I asked (on the Twitters, of course) what was the first application to use the pull-to-refresh gesture. My world of followers suggested it was the original Tweetie app, which was then acquired by the Twitter overlords. Since Tweetie, it’s shown up in a bunch of apps on my iPhone. I’m told it’s also on apps all over those Android phones that everyone talks about.

What’s interesting about the pull-to-refresh gesture is how natural it feels. Need more stuff, pull down on the list. Very simple. Very intuitive.

Well, it’s only intuitive if you know about it. You see, the problem is the gesture has no affordance (a hint or clue that the function exists). There’s no way to know where pull-to-refresh is implemented. Anyone who has learned the gesture has probably experienced the pull-to-do-nothing function in all the apps where it’s not implemented. Suddenly, something that’s novel has become a basic expectation, just like Kano taught us it would.

If you didn’t know about pull-to-refresh, how would you learn it’s in your app? For the most point, it requires you learn it from someone else.

Someone who leans over and says, “Hey, did you know you can update your list by just pulling down on your thumb?”

“No Way!” is the usual response, followed by the now-common thumb maneuver. “Cool!” is what comes next.

And it happens. Just like that. We’ve just transmitted the functionality, socially.

Pull-to-refresh isn’t the only socially-transmitted functionality. In years past, it’s how I’ve seen people learn about drag-and-drop in applications. It’s how they learn about special keys, like F5 for refresh or F1 for help. A lot of functionality has been transmitted from one person to the next, socially.

There’s nothing wrong with socially-transmitted functionality, as long as it’s not something the user needs (they can use the design just fine without it) and you have users that talk with each other. The problem comes from when you, as a designer, know about an functionality that only transmits socially, it’s hard to realize that people around you haven’t caught on yet. Just because it’s in your pattern library doesn’t mean your users will know about it.

[A note about accessibility: socially-transmitted functionality is rarely accessible in itself, as it usually has no way for a screen reader to work. For accessibility reasons, you probably want alternative access.]

In a recent site visit, I watched users struggle with navigating around a web app because the return-to-main-menu function was a not-obvious icon that looked like decoration to the untrained eye. All the developers observing the visit knew about it, but this collection of users hadn’t been infected with the knowledge of the functionality, and therefore didn’t use it. Their alternative: sign out of the app and back in again, which returned them to the top-level menu. (Boy, did that ever elicit a sigh of wonderment from the observation party!)

Do you have socially-transmitted functionality in your design? Are they things that users can live without and will be delighted when they hear about it from a friend?

Right now, few things are hotter topics that mobile in the design world. With the burst of smartphone and tablet technology, the mobile design landscape has just exploded.

With this new landscape comes a new way of thinking about design. It’s no longer about filling every pixel on the screen and implementing a multitude of different functionality.

The smaller screen demands that we hone our functionality down to it’s bare essentials. It means letting the content drive what we do, instead of putting the actions first. And it requires we rethink the basics of interaction, as touch gestures offer more flexibility than the mouse pointer.

Nobody has thought more about what it means to design for mobile that Luke Wroblewski. For the past few years, he’s been touring the world with a detailed explanation of what it takes do create great mobile experiences.

We’re really excited that he’s joining us for UI16. If you think mobile is in your future, you need to make sure you attend his full-day workshop. There you’ll learn everything there is to know about making a fabulous, interactive mobile web experience.

This is your opportunity to hear all 12 Masters from the Tour give their 75-minute presentations. The OnDemand collection consists of 15 hours of audio recordings, Q&A from the audience, and the Masters presentation decks. It’s a toolkit that you can share with everyone in your office. You can access it any time you want, as often as you want.

Web App Masters OnDemand covers these topics

• Constructing sites for active communities
• Building native device vs. mobile browser-based applications
• Producing beautiful data visualizations
• Using data for design decisions
• Integrating infographics and games to engage your users
• Designing for mobile first
• Handling rich interaction techniques on multiple devices & platforms
• Looking at AARP’s journey into web-based applications
• Conducting successful kickoff meetings
• Finding users’ deepest needs and desires
• Designing Salesforce.com’s Cloud Apps
• Creating great design principles for your team
• Ensuring a positive user experience with mobile

Learn more about Web App Masters OnDemand.

