Category: Design

The area we’re staying in isn’t the most salubrious. Even the cabbies talk about it as a ‘bad area’ (just before they ask me questions about the National Health Service). Today as we came back to our hotel, about eight homeless people had set up a camp under a shop awning opposite and were listening to “What if God were one of us?” on a stereo held together with string. It was both sad and unsettling. Probably one of the only things in the minus column during our stay in San Francisco has been the sheer amount of homeless people we’ve seen…

Our hotel is incredibly nice though – particularly for the money. And they have a really good grasp of effective signage…

The newly redesigned BBC news launched last night – the redesign being an attempt to keep the basic UI and architecture of the site intact while bringing its design in line with the rest of the BBC. The most substantial change is the shift from a 640px to an 800px wide layout, which has some clearly positive consequences. The available space for the articles themselves is now substantial, but not so wide that your eyes have trouble finding the beginning of the following line. However, the redesign isn’t perfect, and if I was forced to pick holes with the way it has been restructured they would be:

• I miss the news being in one column. The single column format – much like the weblog format – highlights chronology, promotes the idea that the material is novel, cutting-edge, breaking news. Having three news stories grouped at the top is an interesting shift with one obvious advantage – it allows them to decide what story demands the most emphasis rather than which story is simply the most timely. Unfortunately it now feels more like feature-content than news content.
• The internal home-pages (cf. Scotland) don’t seem different enough from section to section. It’s quite easy to get disoriented within the structure of the site – as if you were in a huge building where all the rooms looked the same. I think this problem could be very simply resolved by sizing-up the signage (increasing the size of the page-heading alone would probably help considerably).
• The “good recent features” bar that spreads horizontally across the front page and sectional home-pages (three pictures with taster-copy on a beige background) produces some HTML layout issues. Primarily, it restricts what you can place in the top section of the third content column. The Education section has a prime example of the problems it can cause. There’s too much copy inside it, which is pushing the horizontal bar down the page, leaving a block of white space in the middle of the central content columns. And if you limit the length of the text on that side, you can end up with nasty gaps of white space there as well. It might not sound like much of an issue, but I wonder what it looks like with text-zooming on or unorthodox font-sizes.
• Fundamentally, my main issue is that there’s clearly more screen real-estate available but there doesn’t appear to be the same amount of actual news on the page. I suppose the only way to do that would be to measure the area of all the illustrative images, the number of stories linked to and the number of characters spent on the page on the stories involved. Has anyone got the time to do this?

What are your thoughts on the BBC News redesign? Leave a comment here and then head over to the discussion taking place over at Metafilter.

Much to my delight, there’s a picture of plasticbag.org in an article on “Undesign” in this week’s copy of Graphics International: Lo-fi Allstars. If you want to see the article in context complete with images, then you have to download the PDF. There’s something really nice about having your design genius recognised in a professional magazine, even if said genius is a tarted up hand-me-down from more serious and well-trained individuals. You know who you are.
Having said all that, there is something that I’d like to take issue with. The article seems to be conflating two completely different concepts of design, and in the process is doing a disservice to both. Firstly there’s the kind of design that is undertaken by someone like Jason in the design of his weblog – a form of design that he’s recently posted about. This kind of design derives from allowing the content to take centre-stage, simplifying the rest, cleaning away anything that isn’t necessary and leaving people with a simple and clearly branded content delivery system. Being flash with design, he suggests, rather misses the point. I totally agree with his strategy here (and so I should – I’ve ripped him off enough). It’s a strategy that reminds me very much of craftsmen, artisans and the like – a respect for your medium, a desire to do something clean and clear and elegant that fulfils its purpose practically and effectively. This is a school of undesign that is dripping in the craft of design. It’s almost ur-design or even deep-design, in the same way that people have searched for years for ‘deep’ grammatical structures in language. What it isn’t is slipshod, dirty or inelegant.
On the other side of the scale is the work done by Rob Manuel of b3ta in the promotion of a do-it-yourself, scrappy, “shit is good” aesthetic. I used to work with Rob and I know he feels very strongly – and again, I think, correctly – that the more polish you put on a visual joke then the more likely it is that the humour is lost. He aims for characterful and exciting pieces of work above all – get it done, get it out, if the joke’s good then it’ll thrive. It’s a design strategy that can only work in terms of content, though – not structure – and if you step back and look at how b3ta as a site is structured – both in terms of Information Architecture (if you can say something like that about b3ta without being slightly ridiculous) and overt navigation – then it’s a supremely elegant interconnected mesh of simple pages. And the design for the pages themselves concentrates – just as much as Jason’s work does – on being clear, non-invasive and well-branded.
So if you’re coming into this field fresh from the outside world, and you want to get involved in the new weblog-chic (yet again) then keep this in mind – a good site must necessarily be well-designed. It’s designed to be a clear and unobtrusive content-delivery mechanism with no sharp-edges and no confusing bits of functionality. It’s designed to clearly communicate the structure of a site and the nature of a brand. This takes work and is simply not the same thing as making something look pretty. It’s only in the content itself that you can play – and even then some content is perfect for ‘born sloppy’ approaches (humour and horror for example), while other content (news content, financial reports) still have to look authoratitative… [If you’re interested in reading still more on this issue, I’ve had another stab at explaining myself over at marketingfix.com].

