AlexAitken.net

The grid-based design be­hind much of today’s web was re­vealed to me a few years back as I was serving as in-house Tech­nic­al Lead for a ma­jor cor­por­ate re­design. My team worked with de­sign­ers from an ex­tern­al agency, and as their comps star­ted com­ing across the wire it was quickly clear that visu­al com­pon­ents were be­ing aligned to a four-column grid. Every­one liked the or­der and or­gan­iz­a­tion af­forded by the grid. When it came time to turn comps in­to code we went with the 960.gs css frame­work and to this day, design and de­vel­op­ment of new solu­tions takes place with­in the con­text of the grid.

A couple of years back I half-yawned my way through a UX­Week break­out ses­sion on di­git­al strategy led by Hen­ning Fisc­her from Ad­apt­ive Path. Root cause ana­lys­is fea­tured. The group also went through a couple of mock spend­ing ex­er­cises. Then I re­mem­ber a Venn Dia­gram that had me say­ing, “I have to re­mem­ber this,” be­fore I skipped out early for some San Fran Chinese.

Al­most all ap­plicatons we in­ter­act with on the web are form driv­en. User-sup­plied data in; sys­tem con­clu­sion out. To be sure, a dec­ade plus of ex­per­i­en­ce and in­nov­a­tion has seen UX im­prove by leaps and bounds. But we’re still build­ing forms, and to that end I al­ways en­joy re-vis­it­ing the ba­sic ques­tion of how to build them well. Here’s the es­sence of a re­cent stab.

For the second year run­ning I’ve spent four late sum­mer days at Ad­apt­ive Path’s UX Week in San Fran­cisco. The 2009 edi­tion saw me di­li­gently post­ing day-by-day notes and ac­counts. This year I simply re­lay quotes and sources while steer­ing clear of at­tri­bu­tion. The con­fer­ence was again killer, the per­spect­ives at the same time re­fresh­ing and af­firm­ing, the chal­lenges plenty and in­creas­ing, the in­spir­a­tion ubi­quit­ous and palp­able. Thank you Mer­holz and co. for an­oth­er un­qual­i­fied suc­cess.

Ed­ward Tufte is Yale Uni­versity Pro­fess­or Emer­it­us of Polit­ic­al Sci­ence, Stat­ist­ics, and Com­puter Sci­ence. Through his work in these do­mains and the four books he has pub­lished on the dis­play and con­sump­tion of data, Tufte has come to be best–re­cog­nized as a mas­ter of in­fograph­ic and visu­al in­ter­face design. In his per­en­ni­al one-day course on Present­ing Data and In­form­a­tion, he teaches his view on ef­fect­ive visu­al com­mu­nic­a­tion through ex­amples drawn from across eras and me­dia.

Even at the time it de­b­uted dur­ing my os­tens­ible un­der­age years I re­mem­ber be­ing im­pressed by the bril­liance of Jim Beam’s ‘You al­ways come back to ba­sics’ ad cam­paign. The ori­gin­al, which ran in the Oc­to­ber 1989 is­sue of 16 na­tion­al magazines, de­pic­ted a pro­gres­sion of Amer­ica’s pre­ferred food­stuff over 5 dec­ades. A series of 7 pho­tos in­cluded 1955’s ham­burger, then a hero sand­wich in 1975 and bean sprouts in pita bread for 1983 be­fore re­turn­ing to the ham­burger as the go-to of 1990. Sub­sequent vari­ations played the same trick with box­er shorts, re­cord al­bums, salt and pep­per shakers…

One of the harder things I do in my cor­por­ate design gig is to try and main­tain some wiggle room with­in UI and in­ter­ac­tion projects. More of­ten than not these put front end pieces to mar­ket that grow from months of di­li­gently sched­uled meet­ings in­volving busi­ness ana­lysts, mar­keters, bankers, front and back end pro­gram­mers, and strict dates. The UI pro­cess ex­pect­a­tion is one of ex­haust­ive re­quire­ments defin­i­tion, then pro­to­typ­ing and si­gnoff, then code. And I don’t think the mod­el is an ex­cep­tion for big or­gan­iz­a­tions with in-house teams.

I near the end of my ten­ure as Project Lead for the biggest cor­por­ate web site design project I’ve ever been a part of. We’re go­ing to hit our date (no small mir­acle giv­en that it was based on a 5000 hour es­tim­ate 6 months ago), but that’s not to say there haven’t been ma­jor chal­lenges along the way. Fore­most among these has been that of in­cor­por­at­ing the vis­ion, de­sires, feed­back, and con­cerns of all the parties in­volved. Not un­til I con­struc­ted the list of these, however, did I real­ize the achieve­ment it is to have ar­rived at a mod­ern, fo­cused, per­form­ant, and co­her­ent site. Here’s to the cooks in the kit­chen:

IE6 is in the ICU. Developers are still forced to accommodate the 8-year-old browser’s maverick rendering engine but we also find ourselves on the dawn of a new era that isn’t defined by a market-leading millstone. IE7 and 8 come markedly closer than their little brother to true standards support. Firefox, long the coder’s favorite, has found larger love and the webkit rendering engine of Safari and Chrome continues to walk the line. We are, in effect, very close if not already at the IE6 tipping point whose far side promises unencumbered development to current and native browser capabilities.

Alan Cooper, sometimes the "Father of Visual Basic," was an interaction designer before there were interaction designers. One of the first advocates of the user-centered approach, Cooper waxed lyrical and prescient in his 1995 book About Face on the politics of admitting ‘designers’ to the software club. Our field drops you like a bad habit if you languish on skills or technology, but some struggles endure 13 years later.