With Web App Masters 2011 OnDemand you’ll get

• Fifteen hours of audio from 12 Masters
• The best of the Q&A from all the tour stops
• Presentation slides from all 12 talks
• Unlimited access to the material any time you want it, as often as you want it

Order Web App Masters 2011 OnDemand now

No pre-ordering and no waiting for a disc. With just a few clicks, you can have Web App Masters OnDemand at your fingertips and start to improve your web apps today.

Purchase Web App Masters OnDemand by August 30, 2011, for $179. After the 30th, the price
increases to $229.

Now go get your bundle of goodness.

What happens over time with applications is a design entropy sets in. As new features are added, they are glued on top of old ones, often with slightly different interfaces. Slowly, the application starts to develop a Frankenstein look-and-feel, which hurts the users and the business.

Teams can avoid all this. Using established, well thought out, and proven user interface design patterns, teams can hedge these problems off before they become unmanageable. Even the worst applications can benefit from the careful hand of applying the best design practices.

There’s no one who knows how to deal with hedging off design entropy than Hagan Rivers. I first met Hagan back in 1995, when she was working for Netscape as one of the world’s first web application designers. Since then, she’s become a world expert in interface design, helping hundreds of teams get their application UIs under control.

I’ve had several opportunities to work with Hagan on various projects. Each time, I walk away learning new design techniquesn and feel smarter about how to tackle even the most complex hairball of an app.

Hagan probably has the biggest collection of application design examples I’ve ever seen. Everytime she delivers her workshops and presentations, she brings out these stunningly amazing sets of both good and bad examples. You can instantly see how changing a design in just a few simple steps can immediately make for a better user experience.

This year, I’ve been working with Hagan on her full-day workshop for the User Interface 16 Conference. She’s putting together a intense program, where you’ll walk through practically every type of interface element, from tables and lists, to working with trees, forms, and wizards. She’ll tackle the gnarly topics of simplifying a complex navigation scheme and creating an effective dashboard display.

Anyone who is fighting design entropy, trying to get their application’s UI under control will be riveted by this in-depth workshop. I’m so happy Hagan’s on our UI16 program and I know you’ll love her session.

See the other UI16 Spotlights:

You can catch the sneak preview of UI16 at uiconf.com. (And there’s still a few of the sneak preview $1,349 registrations left. Snag one while they are still available.)

Pam Rodriguez and Luke Wroblewski did a nice job of posting their notes. Thanks guys!

• Steve Portigal on Design Fieldwork: Uncovering Innovation from the Outside In – Pam’s notes, Luke’s notes.
• Kate Brigham on PatientsLikeMe: Adventures with Data Visualizations – Pam’s Notes, Luke’s Notes.
• Luke Wroblewski on Designing Mobile Web Experiences – Pam’s Notes.
• Mike Lee on AARP: Designing a Strategy for Organizational Transformations – Pam’s Notes, Luke’s Notes.
• My presentation on The Essential Principles behind Great Design Principles – Pam’s Notes.

As you can see from the #UIEWAMT Twitter stream, everybody had a great time and we all learned a ton.

There’s one more stop on the 2011 tour – Minneapolis on June 27-28. Use the promo code BLOG and get $100 off the registration price.

See you there!

UIE Web App Masters Tour:
Get $100 off the Minneapolis Masters Tour with the promotion code BLOG.
Minneapolis

Blogger Pam Rodriguez has done a tremendous job summarizing the first day’s sessions. You can read them here:

• My talk: Mobilism & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm
• Bill Scott’s talk: Designing for Mice and Men
• Josh Clark’s talk: Mobile Apps: Native or Web-Based?
• Noah Iliinsky’s talk: The Steps to Beautiful Visualizations
• Julie Zhuo’s talk: Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Our own Web App Master, Luke Wroblewski, also has some great summaries:

• My talk: Mobilism & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm
• Bill Scott’s talk: Designing for Mice and Men
• Josh Clark’s talk: Mobile Apps: Native or Web-Based?
• Noah Iliinsky’s talk: The Steps to Beautiful Visualizations
• Julie Zhuo’s talk: Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions

Thanks to Pam and Luke for taking such great notes.

You can follow along with the second day by following the #UIEWAMT hashtag or the UIE Web App Tour attendee and speaker Twitter list.

UIE Web App Masters Tour:
Get $100 off the Minneapolis Masters Tour with the promotion code BLOG.
Seattle · Minneapolis

I’m interested in finding information about “On Object UI”. To me, this term means displaying controls on or near an object after the user has interacted with the object by hovering over or clicking on the object.

