cazmockett.com

Designing User Interfaces: Details Make the Difference

Dan Rubin

The main topics Dan covered were:

• Proportional Design
• Borders, Lines & Layer Modes
• Texture Tricks
• Other Interesting Stuff

Proportion
Creating patterns for margins and padding aids a sense of cohesion with your design - even if it’s just multiples of 5px, 10px etc. Being consistent will look better.
With typography, use relative text sizes to create balance. Use letter-spacing property (aka Tracking) to balance things.

Borders, Lines & Layer Modes
Grids - take the guesswork out of things. But they can be a bit boring - so use certain elements to break the repetition [see below]

Texture Tricks
Reality is rarely smooth - so using slight touches of texture to break up large blocks of colour can make designs seem more natural and less “flat”. Subtle lines & gradients on elements can have a similar effect, and make things feel more tactile. Depth can be inferred with a bit of subtle bevelling of buttons etc.

Almost any image can be used to make a gradient fill for a banner, for instance. Getting a natural, interesting gradient could take ages in photoshop, but sampling a single line of an image, then stretching it vertically to produce a gradient is a really quick and easy way to start. Then use layer cloning/blending to make it more interesting. It’s a trick I’ll definitely be putting to good use in due course.

Other Interesting Stuff
Finally, Dan wrapped it up with a demonstration of a redesign of the Fox News website (which he did purely for his own amusement!). Currently, it’s a mess with uneven margins, padding, borders, heading styles etc. The revamp made it all much more cohesive and easier on the eye. Nice work, Dan!

Oh dear, now I think I might have to revisit this site’s design and put some of Dan’s tips into practice

Dan’s presentation: slides (pdf) | audio (mp3)

For Example: BBC Home Page

Tom Cartwright/Claire Roberts

Tom and Claire took us through the processes involved in rewriting the BBC Home Page.

Old page was boring, tables based. New has been redone with web standards. Still looked the same, not a good plan. 9 months later, redesigned totally.

There are certain technological/infrastructure constraints which had to be worked around:

• Apache with Mod includes.
• No loops, no xml processing.
• Look like a page not an app.
• Optimisation the key.

more requests = bad

• Images - CSS sprites - 60 image requests (old page) -> 3 only now with sprites - GIFs because of cross-browser support.
• Default page is 300Kb with 30 requests

Drag and drop isn’t the core point. 5% of users have no JS. So they don’t get identical features).

The other 95%. Keyboard browsers, screen readers. Function of links can change.

.blur() is not friends with JAWS. Sends users back to top of page. Taking care for some users, builds a better experience for all (web standards).

Upcoming Stuff

• bbc.co.uk/glow - bit iffy with browser support with other JS libraries - so they wrote their own. Will go open source, hopefully.
• New platform coming up - PHP running Zend framework (instead of nasty CGI and PERL nonsense).
• Identity - implicit and explicit personalisation on bbc-wide site.
• About 60% of users have customised the page some way or another.
• Scrum development, 2 sofrware engineers, 3 client-side devs took 3 months.
• Now joined OpenID federation - it will come.
• Fixed width still - wide variety of sites, easier to try and achieve a consistent look across all sites by using the fixed width.

Tom/Claire’s presentation: audio (mp3)

For Example: Edenbee

James Box (Clear Left)

James’ presentation was about the design processes involved with developing Edenbee.

Clear Left are a User Xperience Design Conustlancy. Edenbee Tracks green stuff and shows you your carbon footprint over time. Each user has a Goals page. eg fit enery-saving lightbulbs. Built by a small team - up to 4 people. 2 clients, New Bamboo did rails backend. Clearleft doesn’t do “deliverables” - they don’t get shown to the clients.

Process

• Start with a “discovery phase” - get round a table to discuss. Paper-based to begin with. White boards. Carbon calculators. Make it social. Wanted it to be the place for your green profile - c.f. flickr, del.icio.us etc.
• amee.cc calculates the actual carbon emissions from meter readings, flights etc.
• Don’t let features overwhelm the main point of the site. Design features when the community needs them - not up front.
• No API at present, want one to be able to feed back into other areas of the web.
• Hive is the main group - aggregated content.

