Software Interface Design

The Dexo Wordle!  (courtesy of http://wordle.net)

Good user interface design has traditionally been a low priority in the world of network management applications (except for a few companies like my own that seem to get it).  But a recent interview with Cisco’s new CTO, Padmasree Warrior, may be a bellwether of changing priorities:

What’s Cisco’s most immediate technology need?

I don’t think it’s a Cisco need as much as an industry need. If you think about what’s happening with the industry, you can think of it as either a convergence or a collision. Convergence because we are truly merging content, communications, computing and commerce. It’s a collision because different industries come at it form different angles. Google and Amazon come form the application down into the infrastructure; infrastructure companies are going up. Wireless and wireline are converging as well. So it changes the landscape of who competes with whom in the future and who becomes your friend.

So what I think what Cisco needs more of in terms of technology and talent is moving from infrastructure to more providing the applications associated with the infrastructure. You have to think about how users interface with the technology. So user interface becomes a very important aspect that we have to think about. As the enterprise gets more consumerized, it has to be very simple, it has to be one click. It’s user interface, usability – how simple is it to set up. It’s that kind of focus that we need more of.

Original article: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/062508-cisco-cto-warrior.html?page=1

Padmasree, you give me hope!

John Mao, one of our product managers and a good friend, has been doing some research on GUI frameworks for creating Web applications. He’s a big proponent, and while acknowledging some of the risks (e.g. being dependent on external code), he makes a good argument for not “reinventing the wheel”. Recently he sent me a list of some that he has researched including the following:

.NET
ComponentArt: http://www.componentart.com
Infragistics: http://www.infragistics.com
Telerik: http://www.telerik.com

Javascript/AJAX
Google Web Toolkit: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/
Yahoo! User Interface Library: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
ComponentArt: http://www.componentart.com
Ext JS: http://extjs.com (a bolt on: http://www.codeplex.com/ExtJsExtenderControl, Write ExtJS code in C#: http://code.google.com/p/extsharp/)
jQuery: http://jquery.com (general animation framework, there are bolt on’s too)
dojo: http://dojotoolkit.org (bolt on’s: http://dojotoolkit.org/projects/dijit, and http://dojotoolkit.org/projects/dojox)
script.aculo.us: http://www.script.aculo.us which is built on top of Prototyp http://www.prototypejs.org)

I would be interested to know if anyone has any specific experience with any of these frameworks and what opinions are about them (and of course if there are others to consider). After taking a look at them, I’m personally leaning towards experimenting with GWT and YUI.

Lou Rosenfeld (Information Architecture for the World Wide Web) founded a publishing company (Rosenfeld Media) focused on books relating to UX, or User Experience.  As part of Rosenfeld Media, Lou also created what he calls the “UX Zeitgeist” - currently an invitation-only survey of popular user experience design books and topics.  You can find my entry here: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/zeitgeist/people/detail/490/russell-wilson

“sIFR lets you use your favorite font on your websites by cleverly working with Flash, JavaScript and CSS.”  I haven’t tried this technique yet, but I’m anxious to see if it works.  I’m a little tired of Arial…

For details see:  http://wiki.novemberborn.net/sifr/

Navigation for Websites and software applications fascinates me. I’m always on the lookout for some new and inspirational way to help users find the content and features they are looking for. And based on my personal style and what I feel are best practices for the domain I focus on (enterprise web-based applications and websites), I gravitate towards simple, clean, and efficient methods.

Yesterday a design student that I’m mentoring (thanks Kelsea!) showed me the Maroon 5 website and I was really impressed. I’m not concerned with the implementation, which in this case happens to be Flash. I’m focused on the concept. The designer used a very simple geometrical shape with a strong color to draw attention to navigation that “appears when you need it”. You can quickly find the navigation anchor–an orange triangle in a sea of grey/black–but the choices remain hidden allowing the content to dominate and show through.

When you move your mouse over the image the navigation menu appears:

In another part of the site it is done slightly differently. The orange bar is dropped and the navigation text floats over the background:

Excellent job!

If you know of any other really creative navigation methods, please reply to this post and share with the other readers.