For example, in Microsoft Word, after highlighting/selecting some text, a Mini-toolbar appears near the text with choices that the designer thought the user was most likely to want to choose next.

Another example from Word: click on the File Tab from the ribbon (Office 2010) to enter the “backstage” of Office. Then click on the Info Tab. On the right hand side of the screen there is a “Related People” section. If I hover over the author name, or the “Add an author” text, additional controls appear offering functionality related to managing the author information.

This technique seems to work well, but what are the recommended best practices for its use ? What has been learned about this technique that is to be avoided ? Etc. And what is it called ? I know it by “On Object UI”, but a Google search of “On Object UI” finds very little.

If there is another name for it, I would love to know it. If there is not another name for it, then this seems like an area that User Interface Engineering should research and capitalize on by selling that information back to suckers like me.

Well Greg,

I think there’s a lot of thinking that’s gone into what you’re talking about. The broad term is pop-up menus, though people also call them context menus or on-hover menus.

Chapter 4 of Bill Scott & Theresa Neil’s Designing Web Interfaces talks about these as Hover-Reveal Contextual Tools. (Their book is a great resource. It should be within reach of everyone doing web design.)

I expected to find something similar in the Yahoo Design Pattern Library, but a quick glance didn’t yield anything.

That’s a start at least. We’ve looked at creating UIE pattern libraries, but it’s a hard challenge, as interfaces are constantly in flux. Just look at the recent patterns emerging from iPad apps and you’ll see that any library would have to double in size. I think they only way to do this would be wikipedia-style, with an army of folks trying to keep up voluntarily. That doesn’t lend itself to the making-money-off-of-suckers model.

Hope that’s helpful.

Jared

Let’s talk about search!

Earlier this year, Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender gave us their comprehensive book, Search Patterns. If you work on a web site or intranet where you want your users to find and discover all the good stuff you’ve hidden within, you want to read this book.

And here’s your chance to not only read a great book, but to ask your questions of one of the authors. Peter Morville will join us on December 6 at 2pm ET for a live Q&A about the book, finding things, and designing for discovery.

Joining us is easy:

Sign up at our EventBrite page. (This way you’ll get the connection information and last minute reminders.)

If you don’t already own it, buy Peter & Jeffrey’s book, Search Patterns. (Amazon’s got it for great prices, especially on the Kindle.)

Read the book by December 6. (Don’t worry, it’s an easy and fascinating read, with lots of Jeffrey’s fun illustrations and examples.)

Join us on the 6th at 2pm ET for our discussion. Have a phone near you and you can dial in to the show to ask Peter your questions directly!
See you there.

Thanks to the good folks at Aquent for helping us make all this happen. (If you’re looking for top design talent with the perfect skills to match your project, you should definitely look to Aquent. And if you’re top talent, you want to check out what Aquent can do to help you find some awesome gigs. Learn more about Aquent. )

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Few people have thought about search, and all that it encompasses, like Mark Burrell. Mark’s the Worldwide Lead for User Experience at Endeca, the company that builds search applications for many of the sites you use every day. These guys know search, and Mark is tasked with making the search experience humane.

With his vast experience with search applications, he oversees the Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library, which attempts to catalog many of the most successful interface patterns for search. The goal is to make user and designer’s lives easier—and their searches more effective.

Which is exactly why we asked him to join Peter Morville for a UIE Virtual Seminar on Search and Discovery Patterns, back in January of this year. Today we’re revisiting the topic by sharing the follow up podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the seminar. Below are a few highlights from the podcast.

Much of the challenge in search lies in sorting through results in a meaningful way. There are a number of interface components that sites use to accomplish this, and one is the range slider. You may have seen them on sites like Kayak.com. But are these intuitive for the users? Mark says they can be, but the devil is in the details. Designing the search experience is complex and there aren’t simple answers. Used correctly, range sliders can be useful.

“Determine what information is critical for the people you’re designing for and make that salient.”
-Mark Burrell

One size doesn’t fit all. One question asked, should you use different patterns for different audiences? There is not just one right answer to this question, but you need to know your audience and their scenarios, Mark says. Different interfaces or patterns for different types of searchers can be an effective decision.

One example of this is with Intranets. Mark says there’s a surprising amount of overlap between design for Intranets and public-facing sites. But there are advantages to knowing your audience intimately, as with an Intranet. You can tune your search and interface for specific groups within your company. A great example is in searching for human resources information. An average employee searching for “insurance forms” might expect to get a list of the relevant forms for her to fill out.

