Author: Rick Monro

Rick has led and managed design teams in agencies in Ireland, provided UX consultancy for both public and private sector clients and is currently Manager of UX Design at Contrast. He is also a syllabus consultant and lecturer for the Digital Marketing Institute and organiser of UX Belfast.

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Community

Return to the garden

(or: Designers Assemble!)

 

I shouldn’t need to declare support (again) for the pursuit of responsive web design as the future for online design. What irks me though is not so much a sense that visual design is being compromised in order to achieve a responsive outcome, but that the fact is not being acknowledged.

For what it’s worth I’m writing from the standpoint of working in a sizeable agency on many projects where RWD is not a practical option based on such factors as functionality and user profiling. You can take much of what I offer here as my opinion only, but my firm belief is that it is not mine alone.

Yin without a yang

I’ve written before about the difficulties of implementing responsive solutions in a commercial environment. As evidenced in James Young‘s excellent collation of “problems from the coalface“, designers are having mixed experiences in the transition to RWD – a situation I feel is inadequately represented in online conversations. The overwhelmingly positive spin accompanying a responsive site launch creates a subtle (but tangible) pressure on conscientious designers to ‘step up’ and deliver RWD on their own projects. Which would be fine, but the inference that RWD is desirable at any cost.

So here is a conundrum for designers that I will pretentiously moniker ‘the RWD Paradox’:

Forced to choose, what is less desirable: a visually mundane but responsive website, or a highly engaging fixed width site?

Obviously I distort for effect, but I believe that this is the uncomfortable truth for a large proportion of designers trying to pursue a responsive approach. The underlying point of RWD is that all resolutions and viewport sizes are important; it’s not just preordained screen sizes that should be accommodated. That being the case, why do many responsive sites create visual anomalies at certain sizes that we would normally find unacceptable in any other context? And if this as a natural consequence of applying RWD, then lets at least admit it.

Think outside the box (model)

It has further been suggested by more than one industry colleague that RWD promotes ‘boxy’ design, where a facet of the site’s visual appeal – part of the ‘personality layer‘ – is sacrificed to easily scaled, easily manipulated blocks. This is clearly manifest in at least one high-profile brand’s recently launched site.

Now, this is not to suggest that RWD precludes great visual design. Not at all. There are many examples of a successful marriage of the two, but they appear to be in the minority compared to the plethora of single-column portfolios or blogs that have little relevance to large consumer-facing sites.

Ding-a-ling

Suppressing these issues will only exacerbate them. And yet we resize our browser windows, ooh-ing and aah-ing at every cute little piece of javascript that animates resizing images while missing an important point – users don’t care. Users want a coherent experience relevant to their situation at any given time. Designers and developers are the only people I know who sit and accordion their browser window to see how a site will respond. We’re too in love with technique because we know that somewhere, another designer or developer is going to think it’s cool. And folks, when it gets to the point when we are designing for other designers, that should ring some pretty loud alarm bells.

Return to Eden

So what should be done? We need look no further than relatively recent history for inspiration.

Dave Shea‘s CSS Zen Garden marked a sea change in online design. The site, if you are unfamiliar with it, accepts CSS submissions and applies them to a core HTML file, demonstrating in a simple and powerful manner how separating content from presentation creates a beautiful and effective flexibility. In 2003 it enlightened many designers, myself included, and put the argument for the jump to CSS beyond debate. More than that, it coalesced the design community in a way that circulating links on Twitter does not.

“Just sowing seeds..”

We need a new garden for responsive web design. Mediaqueri.es is great as an initial eye-opener for those unfamiliar with the idea of adaptive layouts, but we badly need something to give designers the opportunity to pool ideas and resources and begin raising the bar for RWD. Not a new idea I freely admit. However while it may have been hinted at, and the original Zen Garden used to illustrate adaptive potential, I have not found a straight call for a new ‘Garden’. So this is it.

We can and should learn from experience in order to forge a better future for web design. That, and be a little more open on occasions when quality has taken a back seat to technique.

