I’m all for ease-of-use and intuitive user-interface (UI) design. Usability is my middle name. Well, actually, Rex is my middle name, but whatever.

However, my desktop is getting confusing, now that we’ve started the journey from browser-based interactions with the cloud-thing to app-based interactions with the cloud-thing. In some ways, such apps are merely micro-browsers, focused on a narrow niche of functions that interact with a specific set of data on the cloud. We understand this concept on iPads and iPhones. Mac users are beginning to get a taste of  what happens when the iPad / apps approach heads to the desktops of networked computers (data on the cloud, light-weight client software on the desktop).

In an effort to make things obvious to the user, UI designers are starting to stamp-out design-by-number app interfaces. The image above displays two client/apps I’ve been using for a while and one I’ve just downloaded. I use, from right-to-left,  a wonderful email client (that Apple should  buy to replace its Mail client) called Sparrow, the Mac Twitter app, and on the left, Raven, a new app that’s actually a  web browser for organizing apps (very meta, as they say).

However, as the image above also demonstrates, not only are Sparrow and Raven UI clones of Twitter (which is also quite derivative of many other apps), Sparrow and Raven felt the need to give their products names that, like Twitter, evoke fine feathered creatures.

Can we at least move on to fish names?

I’ve read conflicting claims about which day of the year is the busiest travel day. (The day before Thanksgiving and the day after Christmas are favorites of bored TV news crews.) No matter what precise day you choose, if you combine one of the “busiest travel days of the year” with an eastern seaboard blizzard, I’m guessing this could be one of the worst air travel days ever. So, I’m glad my family has no one “enplaning” today.

And since they’re already so overwhelmed, I guess I should feel a little bad that I’m posting this item I wrote a few days ago (while delayed in an airport for six hours) but didn’t realize until a few moments ago that I had mis-dated it, and it had not shown up on my blog.

This post has nothing to do with travel or weather. It’s about how to inadvertently communicate the opposite of what you intend to — with a simple bar chart.

Let’s go back and pick up the post where I had originally started it:

For some reason, the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority sent me a printed copy of its annual report (Here’s a PDF version. As I was flipping through the report hoping I’d find an item that says they’ll be offering free wifi soon (to no avail), I noticed two charts on page 18 that I’ve included with this post (if you are reading it on my blog). The charts compare the number of passengers and the weight of planes originating that the airport for the past three years.

Like most Americans and Nashvillians, I read bar charts in the traditional western way, based on the left-to-right display of ascending numbers. That should come as no surprise, as most of us were taught to expect the left-to-right ascending number concept by everyone from Bert & Ernie to college math professors. I, therefore, assume that bar charts that compare year-to-year data have the oldest data represented in the left-most bar, and then, as Bert & Ernie taught us, the next-oldest data to its right, and so-on. So, when I saw the bar charts moving higher, from left-to-right, I assumed this bar chart was a visualization of a metric that had gained in volume each of the past three years.

Yet upon second glance, I noticed something I thought to be rather odd — or, perhaps mis-leading. The years were descending, left-to-right.

Was this an intentional switcharoo? Or was it just a mistake? Apparently, neither. A quick googling of past annual reports by the commission convinced me they’ve always used this convention: descending years in bar charts that compare year-over-year. What’s with that? I can only guess that some accounting requirement is at work, rather than the desire to use a common-sense, “user-centric” visualization.

[I still think Nashville should join the dozens of airports providing free wifi so that travelers can better endure travel every day, and especially days like today.]

You know how there are companies that  match up a business that needs a logo with a logo designer — actually, with hundreds of designers: companies like HP’s Logo Works. And you know how you can find thousands of free-lance designers on sites like eLance. And you know how there is an entire marketplace (and swap-meet) for open-source Word Press blog themes.

Well, let’s say you shrunk those gigantic marketplaces of free-lancers (and, in some cases, free design) down to a cabal (their word, not mine) of five print and web designers who create a dozen or so templates for magazines, broadsheet newspapers, tabloids and websites — what would you have?

Something called Ready-media, a start-up idea that must have sounded great over drinks because, well, I can’t think of any other place the idea would have sounded great.

I’m sorry. This is not just a bad idea, it’s sad. It’s especially sad because on the front of the website is the photo of a print designer who once was a go-to guy when big magazines needed a new look.

Unfortunately, Jeremy Leslie’s description of Ready-media on his blog, MagCulture, is spot-on:

“It’s a shocking piece of opportunism. Good editorial design is not tailored solely by genre, it’s tailored to the job in hand. Good magazines are all about identity and that identity is bound up in the content and design and how they interact. How can you make a decent magazine using a pre-designed template with no relationship to your audience / experience / opinion? Whether or not the idea costs jobs, it will cost quality.”