But if this search comes from an HR employee, her scenario is almost certainly different. She might rather see recently updated forms or policy documents that pertain to the forms, instead of the forms themselves. Leveraging our existing knowledge of who is searching can lead to powerful modifications.

There is much more in the podcast, including a discussion of combining searching and browsing, the complexities of designing components that denote AND vs. OR searches, and the good and the bad with “type ahead” assisted search. Tune in, and then let us hear your questions and thoughts in the comments below.

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Nathan Curtis

If your site has more than one page, chances are you have repeated elements: Repeated interface elements, repeated design patterns, repeated code snippets. When you multiply your responsibilities over a large site and involve many designers, developers, and stakeholders, how do you make sure you’re not wasting your time building many widgets that already exist? That’s where a standardization process comes into play.

Nathan Curtis and the crew at EightShapes are the leaders in standards, reuse, consistency, and libraries. In this podcast, Jared Spool speaks with Nathan in anticipation of his workshop on this topic at the 2010 User Interface Conference.

(Side note: in this context “standards” are different than “web standards”, though completely compatible.)

When do you know if you need a component library? Nathan says the idea often surfaces when designers and developers start chatting about their collaborations. When many people are touching the design, the idea to reuse components comes up quickly. Standardizing on certain page components, for example, helps in many ways. It prevents double work and keeps the experience across sites (especially large sites) consistent. Certain items, say a calendar picker on a travel site, are especially useful to reuse.

While the creation of a library is useful and efficient in many ways, storing the components isn’t free. It requires a manpower commitment and possible software purchases or provisioning. Nathan says to do it right, you should treat it as if it were another project on your team’s plate. But once committed, you can focus on the quality of the components. If you have 18 different video players across your site, someone can take the time to discover which ones work best and then improve the experience across the site.

Beware of how you maintain your library, Nathan warns. If you let it get too out of date, it’ll lose its credibility and people will begin to stray. If you can’t ensure the library will be faithfully maintained, make sure only your critical items are in the library. Prioritize for the components that have the most effect on the User Experience.

Nathan shares many more tips for libraries in the podcast. But he’ll have even more when he teaches a full-day workshop on the topic at this year’s User Interface Conference.

Explore Nathan’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by September 22 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

Are you reusing your components? Are you curating them in a library? Share your experiences with the community in the comments.

As we were talking, I had suggested that a UX Design Library was a snapshot of what the team felt the future of the design would be like. “Oh, no,” Nathan exclaimed! “I strongly disagree with that idea.” He went on to say that the library really was a snapshot of the past, not the future. A great library represents the best and most promising pieces of the design, so that future work could take advantage of what can be done.

Creating a library that works for the team isn’t technically challenging. However, there are important considerations and steps that the team needs to make sure it’s a success.

In today’s UIEtips, Nathan walks us through the process of creating a library. He’s broken it down into four doable steps (and even has a fabulous poster-grade visualization of the process). You’re really going to enjoy his article.

Read Nathan’s article, How to Create a UX Design Library.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to talk with Nathan on a regular basis. Every conversation we have is eye opening and amazing. You can have that same opportunity when you sign up for the UI15 conference. Nathan will deliver his fabulous full-day workshop, Standards, Reuse, Consistency, & Libraries, where you’ll learn how to capture the best of your work for the future. Read more about the workshops.

Have you put together your own library? How did it go? We’d love to hear about your experiences below.

Explore Nathan’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by September 22 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

Without the mind-meld thing, we have to resort to more primitive approaches to get everyone on the same page. In the past, we’ve tried templates, guidelines, and style guides. However, these have not proven to be very effective and end up frustrating teams more than helping the design process.

A few years back, we started seeing the emergence of pattern libraries as a solution to this problem. However, recently our research has shown us that pattern libraries only get you so far. For the rest of the solution, a component library can fill the gaps.

We’re revisiting an article that Nathan Curtis wrote for us in January 2009. Nathan does a great job outlining what patterns and components are and how they’re related. I think you’ll find this article quite beneficial and a good refresher if you’re already working with patterns and components.

Read the article, Components Versus Patterns.

If you’re thinking a pattern or component library can help your team be more efficient and create better designs, then you’ll want to check out Nathan’s full-day workshop: Standards, Reuse, Consistency, & Libraries. Nathan received rave reviews on a similar workshop he presented at the Web App Summit in 2009. Get more details on his workshop and the other 7 at http://uiconf.com.