James’ presentation: slides (pdf) | audio (mp3)

Designing Our Way Through Data

Jeff Veen

Jeff’s opening keynote for @media was very thought provoking, as usual.

He spoke about data visualisation and how diagrams can often show us things more quickly and more intuitively than a table of data is able to.

User Participation + Mass of data = designing for data
Data + metadata = information

Make the data useable, you can make sense of it. Add some styles -> makes it more accessible. Example was a rainfall chart. Boring table gives no indication, you have to parse the figures and work it out. But make an icon in each cell instead - colour darker and a bigger raindrop for indicating more rainfall - suddenly the visualisation makes things easily understood. Beware, “prettification” can go too far, and destroy the underlying data.

Jeff also showed us some notable examples:

John Snow
A Cholera outbreak in 1854 in London killed 500 people in one neighbourhood. He figured out with empirical evidence what was happening by plotting the death locations on a map. The local water pump was infecting people  - pump handle removed -> people stopped dying. He effectively mashed up pump location vs Cholera deaths and proved Cholera was a water-born disease. Lead to the development of  Victorian sewers. Found new way of gaining meaning from data.

Charles Joseph Minard
Map and chart for Napoleon’s troops marching to Moscow [see above]. This showed graphically how the number of Napoleon’s troops dimished with time, and location, as they marched to Moscow. And it also showed vividly that thousands of them died whilst trying to cross a particular river - obviously a dangerous spot - by plotting time/deaths/geographical location, it tells you much more about the data than pure figures would convey. Minard said of his map:

The aim of my carte figurative is … to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calcuation. Charles Joseph Minard

Harry Beck
Tube map designer - Veen showed us before and after views. The old version was very confusing. Leaving out all the dross made things a lot simpler and more intuitive.

Google Analytics
Simplified things. Don’t plot too many things at once. Inspired by Indiana Jones plane journey - dot per datum on the chart. Don’t junk up things too much - remove “chart junk” and things get more comprehesible.

When to talk to people
Lots at the beginning, tails off in a log graph - compared with cost of changing your mind - the opposite. As launch approaches, expense climbs dramatically.

• Look at history
• Look at data visualisations
• Look at users

To help give instpiration for your designs. Books - Edward Tufte:  “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

Jeff’s presentation: slides (pdf) | audio (mp3)

As web designers, we all know how important it is that you are aware of your target audience, and what sort of browser they might be using to view your sites.

I was idly fiddling with the Sitemeter Stats for my blogs today, and was intrigued by the variation in browser share between them - largely reflecting their readerships, and how “geeky”/computer literate the visitors may be. They’re all hosted on Blogger and have referrals from a variety of sources.

First up, this blog shows the largest number of different browers - even getting a few percent of views with Konqueror and Opera 9. I see 2% of folks are still straggling along with Netscape 5 too! The majority are on Firefox 2 - just edging IE7 by 6%. I guess this wide spread of browsers reflects the “geekery” of the content and people using niche browsers are likely to read webhead stuff!

[Browser Share pie chart for this blog readership]

The second chart is my Rugby Mad blog - the first one I started back in Feb 2006. Although the subject is just limited to rugby, I’m guessing that the readers represent a more “average” web user - the blog was linked from the BBC’s Six Nations blog last year, and I got massive numbers of hits from that. They are certainly a less geeky crowd than above. This is reflected by the stats - nearly half of them are using IE7 - with IE6 the next largest chunk at 28% <sigh />. Firefox has plummeted 20% compared to the geeky blog. And it looks like around 8% read from a Mac (although I suppose some could be using Safari on a PC now). But no Netscape in sight!

