Your Friday Quote
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We often don’t realize that the people we admire as designers have yet to “arrive.” Their ongoing quests are part of the reason we admire them so much.
Mark’s reading material.
Open House
You’re a Hacker Too
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Whether he knows it or not, Bryan Zug and his fellow geeks at IgniteSeattle, have introduced me to the concept of “life-hacking”. Sometimes all it takes is a new term to open you mind to an idea that was lurking there the whole time. Like a mischievous computer programmer who can “hack” into the bank and steal your money, each of us has our own unorthodox ways of getting things done. Once we recognize these self-made tools, we can better use them to our advantage, and avoid our weaknesses. Sometimes that’s just what you have to do: Hack it.
Like myself, my wife, Nikki, is a graphic designer. She is talented, creative, and truly smart - but she gets a case of the nerves when speaking to new clients, especially on the phone, at initial interviews, etc. She forgets what she wants to say, can’t process new information thoughtfully, and basically just wants to exit the situation as quickly as possible. After years of trying to overcome this through all the recommended techniques, we have gained little ground. But if you ever get an email from her, you’d think - correctly so - that she is one of the smartest, most articulate designers you have ever met. Her ability to see the problem for what it really is, break it down into manageable chunks, and clearly express complex ideas is nothing short of impressive. Her vocabulary and manner of writing, are at the highest level of professionalism and mastery of the language. How she speaks (publicly) and how she writes… it’s like two different people. Email is her hack.
There are times where a phone call is more appropriate than an email - but there are times where a good result is more important then impeccable etiquette. Judge the situation. Assess your strengths and weaknesses, and if you need to, hack it. Once you are enlightened to your own little hacks, you can use them consciously when you need them. Just identifying them helps, and recognizing the whole concept is the first step. Thanks, Bryan for a consciousness-raising word/concept.
Lighting the Fires at Ignite
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Before dashing off to the beach Wednesday night, I stopped by this Ignite event that our own Bryan Zug has been promoting. Pretty cool. Anybody who has anything worth sharing takes 5 minutes of their life, and gives a sort of mini presentation - could be about anything. There were about 20 short talks on topics ranging from networking tips to an insider’s view on a personal addiction to Legos (yeah, the kid’s toy).
The networking was as its best, and with Bryan’s kind introductions, I handed out an entire stack of business cards and made quite a few new connections.
Who wants to hear a bunch of random people talk about random things? Well, that’s exactly the beauty of the event to me. Our brains work like filter feeders, they need to be exposed to new ideas to grow. Ignite offers a perfectly random stream of fresh content, that is guaranteed to give you something to think about, probably something to write down, look up, look into or try out - whether personal or professional (note pad highly recommended). At only 5 minutes per talk, if you’re really not interested in a particular topic, it’s over quickly.
Here’s a great example of one of the presentations that I found valuable, which just happens to reinforce why you might want to attend an event like Ignite.
Phinney Bischoff was a proud sponsor. I’m not sure the nature of the sponsorship, but I’m sure it was worth it on both ends of the deal.
Thanks, Bryan for sharing. Thanks, Matt for the beer. I hope to attend again and probably give my own 5-minute talk one of these days.
The Wisdom of Prom-goers.
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I have a niece who’s now finishing her senior year of high school. Now that it’s May, she’s fervently in the market for a prom dress. And she has the same concern all young women prepping for the prom share: will my dress be so unique—so distinctly me—that I’ll be the only one wearing that dress at the dance? I mentioned this recently while speaking at a marketing conference in Chicago, and asked the women in the audience to remember what the primary driver was in purchasing their own prom dress. A decade or more removed from the event, they all immediately recalled a fundamental desire for their dress to be a one-of-a-kind presence.
Why am I telling you this? Because prom goers have a lot to teach us about positioning. Is your company or product going to the prom wearing the same dress everyone else is wearing? That is, is your brand—including its core message and overall look and feel—very similar to the competition? This is easy enough to find out. Across most industries, a simple competitive audit often reveals too many same-old, me-too messages and shared color palettes. A teenager knows the inherent value in being differentiated on a crowded dance floor. Does your brand?