I’ll go back to where I started this post: the way the internet works best. It works best when you have marketplaces of hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands. Not five.

If a “client” (in this case, a publisher) views print design as a place they can save money by going with a standardized template, they won’t stop at “ready-media” just because it has a half-dozen templates from designers who are well-known for font design or magazines they re-designed back in the day. Such “clients” will follow the pricing down stream to a marketplace  offering endless variety. Such “buyers” will not give a rip about the credentials of the designer. It just needs to “look okay.”

The Ready-media designers may think they are competing with traditional design firms, but they’re actually competing with LogoWorks and the folks who create WordPress themes or who offer their services in marketplaces like eLance and others.

And that’s a competition they are not likely to win.

[Thanks, Eric Spooner]

As you can imagine, I’m very interested in iPad apps that extend an existing media brand into (onto?) touchscreen mobile devices. One early iPad effort that received a lot of attention during “the first week of iPad” has been Popular Science+, an app based on the “Mag+” development efforts of Popular Science parent company Bonnier. Not only was the Popular Science+ iPad native app available when the App store first began offering such apps, Steve Jobs mentioned it at his Thursday iPhone 0S 4.0 event.

But before I get into the part of this post where I explain the things I believe are wrong with this app, let me stress first how I admire Bonnier and Popular Science being there first, attempting things before others. Six years ago, when Popular Science was one of the first magazines to embrace the blogosophere, I praised their effort and used it as an example to learn from.

But unlike those early efforts where Popular Science succeeded by responding to the moves and mores of a group of readers, their iPad app is an example of trying to steamroll an interpretation of what a medium can or should be if you could re-mold your readers into using a new medium just the way you want them to. Granted, because it contains beautiful art (from the magazine) and you can make pages sweep up or down, and the typography renders well*, the app is attractive and different. But it is also self-absorbed and pretentious. And it reminds me of how people would use 15 different fonts during the first days of desktop publishing. I think it’s a good thing they placed a $5 price-tag on the “concept app,” as the price will keep a lot of people from downloading it and using it and thinking this is what an app from a magazine company is like.

As someone who has been a part of many attempts that haven’t lived up to what I’d hoped (for example, most posts on this blog), I believe in the the idea of “failing fast” — as trying new things and failing is where ultimate success comes from. So I appreciate the comment that Mark Jannot, editor in chief of Popular Science said to my friend, Samir Husni in this post on Samir’s blog:

“We felt there are no downsides for experimenting in public,” Mark said. “Even if the others imitated us, we will learn from our failures and change them to successes. We will always be ahead of the competition because we are aggressively experimenting. Failing in public does not scare us because that is how we learn.”

To be candid, I’ll confess taking that quote out of context a bit as Mark was not referring to the Popular Science+ app, but about their approach to trying anything new. I decided, however, that the quote would work for the iPad app, as well.

Here’s my concern:

A lot of people in decision-making positions (those who can green-light iPad app projects, for instance) are going to look at the Popular Science+ App and decide if this is an iPad app, “there’s no way this is worth investing in.” Worse, still, some designers/editors and others will take a look at it and be thrilled with the big type and art and decide those are the benchmarks of great iPad app design.

I think the primary lesson to be learned from the initial version of the Popular Science+ app is what to avoid.

Andrew Savikas at O’Reilley’s TOC Blog sums up the primary concern I share about the Popular Science+ app:

“…while it’s slick, the problem is … when someone is using your application/game/content/website on their iPad (and mobile device in general) they expect it to behave like everything else they’re using on the device.

This is not just a usability issue, it should be a concern for those who care about great publication design, as well. The iPad offers some extraordinary potential for designers to address some heretofore un-penetrable barriers to great design inherent in the web browser. But the iPad is not so new that designers can approach it as a creatio ex nihilo: something created out of nothing. In their press release about the Mag+, the prototypical approach the Popular Science+ app is providing for its other magazines, the publisher of Popular Science, Bonnier, claims its developers and designers have “re-imagined” the magazine.

Unfortunately, in their re-imagination, they forgot to consider that readers have been using interactive tools for accessing news, information, features and advertising, for almost 20 years. Users have re-imagined magazines themselves, and the conventions, expectations and intuition they bring to any new type of media should not require a user manual to understand.

Rather than me pretend to know what I’m talking about, I’ll defer to the post and comments you can read here on the blog of Khoi Vihn, the design director of NYTimes.com.