I’m two-thirds of the way through my second Edward Tufte book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Now, before your eyes glaze over and you start skipping over to one of those proper weblogs where they talk about sex and disastrous relationships and the movies they’ve been to see recently, I want to try and convince you that the books of Edward Tufte are fun and interesting. I have no obvious reason to read them – I’m not a statistician and I don’t work with graphs – and yet I find them endlessly pleasurable. I suppose there are several reasons for this , although some of them might be unexpected. Firstly, they are books which are intellectually stretching without being wordy or incomprehensible. They immediately open up realms or spheres of engagement with the world and with the information in it that are normally hidden from people. Secondly they are profoundly sensual experiences. Printed on high-quality paper, mixing textures between covers and cloth and sheet – these are quality publications. The typography is beautiful, the diagrams are never less than beautifully rendered – and occasionally they are simple beautiful diagrams, charts and the like. And finally they have the charm of the Schott’s Original Miscellany (in that they contain as asides blocks of utterly unexpected information and background) without the handicap of being about nothing… In fact all of Tufte’s books are satisfying because they exude the care of the artisan or the craftsman – someone with a profound expertise in, and love/respect for the process of creation of quality. In this respect his books really remind me of Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style, another book that beautifully expresses passion and expertise based around a respect for quality.

Which is probably why, when I was reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, I was so surprised to come upon a paragraph that was so completely alien to the practices of web clarity and usability. In it, Tufte states some beliefs that have long-since been rejected from web design – ostensibly because they are smack of elitism and are impractical – even costly. He states, in effect, that we shouldn’t forsake complexity just to communicate with our audience. Here is a brief quote from a much larger section of the book concerned with novelty and different paradigms of information-presentation:

Moreover, it is a frequent mistake in thinking about statistical graphics to underestimate the audience. Instead, why not assume that if you understand it, most other readers will, too? Graphics should be as intelligent and sophisticated as the accompanying text.

The section concerned is a lot longer and more detailed than the quote above, and is fundamentally about revealing complex and large amounts of information through graphical means – rather than about navigation or layout. But it’s still interesting to me. He talks about how most diagrams used in the national press (if compared with those used at schools and colleges) are of a pre-adult level, and that we shouldn’t allow this to happen. We should respect the intelligence of our audience. The comparison with the title of Steve Krug’s brilliant web usability book Don’t make me think! (much recommended) couldn’t be more striking.

So what is it about web navigation and site structure that means we should treat our users as idiots while infographics are allowed to treat their viewers like grown-ups? Unfortunately the answer is ultimately extremely simple – infographics are designed to transmit useful information and that information is the final goal of any interaction with them. This isn’t true of web-navigation. Web navigation is designed to structure and communicate information about how to find different information. Web-navigation (and my doctoral supervisor in Bristol is literally turning over in her tenure as I say this) is for the most part nothing but meta-information – no one (except web UI professionals) visits MSN.co.uk for the information communicated by the navigational scheme. It’s fundamentally uninteresting.

But this does not necessarily have to be the case – it seems to me eminently possible that we might be able to generate a hybridised system whereby web navigation actually itself holds valuable information – much like Tufte demonstrates the axes of a graph can be redeveloped to carry additional information about the data that they frame (I’ll see if I can find a visual representation of this as soon as I get a moment). I have at this time no sense of how one might go about doing this (except through a cascading series of inter-navigating graphs) but there seems to me to be a certain amount of potential in this line of investigation… More on this later (perhaps)…

Addenda: How to pronounce Tufte (after kottke.org).

