You probably noticed from the recent stream of posts here and elsewhere a definite slant towards UI design. I’m working on a super cool project right now, with the liberty to ignore enterprisy features and focus on the way people use the software effectively.
So I have this new fascination and filtering my feed reading towards what I feel is either a good source of inspiration, or the chance to learn from other people’s … ahem … experiences.
That, and also posting more frequently and more raw/unfiltered posts, which happens when I spend more of my time researching and experimenting with stuff.
The other day I noticed an interesting UI screenshot, a new take on an old problem. The old take: pick tidbits of information based on a search pattern, collect and present a large set of results, browsable top to bottom, ordered by popularity. What I don’t like about this approach: it burdens the use who has to cull the list, trying to identify the more relevant pieces of information based on very little contextual information (at best, a URL).
The new take: filters the result first by picking the most relevant ones, presents enough contextual information to help find the most relevant result, and present it all so it fits the way we scan Web pages in our eyes. I personally think it has huge potential, and just looking at the screenshot was enough to motivate me to try it out for myself.
Unfortunately, sometimes the best UI designs are marred by limitations of the back-end. That’s something worth considering when doing UI design. In this particular case, the contextual information collected by the back-end resulted in some — how should I say it without sounding offensive? — less than stellar UI representation. In fact, something I wouldn’t want to see in any product I build.
So right there, a good lesson about software limitations, and how sometimes good ideas don’t translate well in practice.
The same thing happened to me. My metaphorical back-end missed on some very important contextual information, and in doing so rendered pointless, possibly offensive, information. There was a point I wanted to make but didn’t. There was a point I made, and wish I didn’t.
What I was looking at wasn’t just a screenshot of a new design — which I do encourage you to experiment with — but part of a well orchestrated PR campaign for rolling out a new service. The type that guarantees you a day’s worth of top placement on TechMeme, and either instant fame or instant FAIL.
In the rush to try it out myself, I skimmed the mention of ex-Googlers and other echo-chamber appetizing buzzwords, guaranteed to make a media circus out of the affair. Should have paid more attention.
I subscribe to some feeds that provide a lot of interesting screenshots of new products as they launch. Mostly they pop up in my feed reader and die just as quickly. They’re not all bad, they just appeal to a different audience, and the only chance I get to see them is from posts covering their launch.
It may be the launch of a new service for collecting stamps. I don’t collect stamps, so I’ll never hear about it again. But still, it might be an opportunity to pick up some interesting design ideas I can use elsewhere. Who says people who collect stamps can’t innovate? So I note it, and possibly blog it.
Unfortunately, that sometimes means getting caught in the buzz. I learned a valuable design lesson from trying out this new service with a few random queries. It looks like a good idea, but it might be hard to pull off on the large scale of unmanaged data that is the Web. I think twice before pursuing the same idea in my designs moving forward.
Under different circumstances, you may have picked the same lesson. Or at least get entertained, I do try to keep an entertaining slant on Labnotes to not bore you all to death. But giving the timing, it ended up just another bitchy post on yet another service failing on their launch date. And seriously, what service is not failing on their launch date?
Even worse, I held on the post for a few hours before hitting publish. The image wasn’t the kind of stuff I like putting on my blog, a bit offensive in my opinion. I contemplated just deleting the draft, and ended up doing a NSFW link instead. So I held it for moderation, so to speak, but I paid attention to the wrong thing!
So with that, my apologizes for wasting your time.
I’ll make sure the back-end processing algorithm is better with extracting context next time, or more to a more asynchronous architecture, filtering out posts like this so you don’t have to.
Ciaran
Assaf