Sophie Dennis

"We can divide well-done design projects into a discovery phase… an exploration phase…..."

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 21:19:49 +0100

“We can divide well-done design projects into a discovery phase… an exploration phase… and a refinement phase”

- Jared Spool, ‘Shifting to Disposable Personas’, 21 May 2013

We can divide well-done design projects into a discovery phase (where we explore the boundaries of the problem we’re trying to solve), an exploration phase (where we toy with different possible solutions), and a refinement phase (where we choose a direction and fill out the details). Not everyone does design projects well, but the folks who do end up following these three phases. The ones who don’t, well, they skip one or more of these stages then regret it later.

Or, as Leisa would say, “trust the process”. You won’t have all the answers at the beginning. But if you trust the process, you’ll get to them in the end.

"Not drinking tea and not having cream on cream teas reduces the day to day hassle, stress and..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 13:03:36 +0100

“Not drinking tea and not having cream on cream teas reduces the day to day hassle, stress and confusion of living in Devon by approximately 90%”

- Barnaby Walters reflects on conversations at an Exeter Web meetup.

Working in Harmony: Links and further reading from my talk

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:55:00 +0100

My talk at Port80 2013 riffed on the theme of the parallels between music and the web, and why music offers often better analogies, especially when considering workflow and collaboration, than traditional print design. Here are the slides, playlist and suggestions for further reading.

Slides

http://www.slideshare.net/sophiedennis/working-in-harmony-port80-2013

Context

Stuff I don’t necessarily entirely agree with, but that forms the context for some of the points I’m making.

Mark Boulton, A New Canon, 9 Dec 2012
Owen Gregory takes issue with Mark’s argument that on the web “there is no page” in his Antiphonal Geometry talk

Rachel Lovinger, The Nimble Report, Razorfish, 2010
“it’s more structure that makes content nimble and sets it free” - remains one of the key references when arguing for greater structure beyond simple HTML in content authoring

Cennydd Bowles, What Bugs Me About “Content Out”, 20 Nov 2011
Although Cennydd is also making the content+design=meaning argument, I’d take issue with the idea that “content out” disregards the influence of design on meaning

History

Cern, Twenty years of a free, open web

Jeffrey Veen, The Art & Science of Web Design, 2000
I quote from Veen’s earlier Hotwired Stylebook in the presentation, but this is a better overview of the history of the web and where we were c. 2000

John Allsopp, A Dao of Web Design,A List Apart, 7 April 2000
A lot of people are quoting this when discussing responsive design. It’s worth reading the whole thing to see how far we’ve come

Jeremy Keith, A Brief History of Markup, HTML5 for Web Designers, (2010)

Playlist

Steven Isserlis, Prelude Suite no 1 and Gigue Suite no 4, Bach: The Cello Suites (2007)
Yo-Yo Ma, Gigue Suite no 4, Inspired by Bach (1998)
Kathryn Tickell, Old Morpeth Rant / Morpeth Rant / Hesleyside Reel, Northumberland Collection (2009)
Bellowhead, Dockside Rant, Broadside (2012)
Kate Rusby, The Unquiet Grave, 20 (2012)
Lau, The Unquiet Grave, Lau Live (2008), released 2012 on Lightweights & Gentlemen + Lau Live Remastered (2012)
Seth Lakeman, Sound of a Drum, Poor Man’s Heaven (2008)

♫ Listen on Spotify

The Isserlis Bach Cello Suites is not on Spotify but you can listen to samples at hyperion-records.co.uk

The Rant Step

Morpeth Rant on The Session
Basic notation and midi files

English rant step danced by Derek Shaw, YouTube

How to Dance the Rant Step, Colin Hume
Colin explains the vital “po-ta-to crisps” trick

120 web designers attempt to dance a Rant Step, a Vine by @cole007

The launch of the new University of Surrey website

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:21:00 +0000

By George, we did it! www.surrey.ac.uk

I’ve spent the last three months working with University of Surrey’s Digital team, wrangling* a team of freelancers, contractors and in-house designers, developers and writers to deliver what must be - if we do say so ourselves - the most radical and innovative HE website in the UK right now. Here’s the story of the Big Launch, as it unfolded on Twitter:

* aka project managing

Designing Content: how web designers can stop worrying and learn...