I still haven’t completely formed my opinions on the recent IA seminar on “Adaptive Design” I attended (Dan Hill from cityofsound speaking). He’s put up the presentation along with some notes which should make the whole process rather easier. The one thing that I know stuck in my head throughout the whole thing was that there was a regular appeal towards building adaptive sites with an architecture that allowed experiementation and adaptability. There were a few more people talking about component-level systems like Lego as well. They too kept talking about the simple rules of the system that governed the use of these blocks. Everyone seemed to think that the job of the designer was the development of rules and components within self-contained sites. I kept thinking of Operating Systems and the Internet – universal computing machines lying behind the scenes forming an architecture. And then I started thinking of Applications and Sites as the components within these machines. In a sense we’re already designing components within a larger open system – allowing individuals to assemble their own ‘machines’ (which amount to their interactions with computers). Maybe we’re getting this all wrong – maybe we shouldn’t be looking at the products we make and trying to componentise them still further. Maybe we should just look to simplify what each function does and have them hang off one another by using standard formats and useful proceedures for interoperability…

I’ll give you a quick example. Blogger is a way of storing content in a particular format. It can feed that information out as e-mail, html and rss. The e-mails can be sent to me to be viewed on my e-mail client, or they can be sent to Yahoogroups where they can be displayed out of context or repurposed to be sent out to large groups of people or in a digest format. The HTML can be viewed by a web browser (of which there are several different types including speech browsers, braile browsers etc) or pulled into databases (a al Blogdex and can also be printed out to be carried around with me, or put into a palm pilot, or screen-capped and adjusted. RSS feeds can be read by applications like NetNewsWire or by IM programs like Trillian or they can be aggregated (as on Haddock Blogs) or they can be put into databases and reused. Each one of these is a component. Each one of which is something that a user decides (or decides not to) use in assembling the magic “machine that makes things happen” (ie. their person computing space). So maybe that’s what we should be concentrating on – single use (or simple use) applications or sites that do something very well, can be removed or replaced from the processing chain of information. Maybe that’s adaptive design. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with us making the architecture at all. It’s already there.

Over the weekend I went to visit my younger brother, Peter, in Oundle where he goes to a boarding school. My parents came as well – they picked me up from Peterborough train station and we all went out for an extremely pleasant lunch in a pub called The Pheasant, somewhere between Kettering and St. Neots. But this is not what I want to talk about today.

As I have said, I travelled to Peterborough by train. This involved me buying a set of two train tickets, each one of which was about a quarter of the size of a piece of A4 paper – if that sheet was cut into four horizontal strips. For some reason this shape really reminded me of a piece of design work in Edward Tufte‘s extraordinary book on information design, Envisioning Information. In this book, one of the projects he explores is the creation of train timetables – how to keep them clean and clear and informative. And (you may be ahead of me here), the best example of a well-designed timetable he comes across is approximately the size of one quarter of a sheet of A4 paper – if that sheet was cut into four horizontal strips.

More often than I care to recall, I’ve travelled somewhere with a return ticket, with little or no idea as to when my returning train is likely to depart. Particularly with tickets that are ‘open’ returns, it would be profoundly useful to have that kind of information with you. So why on earth isn’t it printed on the back of the ticket? A bespoke return time-table assembled with all the information about the kind of trains you can travel on, your likely date of return etc. would be a godsend, and presumably not a particularly difficult thing to develop. My question, then, is why doesn’t this exist already?

I’ve been inside all day, on one of the nicest days of the year, and why? Because I’m finally getting some redesigning done – getting some code together which isn’t completely awful. Picture the scene – I’ve got a mock-up in Photoshop of what I want to achieve, I have worked out how I should go about achieving it, I set to work, and gradually (very gradually) it comes together. I’m quite proud of it – I’m using a rather clever table structure (or at least I think I am), when suddenly I decide to check it in Netscape.

Of course the structure is all completely in place, and working perfectly. Except that the cell background, which is fundamental to the design of the page, is suddenly replicated in every cell of the nested tables within it. I slap my head in horror. “Of course”, I say, (scream?) ” I had completely forgotten that Netscape 4.x cannot handle images as cell backgrounds very well. But if I make it a page background, it’s going to make the page slow to download. Damn it! I wonder if anyone has any ideas as to how I can get around this problem without using a background image? Hmmm.”

This story seemed more interesting when I started writing it.