Nathan is presenting at this year’s UI15 conference. Explore his workshop and the other full-day workshops. Planning on attending? Register by 9/9/10 for the lowest rate.

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There are more than 16 different events and 96 interesting moments in a common drag and drop interaction. Your designs must leverage these moments to enhance the user interaction to deliver the right feedback and avoid distraction and confusion.

Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE’s Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we’re bringing you this audio and visual sample.

View Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments Sample

Since we couldn’t embed all the visuals here, we’ve built a special showcase. You can listen to Bill describe the components of his first principle of Designing for Interesting Moments, “Input where there’s output”, and view his example videos and screen shots. Bill’s presentation is visually rich. You can listen to the audio alone, but we recommend you view the visuals with the audio.

In this excerpt from the talk, Bill touches on patterns that work and anti-patterns to avoid.

Patterns

• In-line editing
• Multi-in-line editing
• Symmetry

Anti-patterns

• Non-symmetry
• Tiny-targets
• Artificial Visual Constructs

Until May 7th, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

This is just one principle from Bill Scott’s Designing for Interesting Moments You should join us to see all six principles at the UIE Web App Masters Tour. You won’t regret it.

Ken Kellogg’s podcast talks about navigating the design process within a large corporate world, and how customer research plays an integral part of new designs. Listen to Ken’s podcast.

In Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s podcast, they talk about the huge collection of social design elements in their book. Christian and Erin also cover social communities and where the growth of “social in” is occurring. Listen to Christian and Erin’s podcast.

Did you miss parts 1-3 of the interview series? We showcased these Masters:

• Part 1 – Julie Zhuo on how Facebook handles design changes. And Bill Scott taking a look at design patterns and rich interactions. Here’s the post to part 1.
• Part 2 – Hagan Rivers’ new approach to designing web app navigation. And Stephen Anderson on how to encourage user behavior with the design of your web app. Read the post to part 2.
• Part 3 – Jason Fried discusses 37signals’ design and development process. And Luke Wroblewski on how to make web forms less intimidating. Here’s the post to part 3.

If you enjoyed the Web App Masters interview series, then you’ll want to explore the Web App Masters Tour. It’s two days of inspiring presentations with a perfect blend of theory and practice. The Tour stops in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle. Learn more about the dates and program at www.UIETour.com.

Until April 23, you can register for any of the Tour cities for $795 when you use the promotion code TOURBLOG. Learn more about the tour at www.UIETour.com

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Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone

As soon as we saw Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish’s new book, Designing Social Interfaces, we knew you’d want to hear about their rich collection of social patterns and principles. An outgrowth from creating the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library, the book is a perfect repository for anyone planning, designing, and building social aspects into their applications.

The core fundamentals of people wanting to share, people wanting to connect to people, people wanting to feel like they have a social space to be a part of, aren’t going to change. —Erin

We’re excited to have both authors with us on the UIE Web App Masters Tour and we made sure to schedule this podcast with them so we could discuss the realm of social interfaces.

Jared Spool discusses several points with Erin and Christian, including,

• How the book became a huge collection of social design elements and how people are using Designing Social Interfaces in the wild
• Could a better understanding of social design patterns have helped Google launch Buzz with less blowback?
• Expecting to build a community on your site, versus leveraging existing communities (for example, Facebook Connect)
• The growth of social in new contexts (mobile, new audiences)

We tried to drive down to a bedrock level of principles of human behavioral drives and needs and tradeoffs that are fundamental to the dynamics of the system. If there are new trends… that part can be updated without throwing out the idea that you need to model people in your system. —Christian

Tune in for more from Erin and Christian, and join all of us at the Web App Masters tour to hear their Designing the Social In session, where they’ll highlight many real-life examples to kick start your app’s social life.

Want to learn more from Christian and Erin? See their session– Designing the Social In at the Web App Masters Tour

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Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leverage Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions, which we decided to break up into two podcasts. This is the first, and the second will feature Peter’s co-presenter Mark Burrell answering even more of your questions. Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in these podcasts.

In this episode, Jared Spool sits down with Peter to address many issues, including an interesting notion that Peter mentioned in the seminar;

“Browsing doesn’t scale.”