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 16:27:00 +0100

Designing Content: how web designers can stop worrying and learn to love content strategy

Discussing why content and design are equally important to great user experiences at the digpen conference in Plymouth, on 29 Sep 2012. The second half of the talk then shares simple tools and techniques web designers can steal from content strategists to help get better content from their clients.

The talk went pretty well with some good feedback and conversations afterwards, even if I was a bit under-prepared. (Note to self: in future, either organise the conference, or speak at the conference, not both!)

I presented a similar - if shorter - version of this at Exeter Web Meetup last year. At both events the hot topic for smaller agencies was: how do we get clients to care about content? Too many clients simply don’t seem to mind if their website content is poor-quality, nonsensical marketing babble, and will not invest time or money in making it any better.

I fear the real issue is that such clients don’t really care about their websites. Which as a web professional trying to deliver a great online experience for your clients’ customers, is pretty soul destroying.

Update: Slides now available on SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/sophiedennis/digpen-v-designing-content-or-how-web-designers-can-stop-worrying-and-learn-to-love-content-strategy

Predict the Sky: New UX & UI concepts, Oct 2012 from Sophie...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 17:49:00 +0100

Predict the Sky: New UX & UI concepts, Oct 2012 from Sophie Dennis on Vimeo.

Another weekend Hackathon at The Met Office meant a chance to reconvene Team Predict The Sky. The story of building our prototype iOS and Android apps, which tell you when there is something cool happening in the night sky where you are, during the NASA Space Apps Challenge in April 2012, is told on the PredictTheSky GitHub Page.

You can see videos of my original paper prototype, and the prototype iOS and Android apps which we built over the original weekend.

I think this weekend was a bit of a hard lesson for some of the team in the large gap between a prototype and a finished product. Circumstances meant I was only able to join in remotely, so the team in Exeter did some corridor testing with the prototype Android app. This revealed a number of UI issues, especially with the rushed design implementation. We also hadn’t been touch-centric enough, with a lot of pressing buttons when people’s first instinct was to swipe. Plus I had an idea for a “date driven” UI approach which I wanted to try.

After a long conference call with the team, I spent the evening working on ideas for simplifying the existing concept, making things more swipe-y, and experimenting with the UX implications of switching to a date-driven model. Once I was happy with my basic sketches I made the video walkthrough* above to explain my ideas to the team, and help us explore the two very different user experiences they represented.

I find committing things to paper, even as very rough sketches, really helps clarify my thoughts. I’m liking these rectangular post-it notes for sketching mobile apps too. I know a lot of designers love their molekins, but I actually like using something that’s cheap. It encourages you to throw it away, which I think is important when you don’t want to get too wedded to a particular sketch or idea, and means you iterate rapidly.

As informal “UX Lead” my next task is to turn this into a slightly more robust prototype and talk to some real users about it. Meanwhile the technical team are going to pin down exactly what cool space events the app can tell you about.

(* Actually, using a pre-recorded video during a hackathon turned out to be a bad idea. While it was really quick to make, it took forever to upload and share, meaning the team didn’t get a chance to review it before the event was almost over. A video call would have been much better. A lesson for next time.)

Is a lack of great writing why advertising isn't working?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 18:29:00 +0100

Dear Michael Wolff,

You are right. Advertising needs good writers. Like you, I get frustrated by bad writing. I get frustrated when my clients care more about how their stuff looks, than whether the words are right. I get frustrated with the ‘communication professionals’ my clients hire, whose job it is to sell stuff and sell it through words, seem so bad at them.

And yet, I can’t agree with your article in USA Today “Michael Wolff: What ad biz needs are writers”.

Here’s why.

(In no particular order because I’m busy, which means, as I’ll tangentially explain, that I do not have time to write something great for you.)

