’d like to pitch it to my UI Team. How has it been working for you? How do you incorporate it into your workflow? Has it increased productivity? A post about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.”

I’ll let others speak to their own experience, but here’s a quick post on how it worked for me. I was looking for something easy that would help my team focus less on pixels and colors during the planning stage, and just focus on concepts and framework. Balsamiq worked admirably for that purpose. In fact, within weeks of using Balsamiq for our weekly high-level design meetings, team members were themselves articulating the reason to use Balsamiq: “We don’t get bogged down in the details anymore!”

The workflow was something like this:

1. I would review high level requirements, talk with the customer and mock something up quickly in Balsamiq, with sketchy notes in the margins. As promised, the tool is drop-dead simple for most things it supports. Don’t expect a freeform drawing tool, but for dragging and dropping basic UI elements, it’s very easy.
2. Team would meet to discuss.
3. I would take notes directly in Balsamiq, sometimes updating the mockup, but often just leaving a note in the margins for later. Because of the low fidelity of the prototype, the team was able to get past nitpicking the details and focus on the functional requirements and workflow.
4. Once we moved out of planning into iterative development, I would refer to the mockups and the notes recorded there to create higher fidelity prototypes, using Fireworks images or HTML prototypes, depending on the need. I tried to get a cycle or two ahead of the dev team, and was generally successful.
5. As the high fidelity design progressed, we referenced the low fidelity mockups less and less. By the last cycle or two, we were hardly using them at all anymore. I probably haven’t opened the tool in 3 months.

So in terms of productivity, our planning discussions were more productive because we were not bogged down at the pixel level. But in terms of turning the Balsamiq Mockups into production code—that was not really our intent, nor does the tool really support that.

Anybody else have a perspective to share on this or other rapid prototyping tools?

posted by ted on Thursday, Jul 02, 2009 · 1 comment

The End of the Asterisk?

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox today proclaims that we we should Stop Masking Passwords. He claims the usability costs are too high, especially on mobile devices where typos are more common.

I was skeptical, but he has some great points, the most important being that the greatest security risks when you are entering a password are really electronic—someone snooping your password through an unsecure connection. Someone watching your screen can just as easily watch your keyboard to see what keys you tap. But most of the time this is irrelevant, since you are at home and not really being stalked by an over-the-shoulder snooper.

And to cover the occasional Internet kiosk scenario, he suggests providing a checkbox that will let users decide whether they want to mask their password. I like it! Virtual equivalent of cupping your hand around the keypad at an ATM.

Now that I think about it, I have recently noticed that when I type a password on my mobile phone, it briefly shows the last character I typed before replacing it with an asterisk. (Is that an Opera Mobile feature?) That seems to be a concession to some of Nielsen’s points regarding mobile password entry. But I wonder whether it really makes sense either. If it’s visible to you briefly, then it’s visible to a snooper briefly too. But what are the chances that someone can see that teeny tiny text you are taptapping on your phone anyway???

So I guess he’s convinced me! Death to the Asterisk!

posted by ted on Wednesday, Jun 24, 2009 · 7 comments