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Research UX

A few words about the Five Whys

Following this piece on FastCo Design about getting to the root of a problem, I thought I’d share a little experience of using the ‘Five Whys’ technique in the field, plus a few observations I’ve made on its use for user research for the web.

For those unfamiliar with it, the Five Whys involves posing an initial query (e.g. “Why is online booking so difficult on this site?”), asking participants for a top-level response, then gradually peeling back the layers of their insight by successively asking what makes their previous answer true. This is repeated until five answers have been offered, with five seen as the optimum number of levels.

Firstly, it is a great technique. Hours could be spent in discussion with users or stakeholders resulting in only a fraction of the information yield that this provides. When it flows well you will uncover hugely useful insights into underlying problems that could only come from those closest to the issues. When it doesn’t flow so well, you may be left with one of those activities that feels like a step too far, when you could really be pushing on with focusing on the salient issues. The common issues I have encountered using the technique in practice are:

The problem is obvious to participants – in this case, a problem can be so apparent that everyone nails the problem within just one or two steps. This can lead to some uncomfortable forced extrapolation as participants attempt to reword what is essentially the same point

The problem is obvious to you – as with all research, check your own preconceptions at the door, and listen. Your ideas about what the real issues might can blind you to the smaller details that might be hugely significant.

The problem is too abstract – what you are looking for may not easily be encapsulated in participants’ submissions. Visceral factors will not be readily dealt with in an environment where participants need to submit succinct, specific thoughts.

As with all user research, it’s best to simply persevere and work with the data as you find it. If the sample group is small enough, you’ll very quickly get a sense of obvious bias on the part of any participants. And needless to say if the group is large, anomalies will similarly stand out.

I have found it best not to reveal and discuss each participant’s answer before moving on to the next “why”. One of the major barriers to authenticity of results in research is that participants do not want to appear ‘stupid’ or caught lacking in front of other participants; revealing the line each participant is thinking too early is to invite groupthink into the discussions. Best instead to get all contributions in before proceeding with linking and clustering different responses.

Needless to say I wouldn’t base an entire workshop or test session around any one single activity, and the same applies here. Conclusions reached as a result of this activity should be cross-referenced against the results of other activities or discussions. But as a short and sweet method of quickly getting a group’s insight into problems – ususally as an opener – the Five Whys is a worthy addition to your research toolkit.

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The Five Whys technique has been credited separately to both Sakichi Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno of the Toyota Motor Corporation and is one of many excellent techniques collated in Dave Gray’s Gamestorming.

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Community Process

Adapting to responsive

Responsive web design has reached the grand old age of two and remains the single most important shift in design and development for the web since the advent of CSS.

Broken record

I have written previously about the dangers of dogmatic approaches, emphasising that we should move in the direction of responsive design increasingly and methodically. RWD is not however a be-all-and-end-all. It is not a magic bullet for multi-device deployment. Responsive images remain a challenge, advertising doesn’t sit well with a fluid layout and, regardless of how simple the approach is pitched as, the creation of a credible responsive solution takes significantly greater time than a single-resolution site.

Here comes the future

And yet it should remain the goal. We are clearly impelled to move to responsive as an industry standard. Some of the loftier commentary recommending multiple versions of websites appears frighteningly blinkered in its naivety. We are headed only one way in the medium to long term.

One foot in front of the other

However an all or nothing stance on RWD is an equally retrograde move. Speaking as a (ahem) “seasoned” designer, shifting to an adaptive approach has been an essential stepping stone in understanding RWD as a whole. Is it better to learn responsive as standard? Of course. For any new designers starting out: take this route and don’t look back. For those who have been around the block a few times, coming to terms with full responsive as a new way of approaching projects is to put it simply, difficult. I have yet to meet a designer in industry for any amount of time with a different view.

Money, money, money

I work in a commercial organisation and to remain viable in a commercial environment, we need to deliver effective outputs that surpass expectations – within a budget. Recently we’ve committed to producing adaptive sites as standard and deviating from this only where individual projects demand it. Not committing to fully responsive for the moment, our rationale is that doing something is better than doing nothing; not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

It’s not what you do..?