This came up in discussion about whether a site needs to be optimized towards search or towards browsing. Peter said that the two are all-but inseparable. The idea was that for very large sites, there comes a limit to how deep you can patiently navigate to reach the information you’re looking for. In these cases, many users would start their journey with a search, and then navigate from the results. An example of this use case can be seen with how many people use Amazon.com. Their visit to the immense site may start with a search for a particular product, author or artist, and then begin to navigate from their initial search results.

Best Result First Pattern

Another topic that proved popular was Peter’s Best Result First pattern. It may seem obvious that you want the best search result for a query to appear first in the results, but achieving that is not particularly easy. Peter suggests that it takes iterative tuning and testing while tweaking relevance algorithms, but then also pulling in other factors like popularity, date, and format data.

Advanced Search

Several attendees had questions about “advanced search.” Should it be built into sites to assist novice users sort through results better or to help sophisticated users dig more deeply? Others questioned if the notion of “advanced search” was dead altogether.

Peter replied that advanced search wasn’t dead, though many might wish it so. He observed that advanced search often causes confusion among users and many of these interfaces and options overwhelm them. He says you should design your search as if there would be no advanced search at all. One innovative way to give more control to searchers is to present search results with faceted navigation. This way advanced and novices users alike can have an understandable tool to filter through their results.

Faceted Navigation within Search Results

Not all sites work well with facets. If you have your doubts, you need to measure the use of the facets and see if they’re leading to success. However, it’s difficult to determine the success of the facets because trouble could mean either their implementation was done poorly, or that facets simply aren’t a good match for your site.

There was much more in this interview, and I invite you to tune in to get more great insight from Peter and Jared. And check back shortly for the second podcast interview for this seminar, with Mark Burrell. And don’t forget, you can still access the recording of the Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns seminar if you haven’t yet seen it.

What challenges are you facing with search on your site?

We’ve lined up two more Masters for our UIE Web App Masters Tour. We’re thrilled to announce Bill Scott and Ken Kellogg will be joining us.

Bill Scott

First, let me say this: Bill is the nicest person on the entire planet. You’ll notice this the moment you talk to him. But that’s not why we invited him.

I wanted him on the Masters Tour because he’s brilliant, particularly when it comes to design patterns for web-based applications. Bill spoke at our Web App Summit a few years back and dazzled the audience with his presentation on Anti Patterns—things you shouldn’t do when designing.

In addition to co-authoring the book, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, Bill is also the Director of UI Engineering at Netflix. All of these things add up to one thing: you’re going to love his insights. Bill will be with us in all four cities.

Ken Kellogg

Managing the design of a $6.5 billion a year website is no easy challenge. Especially when that website is owned by one of the oldest, most respected brands in the world. While many of us deal with the battle of old ways against modern thinking, this is on an epic scale.

That’s why I wanted you to hear from Ken Kellogg, who sits directly in the middle of that battle, as the Director of User Research for Marriott International. Ken is currently guiding major design changes through Marriott.com and will report, first hand, what that has been like. His stories will inspire you. You can hear Ken talk about his experiences at every stop on our tour.

It’s coming together.

Bill and Ken join a great slate, including Doug Bowman, Stephen Anderson, Julie Zhuo, and Christian Crumlish. Oh, I’ll be there too (but you probably knew that).

Just a few more presenters to go and we’ll have a full program. This is getting exciting now.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.

Join us January 12 for our next webinar: Leveraging Search & Discovery Patterns For Great Online Experiences, with Peter Morville and Mark Burrell.

The abundance and variety of search implementations present a challenge to designers: How do we leverage the behaviors our users are developing to ensure they find the content they’re seeking? By understanding how people interact with search implementations, we can create effective designs that deliver great experiences for both searching and discovering.

We couldn’t have timed this seminar better. In just a few weeks, Peter Morville will put his new book, Search Patterns, to press. And Mark Burrell and his team at Endeca have been working hard to release their new UI Design Pattern Library for Search & Discovery. So, this is the perfect time to talk about how to leverage patterns for better search designs.

This seminar is perfect for you, if you’re working on providing the best experience with your site’s search implementation. Bring your entire team and schedule extra time to talk about what you’ve learned—you’ll want to implement Peter and Mark’s ideas right away.

This winter, Peter’s new book, Search Patterns, published by O’Reilly, will hit the stores. But you won’t have to buy it, because as soon as it comes off the press, we’ll send you a copy—just because you attended this seminar.