A lack of good writing isn’t why advertising isn’t working anymore, though I expect it isn’t helping.
Writing well is hard and takes more time than people think. If people can communicate their ideas faster and more effectively through a powerpoint slide than a memo, perhaps they should.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t times when conveying ideas through the written word wouldn’t be superior. If only people were able to express those ideas well in words. Which often they aren’t.
Writing is not “print”.
Facebook is writing. Twitter is writing. Good writers thrive there. Brevity is the soul of wit and all that. You don’t get much briefer than 140 characters. Just ask @stephenfry. Maybe all the good writers are too busy updating their Twitter accounts and getting rich self-publishing to take the advertising shilling? (No, probably not. But I digress…)
Content isn’t just words. Photos are content. Visuals are content. Video is content. This often involves words even if they aren’t expressed as blocks of letters.
Steve Jobs was a Great Man, but that doesn’t mean he was universally right about everything, in the world, ever. Maybe he was right to judge his advertising agency on the quality of their writers (I certainly would) but “Steve Jobs did it this way, so it must be the right way” is ridiculous. And getting tiresome.
I love words, but I’m not sure “text-heavy copy” is ever necessary. Did I mention brevity is the soul of wit? The mark of great writing is usually fewer words. (Just as great code is often less code.)
The most powerful ideas are those that are simply expressed. Nike “Just Do It”. BMW “The Ultimate Driving Machine”. The genius here is not really the writing, but the process of boiling down the mess of brand and message and desire to its simplest possible expression. That’s what great writers do. And that takes a lot of time, and you don’t have much to show for it. What? three words, maybe four. How long can it take to write four words? I can type 60 words in a minute…
Dangerous, in a world where the value of your job may be measured by volume (like the programmer, judged on how many lines of code she commits a day) and you can’t measure a slogan’s impact in Facebook likes.
Which doesn’t leave much room for those who stare out the window all day, in search of just the right four words.
Which leads me to think…

Perhaps the problem is really, as you say, that “the bureaucrats have taken over from the creatives”. In that world of big data, creative work is being judged on quantitative metrics. “If you can’t measure it, how do you know it’s working?” is becoming “it can’t be working if we can’t measure it”. Dangerous.

Is that why advertising isn’t working anymore?

Perhaps it never did and now we just know it, thanks to the bureaucrats metrics?

I suspect we just don’t like adverts that much. I suspect we never did. We just didn’t have much else to look at during a three minute break in Coronation Street. There was an opportunity for a great piece of creative advertising to grab us. But there is so much amazing creativity out there now. And it is so easily accessible. Even during a three minute break in Coronation Street. We are no longer so thirsty for it that we will drink the sand at the end of the advertiser’s mirage. Will more, better creativity and great writing in advertising fix that, or are all the great creatives just working elsewhere, because that’s where the audience have gone?

Just a thought.

"Your user experience is not your deliverables"

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 18:06:00 +0100

“Your user experience is not your deliverables”

- Martin Belam, ‘Why I have (some) sympathy with the people behind the Olympic ticketing website’

Martin Belam reflects on the disaster area that the Olympic booking system has become, after spending many hours fruitlessly attempting to buy tickets through their convoluted, multi-step system:

> “I wonder the extent to which they tested the actual user experience of sitting in front of it for twenty or more minutes, only to have no tickets at the end. The user experience is not your beautiful design, or carefully thought through deliverables. There is a case to be made that you’d have a better user experience if the page just said “Sorry, we can’t process that request at the moment” any time the queue was over ten minutes, rather than putting you into a queue where fulfilment is unlikely.”

Which neatly ties into yesterday’s post about conceiving interfaces as sets of jobs. The user experience is the whole story not just the individual screens.

'Thinking of interfaces as sets of jobs' by Ryan Singer

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 10:00:00 +0100

'Thinking of interfaces as sets of jobs' by Ryan Singer:

Interactive systems like websites and apps are best designed as a flow. But it is very easy to lapse back into designing them as a series of ‘moments’ made up of static screen. Wireframes and design concepts are still predominantly created as flat files. As a designer you work on one state at a time, which can lead to a kind of tunnel vision in which each screen is honed in isolation from the rest of the task flow, leading to a disjointed user experience.