Says Khoi:

“I don’t know whether to feel distressed that so much apparent effort is being invested in something that I think is a fundamentally ill-advised idea, or, on the other hand, to feel excited that, finally, print designers are going to have to face up to reality and learn how to design for real users. They’ve complained for years that the Web offers precious few opportunities for doing really beautiful design, and many of them have been waiting with great anticipation for the iPad as a chance to finally show the digital world what good design looks like. Well, time to man up, folks. I hope you can do better than this.”

The bottomline for me is this: The iPad is going to provide a much greater canvas for great design — the kind of great design you can find in magazines, but rarely experience online. The iPad and those devices, large and small, that it will influence, may provide a golden age for great design.* But not unless the great design helps tell a story, provides easy access to both content and context and provides the type of intuitive user experience that first drew the user to the iPad, itself.

*The first generation iPad is not without its own limitations on design, as I discovered upon importing a Keynote presentation: it has only a limited number of native fonts and, like a browser, substitutes fonts. This, of course, replicates rather than fixes one of the browser’s fundamental flaws related to design. Steven Coles breaks down this problem in a post on the blog, The Font Feed.

This post is a review
of this banner ad,
but clicking on it
won’t take you anywhere.

I feel fairly confident this post marks the first time in this blog’s near decade-long history that I’ve written a review of a banner ad.

But first, I have a disclosure. While I have no, none whatsoever, nada, association with the company Aflac, I did, however, grow up eating scrambled dogs (scroll down to Georgia) at the Dinglewood Pharmacy, directly across the street from its headquarters in Columbus, Ga.

With that disclosed, I feel I have enough objectivity to observe a tiny blip in the gigantic advertising efforts of the company that was known as American Family Life Assurance Company (thus, AFLAC) during the era when I was eating those scrambled dogs. Unlike when small companies decide to do it, when large brand-dependent marketing companies shorten their names to initials (IBM) or portmanteaus (FedEx), they realize their customers won’t immediately associate the before-and-after (although FedEx actually followed its customers in shortening its name — I don’t recall Coke’s or Bud’s shortening, but I’m guessing those, too, were customer initiated).

In reality, it often takes years — and untold millions of dollars — for a company to pull off the transition from name to initials. In Aflac’s case, the initials formed an acronym that, when read as a word, sounded to someone like a duck’s quack. Rather than fight it, the company boldly decided to follow an advertising agency’s advice and establish its brand with a massive advertising campaign based on the onomatopoeia of an acronym — and thus, AFLAC became Aflac, and a duck became the quacking pitch man.

Over the 12 or so years of the campaign, we’ve seen the duck evolve from a live duck actor (with Gilbert Gottfried’s voice) playing a crotchety old(?) man(?) (although, I understand that in Japan, the duck has been a kinder, gentler bird) into a more robotic-seeming duck that sometimes, at least to me, seems to drift into the uncanny valley, to a cartoon character that has become a part of Aflac’s logo and the version of the duck affixed to the 99 car in the company’s NASCAR (Nascar?) sponsorship. (Think, Donald Duck with no clothes.)

And then, today, I ran across this banner ad on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

I don’t even know where to begin describing the heroic, stylized interpretation of the Aflac duck that appears in that ad. To me, it’s right up there with the Obama campaign poster, except in this case, Aflac actually owns the intellectual property on which the work is based. And the ad’s approach to using an IAB standard format as a canvas for an animation-free exploration of negative and positive shapes strikes me as a bold declaration that there’s a higher calling for the banner ad than the crap usually jammed into one.

Well done, Aflac. Even though I didn’t click on it, that banner is almost as good as a Dinglewood pharmacy scrambled dog.

(via: The New Yorker Blog) Artist Jorge Colombo drew this week’s New Yorker cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. The magazine’s blog has also posted a video playback of Colombo’s painting (embedded below). According to the post, the NewYorker.com website will post a new drawing by Colombo each week.

The last time a virus story hit the news radar was six years ago (almost to the day). One of the symptoms of the SARS virus was its effect on magazine cover designers and the editors with whom they work. I can’t track it down, but that week’s cover of U.S. News & World Report also had a version of the same cliché. Each of these covers appeared on the issue dated May 5, 2003:

Some of you may recall my post last November when I was in awe of a post-election New Yorker cover illustration by Bob Staake. (Later, the cover was selected by Time as the best magazine cover of the year). When I just saw the cover of the current New Yorker in my stacked-up (staaked up?) in-box, I recognized the Staake style immediately. Perhaps it won’t be best cover of the year, but I like it a lot:

(credit: HelveticFanatic, Flickr, [CC])

Robert Scoble has jumped into the debate over the new interface design of Facebook. Scoble’s piece expresses an insight I believe is too often missed by those who confuse the concept of “pleasing the user” with “creating breakthrough ideas.” In his post, Scoble does a tremendous job of describing why “like” is the breakthrough idea that is the foundation of the new Facebook design. Of course, the whole “like” idea is not Facebook’s idea (more on this later), but making “like” and “comment” central to the idea of what Facebook is is (to quote a former President).

