Finding Inspiration Pre and Post Release - Comments on a Daniel Burka Presentation

blog@undefinedrange.com (Vincent Woo) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:02:00 -0700

I highly recommend listening to the MP3 and following along with the slides of The why and how: UI case studies presentation given at Web Directions North 2008 by Daniel Burka. On the surface, it is an hour presentation fussing over insignificant details but that is what’s so great about it. Much of it isn’t about aesthetics or graphic design. Instead, the spotlight is on the process of tweaking placement, wording, and prominence. It is about rearranging for clarity and directing user actions processes. It is about intuitiveness; the end users should understand why things are in chronological order or in a threading model. The kind of design, as illustrated in the presentation with Digg and Pownce examples, that exhibits Getting Real.

Daniel Burka’s examples are fascinating because he starts off with something entirely acceptable but they are then iterated into something that is clearly better. Better not so that end users bask in awe over it’s majesty, but through transparency and clarity in its form. Yet, it is the journey that can provide the direction, incentive, and inspiration that guides design, not just some divine inspiration or foresight.

One of the things that Daniel Burka talks about is his success with using HTML mockups. I whole heartily agree as I found sketching with pen and paper and mockups in photoshop have their place in defining the general form but I’m hard pressed to properly define function in this manner. I don’t feel like I’m the only one since I’ve converted photoshop mockups to webapps, but sometimes would run into issues and ambiguity that the photoshop artist didn’t expect. It’s not their fault but unless you’re working in a webapp or through HTML, you won’t be thinking about webapp related issues. So it is refreshing to hear a designer say (loose transcript starting around 35min):

“This is actually a mockup of about eight connected HTML pages a little bit of javascript and CSS files. And so this is something I didn’t do with the previous comment system. I went immediately into implementation. So implemented in real code. Which took a lot longer and wasn’t as easy to play with because it was half broken most of the time while the code was being written. And so what is happening here is I can play around with if I digg this comment what happens. If I bury it, I can actually change your vote now and if I bury it OK that’s what happens. I want to see the comment again after I bury it OK that’s what happens. You can hide it. I can report the user. I was playing around with these things and now these interactions I can actually kind of – it’s so awkward having a bunch of HTML files interlinked but being able to play around with these interactions means I’m significantly more confident this time that when we release this thing. The flow of when you’re playing around and writing comments and editing comments, I got it setup for what happens when you write a comment we open it and save it, you edit it, you save those changes, so all those things I feel much more confident that each of those little processes all fit together alot better, they’re alot tighter.”

Design is an organic, ongoing and collaborative process and one in which all team members should have a hand in. Here, we have an example of a designer crossing the boundaries and working partly in the realm of the web developer. In the same manner, I would love to cross the boundary in the other direction more often. But too often client project work necessitates design up front for signing off and limiting cost/time resources that prevents creativity and experimentation in the latter stages of the project. In such cases, the webapp’s growth is stunted before it has a chance to mature.

Continuous refinements occur alongside continuous inspiration. Daniel Burka shows example after example where he focused and improved on design elements post release despite how sufficient they were already. The lesson: please don’t discount the inspiration generated through production use. If given the freedom of multiple iterations, projects will flourish.

I leave you with one last presentation reference about finding design inspiration from within the webpage itself. Remember, form follows function.

(~40min into the presentation): “Like I was saying before with the yellow dig button, is take that idea then take it further. Let it design language breath through the rest of the site. And so the story format has it on the left, I took it to the homepage, so you take this really basic horizontal line, you add one little off center hatch to the page and it adds a sense of brand, a sense of identity to the page. Adds a little drama to the page.”

Undefined Range : Tag interface, everything about interface

Finding Inspiration Pre and Post Release - Comments on a Daniel Burka Presentation