UX and the missing piece?

There has been a great resurgence of interest in User Experience – UX or UXD, which cannot be a bad thing. I remember the first ripples when this discipline started to take its first faltering steps int the US a good few years ago. It slid off the radar for a while but is now back stronger than ever.

Reading some of the many articles in the media what I an struck by is the unspoken dimension that is so apparent in what people are trying to achieve – it is psychology. Back in the 1950’s when advertising in the US was searching for some underlying scientific principles, it was psychology that they turned to. Like the web today, they were dealing with human behaviour, trying to understand it, evaluate it … and ultimately, predict it.

Many of the techniques employed by UX practitioners will be familiar to any psychologist – what sometimes concerns me is that in general it lacks the theoretical foundations. This restricts the deeper understanding and insight of cognition and behaviour that could lead to the most effective outcomes.

 

On the move

It seems like a long time since we first started hearing about the wonders or threats of convergence, but there is a strong indication that mobile in its various manifestations may be taking over the driving seat.

I’ve always been a bit of a purist so far as my mobile phone was concerned: it was just for making phone calls. Then I subscribed to mobile broadband, mainly to use a dongle on my laptop as I travel a lot (don’t get me started on the price hotels charge for broadband). Anyway, that permitted me broadband on my phone. My first use was Google maps when I was was lost. There followed a number of distress driven uses and soon I was hooked. My phone upgrade then led me to a bigger colour screen (my eyesight is no longer what it was… if it ever was).

So, where I always made sure I carried my laptop everywhere in its rucksack, I scaled down to a netbook for foreign trips. At one time I felt naked without some form of computer… now I am relaxed with just my phone, comfortably using it for most of my quick applications.

My tasks for the coming weeks?  Adapt and make sure my websites work well on mobiles.

 

Is CMS changing the face of digital project management?

Content management systems have been around a long time. Once they were custom-built and strictly for big organisations with the money to pay for them. Today they are commonplace for even the smallest enterprise. Building on frameworks such as Joomla they have shifted the project emphasis away from the management of development to the management of content.

This has some interesting consequences: the development of structure is far more in the hands of the managers. Does this make ’strategy creep’ more or less likely? In the previous model, if clients did not get their strategy exactly right, they would change or modify the brief, making amendments throughout the development stage. However, there was usually a substantial cost to these changes, perhaps mitigating against too many changes and (theoretically) an onus on the client to get the strategy right at the start. With a CMS, the client can more easily make changes… even serious structural changes, without such penalties.

So, what is more important, getting the project exactly right… even if you got your initial strategy wrong, or accepting something being 95% right but allowing the other 5% to go through to save costs?

With my project manager’s hat on I hate sloppy planning and I applaud anything that encourages people to get the strategy right at the outset. But in the real world I must accept that clients often DO get the brief wrong or unclear, or situations simply change and it is our job to help them get back on course as painlessly as possible.

The other aspect of the increasing use of the CMS is that it puts the emphasis firmly back on content. That means that it engages the client far more than the developer. There was a time when the the client passed a job over to the developer, with content as an afterthought, expecting the finished project to spring fully formed onto their server. Now the steps are far more synergic: get the design and structure approved, then develop the content… which after all is what the project is all about.

 

Reverting to type

At the risk of having a rant, I despair of the quality of typography in much of the digital media I have to deal with.  Now, I trained as a designer when typographical design was a distinct and highly prized discipline.  Print material - ads, literature, stationary etc. was created by a designer, then passed to a typographer or typographical designer to specify the type.  When DTP arrived, the designer’s concepts could go straight to print – so the output was purely dependent upon the quality of the designer’s typographical skills and understanding, which in many cases was sadly lacking.

So, why does this matter in today’s digital world? Because, despite rich media advances, the web is still largely a text based medium and an understanding of the principles of typography is vital if copy is to be easily read and understood.  Let’s look at just a few fundamentals:

Line length – the landscape format of a web page is not ideal (why do you think newspaper pages are vertical?). The ideal number of words to a line is about 10-12 max. Why? Because that is the ideal number for the eye to scan and move to the next line with ease – without struggling to find the beginning of the line again.

Text layout – ranged left text reads better than justified or ranged right text. Why? As above, it makes it easier for your eye to return to begin the next line as the lines ‘look’ different.

Upper and lowercase text reads better than all caps – Why? Because once we learn to read we then begin to recognise words by their shape, not by reading them character for character, and the ascender and descenders (the bits that stick above and below the line) in lowercase text help us see the shape more quickly and easily(that’s why motorway signs are in upper and lower).

Sadly, part of the reason for the demise of good typography is that text or content in digital media is often left to the final moment. Pages are filled with ‘greek’ text to view the designs, and nobody (certainly not the designers) ever has to consider how well the content is read.

I could go on… but I hope these few, simple examples make the point. There is an old truism… the best typography is never noticed – you are too busy reading the content.