Thanks to Peter, Mark, and the great folks at Endeca, we can include this must-have book. We’ve seen an early draft and we’re amazed by Peter’s talent to explain these topics so clearly. The beautiful full-color illustrations and screen shots don’t hurt either.

Register your team today, and reserve your copy of Search Patterns.

Do you use design patterns? What questions do you have about them? Where do you go, or where would you go to find them? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

On January 7 Peter Morville will discuss Search Design Patterns, and in the same session, Mark Burrell will tell you how to then use them.

Later in the month, on January 28, Steve Portigal will present to you his thoughts on studying your users in their own context, Ethnography.

During last year’s UIE Roadshow, our audiences couldn’t get enough on the topic of personas. So, on February 18, we’ve asked Tamara Adlin to talk about The Power of Ad-hoc Personas. Personas can be your ticket to lasting organizational clarity… and it doesn’t take a ton of costly research.

With his book, Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide just hitting the bookstore shelves, Todd Zaki Warfel will help you flesh out your design ideas, test your assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users on March 29.

In the Spring, look for Kristina Halvorson to help you with your content strategy and Louis Rosenfeld to dive deep on Search Analytics. And there is much more in the works.

Until December 3, you can still sign your team up for the UIE Virtual Seminar Subscription programs . Not only is it a tremendous savings, but you get the benefit of lifetime access to each recording and the ease of registering and paying just one time.

We also plan to unveil our plan for our User Experience Training Library. Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness.

Have you ever attended a UIE Virtual Seminar? What do you like best about them? How has your team maximized what it gets out of these learning events? Share your thoughts and experiences below.

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A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets.  As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in how to make the jump from a standard on-site search to faceted search, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterward, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of Faceted Search.

During the podcast, Adam asked Pete and Daniel to dig into these questions:

• Should we show counts for each facet? What about when using multiple selection?
• Can you elaborate on the mixing and matching of precision and recall results to construct facets?
• Is there a best practice for deselecting facets?
• Most search interfaces assume a flat list of results. What happens when you mix up different types of results, and how would you distribute them across a page?

Tune in to hear more about designing for facets. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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Robert Hoekman, Jr. recently joined us for a Virtual Seminar on Interaction Design Frameworks, called, Web Anatomy: Interaction Design with Frameworks. The concept is a new one, and Robert and I are exploring and introducing the concept in new book due out shortly. The seminar (which is still available) was well-received, and we asked Robert back to help us answer some audience questions we did not have time to discuss during the seminar.

Here’s the list of the questions we discussed,

• Do you see being able to abstract information architecture into set frameworks?
• Should design patterns really be referred to as production patterns that fit within creative frameworks?
• Are you basing design patterns on generally accepted Web standards or what’s standard within the uses of the business?
• If you’re assembling a site with anatomical framework pieces, how do you avoid building a Frankenstein?
• Is there any relationship between an IxD framework, and a UI framework like jQuery?
• If everything is encapsulated and solved with an Interaction Design framework… will there be less need for Interaction designers in the future and more need for visual designers to differentiate?

Tune in and see how Robert thinks frameworks could make your job noticeably easier and perhaps even more interesting. If you still have questions, let us know in the comments.

Robert is thinking about this concept more than anyone we know. So much so, that we’ve asked him to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on Wednesday, May 27 — Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks .

We’d love for you to join us at the Virtual Seminar next week, but you don’t need to wait to be exposed to this concept. Earlier this year, Robert wrote a great article on frameworks. If design patterns describe cross-application behaviors, and design components are the place within an application where the behaviors and the implementation meet, then an interaction design framework is a systemic view of a specific portion of the system. An example? Let’s say you’re developing a site where users will need to log in. You know you’ll need a “username/password” login form. But, did you also remember the “Forgot Your Password?” feature? Or what you’ll need to create the user’s account? Or the functionality to change the password? Frameworks are the place where behaviors meet enterprise-wide thinking.

Are you involved in making web-based applications a key development platform? You’ll want to understand how frameworks make large-scale projects much easier. Robert’s article is a good introduction as to why that is.

Web Anatomy: Introducing Interaction Design Frameworks

By Robert Hoekman, Miskeeto
Originally published: Feb 02, 2009

UIE Virtual Seminar
Web Anatomy: Effective Interaction Design with Frameworks
With Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009, 1:30pm ET
90-minute online presentation

In your project, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got all the essential features along with those new, super-cool, hip capabilities that will dazzle your users. By using these interaction design frameworks, you’ll have a ready kit of necessary components so you’ll create the best possible design.

