A few weeks ago I received a BuzzFeed newsletter (it’s really great, and I’d recommend that you sign up for it if you haven’t already) that featured a "brand timeline " that had been created by an advertising account executive.  It was surprisingly revealing, and it made me realize that in many instances a brand name or logo alone is enough to conjure up an entire story.

Continue Reading »

While browsing through the New York Times today I found an article that pointed out something that hadn’t occurred to me (not consciously, anyway)–there is no legal equivalent to medical information sites like WebMD or general knowledge sites like Wikipedia or MSN’s Encarta.  Of course, there are plenty of legal sites out there like FindLaw, but generally they’re difficult to navigate and confusing for non-lawyers to use.  (What’s a tort, anyway? Isn’t that a fruit-filled pastry?)  And sites like LegalZoom and NoLo aren’t designed to be legal references; they’re businesses that want to sell you their products.

The Times article is primarily about a new site called JD Supra, which aims to be a law “library” populated with documents contributed by lawyers of all calibers.  The idea is that Joe Schmo can go to the site, type in a search term, narrow the search by jurisdiction and benefit from what lawyers have had to say about it in various cases.  (The library is a bit sparse at the moment–a search for “tenant rights” in the 2nd Circuit returned exactly zero results.)  There are other sites mentioned as well, including PreCYdent, which aims to be a legal search engine.  The site is currently in beta.

It’s interesting to me that it’s taken so long for the legal world to embrace the Internet and to make it easier for consumers to explore and understand the judicial system and its proceedings, but then again part of me understands that lawyers operate in something of a black box.  Law has its own language and codes and complexities and it takes years to understand it all.  Then again, Americans have always had the right to represent themselves in court–nowhere does it say in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that “you must hire a lawyer whose billable hours cost at least $150, lest you lose your case.”  True, relatively few people choose to take this route since it is difficult to argue with a seasoned lawyer who is gifted with a strong grasp of rhetoric, but the whole point of the Internet is to make information more free and available to everyone.

As a designer that works full-time on a high-traffic website, I understand perfectly that without ample user testing it’s impossible to know exactly how users will interact with your designs. I’ve watched agape when, in testing sessions, users seem unable to decode new features that I’ve developed that made perfect sense to me.

What’s even more baffling to me is when users sometimes disregard simple instructions altogether, especially when they’re clearly presented. I can’t quite grasp why someone would ask someone else for help or give up entirely instead of simply reading the directions. There’s probably a psychological component in play but I’m not a psychologist so I’m uncertain to what that principle is called (if it has a name).

It would be ignorant to try to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation to why users seem to have problems with various interfaces, especially on the Internet. But user error is something you can count on with virtually any technology, even with devices as old as the telephone. Not cell phones, not wireless phones–the old-fashioned telephone that plugs into the wall.

Continue Reading »

CNN.com posted a story today chronicling the difficulties that United States Census workers are having with new handheld computers that they are to use to conduct the upcoming 2010 census. Apparently the computer interface was poorly designed, thanks to a shoddy job on the part of the Census Bureau in writing out software specifications:

Census officials are being blamed for a poor job spelling out technical requirements to the contractor, Florida-based Harris Corp. The computers proved too complex for some temporary workers who tried to use them in a test last year in North Carolina. Also, the computers were not initially programmed to transmit the large amounts of data necessary.

While the government may be to blame in this case, especially by failing to provide adequate use cases to the manufacturer and proper, thorough training to census takers, the contractor isn’t much less culpable:

Harris Corp. spokesman Marc Raimondi said … the computers actually are easy to use, with a failure rate of less than 1 percent when tested in the field. “After you spend about 30 minutes to an hour familiarizing yourself with it, it’s as easy to use as a modern cell phone,” Raimondi said.

As easy to use as a modern cell phone?!  Well, that’s a relief, considering how simple to use most of the cell phones on the market are.  (Please note my sarcasm, especially in light of the fact that the Apple iPhone, which actually is easy to use because of a little thing called good interface design, doesn’t require you to spend 30 minutes to learn how to use it.)  This is laziness, pure and simple–either that or a blatant ignorance of how people actually interact with computer interfaces–and Harris Corp., which I’ve never even heard of, should be ashamed of itself for making a strong effort to make these critically important devices as easy to use as possible.

By this point, the new J. J. Abrams-produced monster movie Cloverfield has been out for well over a month and I don’t think I’m spoiling anything when I describe the (practically nonexistent) plot as follows:

An unexplained monster devastates Manhattan, and a group of rather stupid young adults halfheartedly attempts to escape, but not before wasting a lot of time trying to rescue a girl that should have died by the time they reach her. 

The film is presented in a cinéma vérité style that was well-established with the release of The Blair Witch Project–that is, the entire film is supposed to exist on a single tape “recovered” from a camcorder (though how that happens is a mystery to me; the camera in question ends up buried under tons of rubble in the middle of Central Park). Basically, we, the viewing audience, are supposed to take this entire film as a single video artifact–as something that is “real,” even though it is clearly fiction.That said, there are a number of extremely large obstacles that cause the film to fail in becoming an accurate, believable simulacrum of reality (monster-oriented devastation aside, of course–the elements that cause the film to falter are far more basic than that). Continue Reading »