Scoble (and I) are fans of Kathy Sierra, creator of O’Reilly’s Head First book series and a presenter extraordinaire. Over the years, in evangelizing what software developers need to do to create “passionate users,” she has addressed the need to create “breakthrough ideas” instead of merely better products. Last week in Austin, I was able to catch Kathy presenting to 1,500 of her fans and was reminded once more of how she can explain in a polite, yet explicit way, that focus groups and user research has its place, but that place is not in helping you design great software. It helps you tweak software, she says, but it’s no help when you want to create breakthrough ideas.

Another incredible discussion thread that is bouncing around the tech blogosphere this week about “research-driven design decisions” vs. “break through ideas” was started with this essay by Douglas Bowman, in which he announced his departure as the lead visual designer at Google. Design, of course, is merely one aspect of breakthrough ideas, however, the process of design at Google, as Bowman describes it (and as revealed in recent profiles of Marissa Mayer), seems obsessed with research into iterative changes (as in, what shade of blue gets more clicks) rather than creating something that changes everything. Bowman admits (who wouldn’t?) it’s hard to question anything Google does, as they have the users and money to prove they’re right and everyone else is wrong. However, as someone who uses Google products to the point of considering turning everything over to them (heck, even moving this blog to Blogger.com), I’m more impressed by their ability to make products solid and simple than with their ability to come up with anything new. (And, frankly, to me making web applications solid and simple is a breakthrough idea.)

I say all this to emphasize that I agree with Scoble: What Facebook is doing is not necessarily original, but it is building on a foundation they have that will help create the opportunity for breakthrough ideas. While most of the analysis I’ve read has compared the new Facebook design to Twitter, I believe that comparison is wrong. To me, it seems obvious the benchmark for “the new Facebook design” is FriendFeed. (As those who’ve made it this far likely know, FriendFeed was created by some Google alumni and is one of many services — but the most popular among the A-List geeks — that aggregates ones creations, comments, jestures or expressions from across all the social media he or she uses (i.e., sharing a photo via Flickr, favoring a video on YouTube, reviewing a restaurant on Yelp). If you’re reading this on my blog (vs. via an RSS reader or on Facebook), over on the right you can see a sidebar box (widget) that displays the headlines from my FriendFeed account, something I call jokingly, “The River of Rex.”

While the FriendFeed creators seemed purposeful in not trying to replicate or compete head-on with Facebook (Exhibit #1: The service has no user profile page), they obviously served as a proof of concepts that didn’t go unnoticed by Zuckerberg & Co. Concept #1: You don’t need lots of complicated “invite and display” applications to get users to aggregate every social media thing they do. Concept #2: Those “like” and “comment” fields make every tidbit of content a launchpad for conversation and insight.

Unlike past attempts by Facebook to change the service in ways that violated principles of trust or privacy, I believe the new design will actually be of great benefit to Facebook users — after they get over the whinning. So put me in the 5% group: I like the new Facebook design. I believe it serves the user (rather than screws them like the previous changes). In fact, I like it a lot.

However, I think soon the word “like” will be as confusing as the word “friend” is today.

Technorati Tags: facebook

Last night, I grabbed a screenshot of Whitehouse.gov so I could compare it to what is today, a new site. The design and typography reflect the look established by the Obama campaign, however, the “new” site brings along some standard navigation and perhaps even better conveys the gravitas that comes with the office. There’s also a nice (and subtle) use of the American flag “button” in a more prominent position with the new design. I like American flags. Apart from the design, one of the most prominent “changes” (other than, of course, the change in Presidents) is the use of words like “post” and “blog” — as in, here is the first blog post written by Macon Phillips, the director of New Media for the White House and one of the people who will be contributing to the blog.

I think it’s pretty cool that a blog is going to be the featured platform with which the White House is going to communicate with the world.

It’s odd, but just five years ago, on February 19, 2004, I was the first* person to ever “blog” a private White House meeting with a President. (See: Related posts.) I was told later that the White House media staff had a melt-down when they learned what I did, but quickly figured out that what I had written was about as harmless as, well, anything I write here.

Five years from that to a blog being front and center on Whitehouse.gov. I’m pretty amazed. Change, indeed.

*Source for “the first” claim: This article by Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post. Also, see Dan Gillmor’s We the Media.