Clearly identifying a bill’s due date when the user is scheduling a payment.

Citibank’s calendar widget clearly indicates when the next payment is due.

Bad Idea

Telling the user to remember a bill’s due date while scheduling a payment.

ECSI’s student loan bill pay options require you to know your bill’s due date. Note the two notes. Also note that the due date does not appear anywhere else on this form.

If I drive to work, on my way home I encounter 6 or 7 signs like the one above all in a one-mile stretch. To make matters worse, the signs alternate between “Must Turn Left” and “Must Turn Right.” Even though I’ve made the trip many times, I still get tripped up by these signs.

There are several design problems here. The signs are small, the text is almost identical between “Left” and “Right” signs, and the wrong word is emphasized. When I look at the sign, the first thing my eye is drawn to is the “MUST” in the center – not only is it slightly bigger than the other lettering, it’s also centered (both vertically and horizontally) and is the only word that gets its own line. However, the information I really need is which lane will be turning. In order to distinguish between a “Must Turn Left” and a “Must Turn Right” sign, you have to read it every time, which takes attention away from what you should be doing: driving.

There is a simple and common solution: use arrows.

Photo Credit: Right Turn Only by pwinn

There is no confusion here. You know which lane is turning just by glancing at the sign. And yet, the text-only signs are so prevalent in my area. Maybe there is a reason for this that I am unaware of? I’d hate to think it’s a never-ending case of “well, everyone else is doing it…”

I found there are four things you need to do in parallel: learn, stay current, practice, and evangelize. Sometimes you’ll focus on one more than others, but to be successful, you really need to juggle all four. (And it doesn’t stop after you’ve made the switch, you just have less to learn and more to stay current on.)

Learn

Although a lot of design is common sense, you still need to learn how to recognize what sense is “common” and what is not. To this end, I recommend attending conferences and seminars and reading books.

Depending on where you live, there may be a local SIGCHI, UPA, or IxDA chapter that organizes events and seminars – that would be the first thing to check out because local events are usually less expensive and more intimate than the big national conferences put on by these organizations. Regarding the bigger conferences, I can’t speak for UPA or Interaction, but CHI tends to be more academic, so it may not be the best use of funding (if you’re lucky enough to get it in this economy). I found UIE’s UI conference to be great for a beginner, with great speakers and day-long seminars that cover subjects like design strategy, intro to interaction design, paper prototyping, and many others in full detail.

For books, I recommend Robert’s first book Designing the Obvious and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug. These are quick reads, but they manage to cover a lot of design basics – definitely enough to get you started. Books like About Face by Alan Cooper, while comprehensive and often recommended, are more useful as references when you need to look up how to solve a particular problem. It’s not something you’ll want to read cover-to-cover (unless you have a lot of time on your hands).

Stay Current

There is a bit of overlap between learning and staying current, but I think they deserve to be called out individually because the resources you use are different.

To get and stay current in the field, you should make Google Reader or another RSS feed aggregator your best friend. Blogs are by far the best way to stay in touch with the design community. Here are a few that I recommend:

• Signal vs. Noise
• UIE Brain Sparks
• Boxes and Arrows
• Seth Godin’s Blog

If you find an author you like, they probably have a blog – look it up. If you do some development, read developer blogs. Subscribe to Gizmodo if you have time to spare. Whatever you’re interested, subscribe to the feed and you’ll be on top of all the latest news, trends, and techniques.

Another fantastic resource for staying current is the SXSW Interactive conference. This will be the best investment you make, guaranteed. You’ll be surrounded by bright and creative people and all the emerging technologies. It’s a great motivator and a great way to meet all those internet ‘celebrities’ like Jared and Robert (not to mention Kathy Sierra, Jason Fried, Jeffrey Zeldman, and many others).

Practice

The only way to become a designer is to design. Even if it’s not in your job description, start incorporating design techniques you read or hear about.

Do some hallway usability tests, make a paper prototype, create some mock-ups before diving into the code. One of the first things I did was create a paper prototype and run some usability tests with people in the office. We got some great feedback this way that led to a much better design. It’s amazing how much a quick and dirty usability test can uncover.

Another thing you can do is start asking questions: Who are the users? Why do they need our tool? How do they currently accomplish their tasks? Why do we need features x, y, and z? What workflow are we trying to support? These are the types of things a designer needs to tackle for every project, so the sooner you start asking questions, the sooner you’ll figure out the right questions to ask. If you’re lucky, you may get to talk to some real users and observe them in their environment.

Find the low-hanging fruit for your project – something that would be easy to improve – and do it. It may not be the most visible thing or lead to impressive results, but at least you’ll get to practice your skills and it’ll give you something to talk about when you need to convince others of the value of design and usability. The more you do, the more people will start to see you as the “expert” in the field.