Ryan Singer’s deceptively simple suggestion to combat this is to think of the interface as a set of jobs, each with a beginning, middle and end. It’s a simple concept that’s easy to grasp and to keep in mind while designing each step in that journey.

Although it’s not mentioned in Ryan’s post, I’m sure it’s no coincidence that, just like a job well-done, having a clear beginning, middle and end is also the essence of a good story. Storytelling and designing for emotion are gaining traction in interaction design. As a user, though, I find some of their manifestations crude and heavy-handed. There is a tendency to try too hard, manufacturing emotion and telling me how I should feel like some annoyingly perky user-experience cheerleader. A good storyteller doesn’t tell you how to feel and neither should a good interface. Perhaps if we craft a strong beginning, middle and end to our user interactions, by designing jobs not screens, the emotion will take care of itself.

"Privacy and solitude improve creativity and productivity. I love working alone. Some of my most..."

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 22:40:00 +0100

“Privacy and solitude improve creativity and productivity. I love working alone. Some of my most inspired moments come from ruminating, researching, experimenting and working alone.”

- Andrew Mottaz, ‘Collaborative Prototyping, Groupthink and Design by Committee’

"Design the top level of your navigation in isolation. Base it on your top 20 tasks. Then test it..."

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 18:45:00 +0000

“

Design the top level of your navigation in isolation. Base it on your top 20 tasks. Then test it with about 20 top task questions. Ask a minimum of 20 people what their first click would be based on the navigation you present them. You can do this manually using the simplest of wireframes.

Aim for a 90 percent first click success rate. Keep tweaking your navigation until you get that success rate…

Most of what you will be doing to improve success rate will involve changing words.

”

- [My emphasis]

Gerry McGovern on The vital importance of the first click and how to get it right.

Simple is not a design treatment

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:42:00 +0000

Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience.
Simon Collinson, ‘Taming Complexity’, 24ways 2011

Fluid Grids Are More Complicated Than That: Andy Clarke on 24ways

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:57:00 +0000

Fluid Grids Are More Complicated Than That: Andy Clarke on 24ways:

When columns and elements within them change width, all too easily a visual hierarchy can be broken and along with it the relationship between element sizes and the outer window or viewport. This can happen quickly if you make just one set of fluid grid calculations and use those percentages across every screen width, from smartphones through tablets and up to large desktops.

The answer? Make several sets of fluid grids calculations, each one at a significant window or device width breakpoint.

I hit this issue on a recent project. The fully fluid layout lost its balance as the elements compressed at smaller screen widths. It became clear that multiple design adaptations were going to be needed, each optimised for a different viewport range. The project budget didn’t allow time to craft those multiple design options. I compromised by setting a min- and max-width within which the base grid worked well, sacrificing full responsiveness. Hopefully I’ll get the opportunity to revisit it in the New Year and may try taking the adaptive grid approach Andy Clarke discusses here.

Is Google's clean-and-simple aesthetic dull, or classic? Mashable can't decide.

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 18:43:00 +0000

Is Google's clean-and-simple aesthetic dull, or classic? Mashable can't decide.:

I’m confused. The new Google Reader is “super stark, open and clean, but is it too dull?” yet the “Clean and Simple Homepage” - which could hardly be more dull - is “still a classic”. Make up your mind Mashable.

Much of this can be ascribed to users’ well documented hatred of change. As Jakob Nielsen wrote in 2009 “Users hate change [but] in the long run, incrementalism eventually destroys cohesiveness”.

Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:44:00 +0100

Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu:

(View more presentations from Bryan Rieger on Slideshare)

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the Morrisons mobile site, here’s Bryan Rieger’s excellent presentation Rethinking the Mobile Web from 2010.

Mobile sites: beware flaky device detection

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:44:00 +0100

Morrisons, the UK supermarket chain, have a mobile site. So far, so good. Unfortunately their device detection is somewhat, ahem, flaky.

Here’s what it looks like on my HTC Desire S, a recent Android phone:

Let’s leave aside for a minute that that mock phone surround is pretty cheesy. The offending image, “iphone-surround.gif”, is being applied to the <body> by the stylesheet “notmobildevice.css”. Which suggests it’s intended to be loaded only if you’re not viewing on a mobile phone. Presumably to show, should you stumble across it on a desktop, that this is a mobile-specific site.