As I have said before, we’re getting there and should enjoy the journey. But whether it is acknowledged or not (and it isn’t) there is a purist agenda at work in some corners of the industry. Challenge some of the more vociferous opinions and there is usually a conciliatory climb down, but the inference remains: if you’re not producing fully responsive work, you’re falling short. My problem with this is simply that it places technique over results. The means do not justify the end. There are a number of responsive sites featuring what I would regard as unacceptable design anomalies at certain sizes, and they should not be given a pardon simply because of the way they have been constructed. An adaptive approach may yet be more condusive to better overall design on certain projects.

Conclusion

To repeat myself (again), why create divisions where none exist. We’re all on our way. Those who fail to come to terms with the changing landscape in web access are condemning themselves to history. For those who are moving forward, there is more than one way to do so.

Categories
Design Process UX

A sense of completion

Throughout a career primarily as a visual designer, I’ve always struggled with the judgement of when a piece of work is “done”. In graphic design, the urge to continue adding, embellishing is almost overwhelming. Maturity and of course experience influence better decision-making, but inevitably you find yourself mentally revisiting each project many times in the months after it’s supposedly ‘finished’, thinking of better choices you could have made, better directions you could have taken, better refinements you could have insisted on.

The craftsman’s eye

I often find myself looking at things that my dad made during his life, his joiner’s skills manifesting themselves in seemingly flawless dovetail joints and perfect angles, and outputs consistently fit for purpose.

The end is not nigh

Producing work that is deployed in a digital context brings with it a frustration, a yearning for a sense of completion where you know that something is simply done. This is something that has dogged me throughout my working life to date, whether I realised it or not. The quest for completion led me to acquire technical skills I never believed I would want or need, in what I now believe was the hope that they would bring me a clearer understanding of “finished”.

In short: I’m older now

What this drive for completion has meant for me is a quest for metrics, for data – measurable factors. In joinery, a glance through seasoned eyes can likely offer all the reassurance required to know it’s a job well done. Call it a search for meaning if you will, but moving deeper into UX thinking has brought me closer to the answer; knowing the right questions were asked, the right conclusions were reached and the right recommendations were made is as close as I believe I’m going to get. That sense of satisfaction is what drives me now – a far cry from the “cool” factor that motivated the younger me, an empty quest to mimic the latest ego-centric design trends.

So…

And yet, no matter what nostalgic gloss I might put on it, I am sure Dad would have been able to see in his work where improvements could have been made. It is both the blessing and the curse of the craftsman – the belief that the next project will be closer to elusive perfection that never comes.

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Community Design Process Research UX

Putting the spotlight on ‘delight’

Disclaimer: I tend to react adversely to industry buzzword memes.

A new word has been gradually creeping into the design industry lexicon. Designers should now, apparently, design for “delight” – and once again a word has been introduced without context into the forefront of design debate.

I’ve avoided ‘cool’ for most of my professional career. I don’t do ‘awesome’. I don’t trust it. I don’t strive for it. But I like ‘effective’. Effective I can work with.

The most rational, level-headed thoughts on this come from CX Partners’ Giles Colborne. The points Colborne makes illustrate that we don’t really know what we’re saying. It’s all too easy to drop these phrases into discourse, but it’s quite another to try and measure or define it. And yet invariably a section of the design community, certainly within web design, will regurgitate this type of commentary and broadcast it without questioning what it actually means.

I don’t disagree with the sentiment; I agree fully that ‘delight’ would be a.. um, delightful reaction for users of our work to have. But to impose this on an industry that strives for effective results appears to be imposing very shallow measures on a complex profession. If we’re going to propagate something meaningful, what about “design for success” – how’s that?

“Delight” is a meme and a millstone. It’s another way of saying that we should design something cool. But cool is not a commercial imperative, and it’s place in the process is undefinable. So, at what point should ‘delight’ appear? Until definitions and metrics emerge I will continue to hold such opinion at arm’s length.

There is no magic ingredient for a successfully designed product. There is only process and effort. As with cool, ‘delight’ will be a by-product of an effective outcome.

‘Delight’ happens, just as ‘cool’ happens, most often through rigorous attention to detail and a rock solid understanding of user requirements.