PBDH is sponsoring O’Reilly’s Ignite Seattle tonight
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We’re happy to announce that Phinney Bischoff Design House is a proud sponsor of Ignite Seattle, which is happening tonight over near Belltown. Details can be found on this post by Brady Forrest over on the O’Reilly Radar Blog.
What is Ignite you ask? Picture a quick succession of 5 minute powerpoint presentations on a wide range of interesting topics. Speakers get 20 slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds.
Lively to say the least.
Doors open at 7:00, Paper Tower Competition begins at 7:30, and presentations start at 8:30.
Here’s a video of one of Ignite’s most popular past talks - “How to Buy Car (without getting screwed)” by Rob Gruhl:
Your Friday Quote
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There is nothing glamorous about what I do. I am a working man.
Drop Down Menus: An Information Architecture Conundrum
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We’ve been working on the web redesign of a local community college for the past several months and as with any large, complex organization, the information architecture has been a bit more challenging than your average display site. Any time you try to formulate a simple, useable navigation schema while respecting the hierarchical structure of an academic organization and the sundry needs of students and faculty alike, you’re going to end up with a very deep site. Deep sites are problematic for various reasons: important pages can get lost in the bowels of the structure, navigation elements can become unwieldy as we try to design for six or seven levels of hierarchy, and the overall usability suffers and people get frustrated.
There are solutions to the deep site problem. A couple we’ve tried in the past include highlighting popular or important links in special “Quick Link” areas. Another was to create special persona-based “portals” that work alongside the deep hierarchy to promote important links to the top based on user profiles. The one solution we have always tried to avoid is the dreaded drop-down menu. In the 6 years I’ve worked here at PBDH I can’t remember a single project where we have recommended using drop-down menus. There’s been a couple projects where we were coerced into using them, but never without a good deal of “informed pushback” from us. Drop-down menus present all sorts of problems, from allowing users to skip over important pages, to removing any frame of reference, and mostly frustration at having to keep your mouse in the elusive “sweet spot” as you scan the link offering quickly before the menu disappears again.
So a few weeks ago our community college client came by the office with the results of a pretty extensive card-sorting exercise. We all headed down to the ideation lab and began pouring over the data. As expected, we were faced with the potential for more than 6 or 7 levels of hierarchy and all sorts of varied user needs. Eventually, as we sat there pondering the white board scribbles, the D-word came up. What about drop-downs? Could they actually work here? This time around they didn’t seem all that bad. Especially when we started calling them “flyouts”. Flyout menus sound sleek and purposeful. And there is a real-world distinction: we were envisioning large, multi-column menus that required little in the way of mouse dexterity to operate.
Flyouts make sense in this situation, especially since all of our top-level section index pages were essentially devoid of any real content—they would be reduced to, well, indexes. But, if we could create a section flyout for the first 3 levels and skip the index, we could save the user a lot of time clicking through to the meaty links and offer a nice section overview at a glance. (This is not a site concerned with a sequential narrative, so “stepping” the user through the content is not a requirement.) The file structure would remain hierarchical, with a browse-based interface built on top if it, and anything beyond the third level would become side navigation.
This sounded good. But what about all the anti-drop down usability studies out there? Usability experts are always coming out against the use of drop-down menus—and heck, we were too. Was this really a good idea? So we did some research and it turns out the king of all usability gurus, Jakob Nielsen, has recently published a pretty extensive study called Mega Drop-Down Navigation Menus Work Well. (This is sort of like the Pope recommending that married couples start “seeing other people” to spice things up.) It’s a great read and there’s some good information on what to avoid when traveling down the path of the now renamed: Mega Drop-Down Menu.
From the article:
Given that regular drop-down menus are rife with usability problems, it takes a lot for me to recommend a new form of drop-down. But, as our testing videos show, mega drop-downs overcome the downsides of regular drop-downs. Thus, I can recommend one while warning against the other.
I’ll keep everyone posted on the progress and we’ll see if our assumptions about Mega Drop-Down Menus are correct.
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- PBDH is sponsoring O’Reilly’s Ignite Seattle tonight
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- Your Friday Quote
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