Unfortunately my small Twitterverse sample suggests whatever device detection Morrisons are using is only treating iPhones (and iPods) as mobile. On iOS the cheesy phone is mercifully absent. But iOS is only around 18% of the mobile market. So - assuming my guess is right - 82% of mobile users are getting a desktop experience in error. This is, in essence, the flaw in relying exclusively on device detection.

What Morrisons could - should - have done is use CSS media queries to load notmobiledevice.css only at larger screen sizes. Either in conjunction with their device detection or instead of it. Media queries future-proof sites against the introduction of new devices their device detection script is unaware of. Provided the new device supports CSS media queries, which new devices almost certainly will, the site owner does not need to fret about supporting every mobile device individually.

Media queries offer a flexible, reliable, future-proof method to give different styles for different screen sizes. Used well they let your site elegantly fit to any screen size in a way that is device agnostic. As mobile devices proliferate and overtake desktop internet use, as assumptions about screen size become ever more dangerous, every site will need to use them to ensure a good browsing experience for its users. I’m not against either device detection or mobile-specific sites. Both have their place. But you want to use them alongside media queries to enhance the mobile-browsing experience, not instead of them.

(As a weird ps, I’ve realised the mobile detection is even more messed up. It was capable of redirecting me to the mobile site in the first place, but then decided I wasn’t mobile after all.)

Coming Soon…

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:46:06 +0100

Coming Soon…

Beware web designers bearing solutions

Thu, 05 May 2011 16:09:00 +0100

The Law of the Instrument can be seen in every web discussion forum, on sites such as Forrst and on Twitter. Ask for a CMS, blog or framework recommendation and you’ll see people immediately leap in to declare their hammer the best, without any knowledge of the requirements at hand – sometimes even when the requirements really rule out that tool from the outset
Rachel Andrew | ‘If all you have is a hammer…’

You cannot recommend a solution until you’ve identified the problem. Yet the web is awash with people pushing their favourite one-size-fits-all answers to whatever question is posed, whether a particular CMS, a certain programming language, or the latest social media cure-all. They are focused on a solution: one which works for them, one in which they are competent. Their own personal comfort zone, recommended as much for their own benefit as anyone else’s. But Twitter is not a marketing strategy, nor WordPress the only answer to web publishing.

I’m much more interested in problems, burrowing down into what’s really holding a business or organisation back and seeking out those golden nuggets, the smart ideas which are the real solutions to people’s complex, real-world problems. When someone asks for a recommendation, your first answer should be a question: what are you trying to do, what is the problem you are having, tell me more…

Two wise words on growth, making money, and funding startups

Tue, 19 Apr 2011 18:22:00 +0100

37 Signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson on his distaste for the “swing for the fences”, go bust or have lavish success, approach

I’d rather just have nice, steady, predictable growth. I believe in the beauty of compound interest. We might not be growing 2000%, but if we can just keep our nice, solid growth for a couple of years, that’ll compound to have quite an impact.
David Heinemeier Hansson, ‘The problem with the tech world’s “swing for the fences” approach’ | 37signals

and DHH’s business partner, Jason Fried, on Making Money

There’s a fundamental difference between a bootstrapped business and a funded business. It’s all about which side of the money you’re on. From Day One, a bootstrapped business has no choice but to make money. There’s no cushion in the bank and not much in the pockets. It’s make money or go home. To a bootstrapped business, money is air.

On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There’s a pile in the bank, and it’s not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There’s less—and in some cases, no—pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts…

Anyone can spend money. Making it is the hard part.
Jason Fried, ‘How to Get Good at Making Money’ | Inc.com

Mike Reed, on judging D&AD 2011

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:15:00 +0100

Mike Reed, on judging D&AD 2011:

‘I wish I’d written this one.’ That’s what you listen for, of course: the ultimate creative’s compliment. That potent mixture of delight and envy – and the undercurrent of anxiety that, presented with the same brief, one wouldn’t have come up with anything like as powerful a solution. (Or perhaps that’s just me.)