To help us understand how interaction design frameworks help us think through our designs, we’ve invited Robert Hoekman, Jr to tell us how they work. Robert’s been thinking about Interaction Design Frameworks more than anyone we know. He’ll show you how frameworks fill in the gaps left by design standards, best practices, and libraries of individual patterns. You’ll see examples from major web sites, where the frameworks helped predict missing functionality and critical design elements. Avoid these costly mistakes, and you’ll deliver a top-notch experience for your users.

Robert put together a great preview for you, to help you understand what to expect out of this seminar.
Click here to visit the site page with the preview.

If your team needs to quickly come up with designs that are both creative and usable, Robert’s seminar is a must for you. You’ll want to watch this with your entire team, so they come away knowing how interaction design frameworks will dramatically simplify your organization’s design process. Reserve your spot today!

Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

Nathan Curtis is a principal and co-founder of Eight Shapes in Washington, D.C., where he is spearheading research into design patterns and component libraries. Eight Shapes turns out great work in the UX and IA realms, with some impressive clients.

In our discussion, Nathan and I first defined design pattern libraries and component libraries. A pattern library is a repository for ideas and solutions to design interaction problems. Component libraries are comprised of actual functioning parts with real code. An example would be a log-in process. Your pattern would define the experience of logging into your application, from the interaction, and often visual standpoint. Your component would be the chunk of code that represents the set of fields and controls that can be replicated across your organization’s web properties, so that you can easily create a consistent experience for your users, no matter where they may enter your system.

You can see just from this one example that if you’re designing even a moderately large site, having repositories like these can save you tremendous production time. You can multiply those savings if you have multiple teams working on different portions of the same property. Each team doesn’t need to invent their own wheels and engineer them from scratch.

We go into more detail in the podcast and also compare these to style guides, which were the first step toward this idea—one that is too often broken, over restrictive, and simply ignored. Tune in to hear how pattern and component libraries can help you avoid these traps.

Nathan will teach us much more about how to build out your own library of reusable patterns and components in a full-day seminar at our Web App Summit, coming April 2009 to Newport Beach, California. You won’t want to miss it.

Have you employed a pattern or component library in your projects? What experiences can you share? Please let us know in the comments.

Fast forward three years and today we get a comment from Tessie asking:

I am currently designing a pattern library for my company. Can you recommend any pattern library systems which we can purchase which is easy to update and features a commenting system?

I didn’t know the answer, so I pinged Nathan Curtis, who is our go-to-guy on building pattern libraries these days. Here’s what he wrote back:

Good question. In my experience, I’ve not come across a pre-fab application for documenting patterns, components, or other libraries of reusable design assets that have the types of attributes (e.g., Use When) and other specific features. Instead, I’ve seen that teams have gone one of four routes to publish library documentation:

1. Home-grown systems: This is expensive and time-consuming, but ultimately the most advanced and tailored solution for an organization. Yahoo has written (on boxesandarrows.com) and subsequently spoken extensively about the challenges and roadmap they’ve traversed. Sun Microsystems has also use a custom website as the cornerstone of their efforts; lucky for us, they expose it to the community too at sun.com/webdesign/.
2. Collaboration tools: One team effectively used Jive Software’s Clearspace tool that includes a well suited three-prong feature set: wiki (articles per pattern & component, including editing permissions for team & individual, commenting and ratings), discussion boards (new requests, general discussions), and blog (publish ongoing notifications and articles about the overall library).
3. Basic tools: Other teams have set up a wiki or tried to transform a basic collaborative tool to publish patterns. This may be a good short term fix, but isn’t really a tenable long term solution unless you can really start to customize it.
4. Documents: For better or worse, some teams don’t have access to web-based solutions for publishing a library, and this really hamstrings their efforts. That said, they’ve gone to great lengths to compose documents (like a “Component Guide”, “User Experience Guide”, or “Pattern Library”) that become a versioned document managed over time. Additionally, with a modular documentation system, they can architect their guides in such a way that pages can be linked to project-specific documents as appendices or even key pages to scale changes or overlay annotations.

Hope this helps!

I think it does! What do you think?

[You may have heard: Nathan will be presenting his full-day workshop, Achieving Reuse with Patterns and Libraries at the UIE Web App Summit. Check it out!]