[Browser Share pie chart for my RugbyMad blog readership]

My Photographic blog is most similar to the web design one - although there aren’t any die-hard Konqueror or Opera fans amongst the readership! The Netscape stragglers are back in about the same numbers
[Browser Share pie chart for my Photographic blog readership]

Last of all is my newest blog, My Year In Pictures. It’s been running less than a month, whereas the rest have been going for a year or more. I guess potential users of older browsers may have upgraded before this one went live (I think the stats are derived from the last 12 months if the blog has been going that long). The most surprising is Firefox 2 with a whopping 42% share, a good 8% ahead of IE7. There’s still around 18% of users clinging to IE6. Safari and Netscape figure in the few percent.

[Browser Share pie chart for my Year In Pictures blog readership]

So, what does all this tell me? It just shows that with the proliferation of new browsers, while Firefox is doing well in the geeksphere, IE7 is gaining ground - but IE6 is still alive and kicking (us) amongst the “average” web user. And yes, there are still some poor folks using Netscape - people, if it’s within your power, upgrade to a nice shiny new browser!

When I build sites for clients, I’ll always design it for Firefox. Then test/fix for IE7 (some niggles but not major problems) and pesky IE6 (usually requires more tweaks). I’ll also have a look at them in Safari (PC) and Opera 9.02 - there may be slight presentational differences, but no show-stoppers.

For a laugh, I’ll also take a peek in IE5.5 (and 5.02 if I’m feeling masochistic), but I’m not going to waste any time fixing bugs for them. Let’s face it - none of the above readers have registered as using them - and I’m guessing on average, these stats are pretty applicable for most web users these days, no matter what content they are browsing - so why should I flog myself unneccessarily?

Next up was Mark Boulton, who wanted us to work with typography in a better way.

• Be Appropriate & Adaptable
  Typefaces tell stories, and the web is still playing catchup with this power. Comic Sans is appropriate for the menu at a greasy spoon cafe; you wouldn’t want an invitation to a Black Tie event done in it though. Similarly, the BBC’s use of Gill Sans evokes order and authority. The BBC logo has a twist - by reversing the type and blocking out the shapes of Gill Sans.
  Don’t let type and design get in the way of words.
  Be adaptable to requirements, and appropriate for the story.
• Use Rhythm
  Richard Rutter’s Compose To A Vertical Rhythm explains about using the line height and leading of your blocks of text to best advantage. The basic theory goes: 12px font height with 18px between lines, give a line height of 1.5. You can use incremental leading to make 4 lines of text in the main body of a page line up with 5 lines of text in a sidebar.
  [Text in the sidebar bears no relation to the main body copy. It looks messy.]
  The maths gets a bit hairy: 18px x 4 lines = 72px for the main body. 72px ÷ 5 lines = 14.4px for the sidebar
  If you’re using 10px height for your sidebar text, 14.4 ÷ 10px = 1.44 line height. You may find the sidebar top-margin property needs a bit of tweaking to get it to line up properly.
  [This looks much better now everything is aligned vertically]
• Optical Grey
  If you squint at a block of text, you’ll see the page has different tonal ranges depending on font, leading, letter spacing etc.
  Verdana has a more open shape, so is paler at smaller sizes.
  Combining serif and sans-serif fonts can be effective, giving different “colours”. Minimize dark grey and balance the line height.
• Use The Right Tools For The Job
  Hyphens “-” are NOT em dashes!! “—”. Use an em — or en – where appropriate.
• Use a Grid System
  Use grids as a tool to help you organise information. How to decide how big the grid unit should be? You can subdivide the units too - you might have a 3em high by 4.5em wide block, which divides nicely into 2×3 squares each of 1.5em width and height.
  Choose gutter sizes carefully, it can depend on the relationship between whitespace and font size.
  Using Alternate Row colours in tables must be done with care - don’t use colours which are too strong.
  Set type to your grid, and align everything! The smallest error can really stick out.

In Summary
Typography is all about the details. Tiny increments can make a huge difference. The full slides are available at Mark’s website.