I was recently interviewed by a student in the University of Texas at Austin MBA program on creativity:

1. Do you find any business processes get in the way of creative ideas?

Not really. Deadlines and pressure are actually good for creativity. To create we must work within bounds — limited possibilities do not strangle creativity, they make it possible.

2. What do you feel is the best method for fostering creative ideas?

I believe you must combine energy, pressure, and cross-disciplinary exploration. Energy in the form of excitement and drive to achieve, pressure to achieve something great within an ambitious time frame, and lastly the search for ingredients outside of our normal scope. We often create by taking a concept or idea from another discipline and twisting or turning it to fit our needs. There is so much that software designers can learn and be inspired by in the fine arts.

3. What is it that led you to a creative position, and how do you stay competitive?

I believe everyone is creative. No question. As for staying competitive, it’s very simple — you must apply yourself in ways that benefit the business. You must always keep your eye on the money. If I’m not wrong, I believe that much of the old masters’ works were created based on what they were commissioned to paint; not whatever they felt like painting. Find the intersection between what you want to do and what will benefit your company or customers.

4. How do you measure the success of ideas?

With regard to the software we design, we actually have objective measures in place such as efficiency and effectiveness that help us to determine if we have improved a design. We also use less objective measures such as satisfaction surveys and word association exercises that provide us with good feedback.

5. How is creativity rewarded within your organization?

Creativity is rewarded at NetQoS by turning the right ideas into products or product features. I say the “right” ideas because not all creative ideas make business sense. I’m also reminded of a quote from Harry Truman: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” For me, seeing my work in a product that people need to do their daily jobs is the ultimate reward.

6. Would you rather be in charge of a creative failure, or an ordinary success?

I’m not sure what an “ordinary success” is, but I would not be happy being in charge of a creative failure. No success in our business (high-tech software) is easy or ordinary.

TechSmith interviewed me about using their product Morae for usability testing: http://www.techsmith.com/morae/interview/rwilson.asp

Worth reading: http://www.coroflot.com/creativeseeds/2008/01/sidestep_interaction_designers.asp

I love cigars. I smoke about 1 per month as a treat. That may seem like nothing, but I really enjoy it. About 2/3 of the way through a good Rocky Patel, there is a moment of clarity. Greens become greener, blacks become richer and edges become sharper. A little Laphroaig doesn’t hurt either.

It is usually at this point that I come to some realization. Tonight that moment was defined by frustration regarding misconceptions of software design.

I evangelize design daily. I argue for the importance of good design, justifying the investment in time and resources to design and build smarter. But recently I was told a story about the iPhone that illustrates one of the sources of the cautiously skeptical expressions of many business executives that I meet with.

Hardware mistakes are expensive; software mistakes are (relatively) cheap!

According to one person, much more design and testing work went in to the hardware of the iPhone than the software, and the reason given was because it is much more expensive and unacceptable to ship defective hardware than it is to ship flaky, buggy software. (I cannot verify the accuracy of this claim and truly wish I had real data to support or deny this.)

At Dux2007 in Chicago, I attended a workshop where I asked the group why we don’t design software like we do hardware? Why don’t we spend more time in prototypes, mockups, etc. One of the attendees, a software designer… said “because it’s cheap to fix software problems - all you have to do is make a download available that resolves the bugs.”

That’s what so many executives are really thinking, aren’t they? Build it, test it, get it
out the door, and then ship fixes as necessary. Time to market, fix later.

And herein lies the mistake: fixing bugs is not equivalent to fixing design.

True, bugs in software can be fixed easier and cheaper than bugs in hardware. But we’re not talking about bugs–we’re talking about DESIGN. You can’t fix a design with a download! Design is the essence of the product, how the product interacts with users, the personality of the product, the metaphors, etc.

Attempting to fix design in an update results in confusion, retraining, potential loss of trust, etc. The changes are too significant. Therefore redesign is often delayed until the next major release of the product, resulting in additional costs, potential loss of customer loyalty and the opportunity to “lock them in”, etc.

So, yes, software bugs can be remedied easier than bugs in hardware. But design problems in software are no easier or cheaper to resolve than hardware design flaws, and therefore we (software designers, creators, builders) must adopt better processes, principles, and expertise towards designing better software products from the start.