Evangelize

There’s no getting away from this one. You have to be passionate about great design and usability and you need to talk about it. Make it a point to know all the key decision makers in your company and meet with them on a regular basis. Even if it’s over coffee in the break room, you need to spread the idea that usability is a priority, not a “nice-to-have”. It’s usually not hard to convince people that usability is necessary, but it is hard to get them to act on that belief.

One of the things I did is establish a Usability Special Interest Group where we review our current products and mock-ups, read and discuss design-related books, and share other interesting information we learn at conferences or read online. We have a group of people interested in usability (developers, managers, interaction designers, and technical writers) who learn together and all now evangelize usability on the projects they’re involved with. In addition to being a support group for like-minded individuals, it’s also a great way to spread the influence.

What you do will depend on your organization and its culture. Just find the right people and talk, talk, talk. This is a great way to establish yourself as a usability expert and to start swaying the company culture in the direction of usability, where they will actually value your work.



Remember, it’s better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. The best way to make the switch to interaction designer is to start doing the work. As a developer, you are intimately involved in your products, so you have a great chance to influence them. Don’t wait for someone to ask you to design something or run a usability test – just do it and then present the results. Time may be a concern, but if you don’t find the time for design, no one else will either. Learn, stay current, practice, and evangelize and soon enough, people will see you as the designer you want to be.

Then order your new business cards.

I only have 28 years 11 months 17 days 13 hours and 3 minutes to complete my changes and check them in.

Apparently, the new T-Mobile G1 phone, hailed for being the first “Google phone” (meaning it uses Android as its operating system), doesn’t even have a headphone jack! The newer models are now shipping with an adapter so that people can actually listen to the music they put on the phone.

The T-Mobile website states:

With the included 1GB memory card that you can expand to 8GB, you can listen to your music with the built in music player or on any computer. That means you’re never without your favorite tunes, no matter where you go.

They should add “as long as you have an adapter.”

Come on, this is pretty simple stuff – if you have a portable music player, you should have a jack to plug in your headphones. I thought the iPhone was bad enough with its recessed headphone jack that only fits Apple headphones. But at least it has one.

I’d really like to know the justification for not including a headphone jack on the G1. It seems like such an obvious oversight.

This made me do a double-take. Why would it think this photo had anything to do with the BostonCHI meeting? Well, that’s because it was uploaded while the BostonCHI meeting was going on (and it was in my calendar).

I don’t know, doesn’t seem all that intelligent to me. Others disagree, though.

This is especially annoying in the mobile version, which only shows the last 15 posts by default. I end up having to scroll down to the bottom, click the “Load more posts” link, scroll all the way down again, rinse, and repeat depending on how many unread posts I have in my list.

A simple sort option would go a long way toward improving the user experience.

–
[Edit] Apparently there is a sorting option in the regular Google Reader interface. Unfortunately, it is hidden in a menu labeled “View Settings”. Calling it “Sort” would be a lot more intuitive and I’m sure they could find a better place for the “Set as start page” option.

I’ll probably write more about it later. Now, back to drawing!

When I opened up Google Reader this morning, I was greeted with this friendly, yet annoyingly undismissible popup. My only two options are to “Learn more” or to edit my friends list. I don’t want to do either of those right now, I just want to read my feeds!

Clicking outside the popup balloon doesn’t do anything. I can even click on one of the new posts and read it, but the balloon does not disappear.

It seems like they tried to make a non-invasive announcement of a new feature, but forgot to add a “Close” button.

First, there is the iPhone problem. Unless you buy “iPhone compatible” headphones, yours probably won’t fit into the slim recessed hole that Apple put on the iPhones. (I can’t speak for the 3G ones, my experience is only with the first generation iPhone.) Why they decided to do this is beyond me. I had to first get an adapter, and then went out and bought new headphones after getting fed up with the extra length and inflexibility the adapter provided.

I don’t use the iPhone as my main mp3 player, though, so recently I got a new Sansa Fuze because it integrates with Rhapsody. The strange thing about this mp3 player is that SanDisk decided to put the headphone jack on the bottom of the device.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this makes any sense from a design perspective and have only been able to come up with one advantage that this design provides over the standard headphones-on-top design. If you hold the mp3 player in your hand while you’re walking, you probably hold it upside-down so that the screen faces you and you can read the text on it right-side-up. You probably also hold your thumb on the control wheel. In this scenario, having the headphones plugged in at the top of the player (thus, facing down toward the ground), might get in the way, as the cord would constantly brush against your hand. Having the jack on the bottom of the player resolves this issue by having the cord remain out of the way.

It seems like a bit of a stretch to think that this is why it was designed like this. More likely, it has something to do with the way it is structured internally. Maybe, in order to keep the player as thin and as small as it is, the headphone jack had to be moved away from the screen because it would not fit behind it. Whatever the reason, there are at least two major disadvatages to the design:

• It’s awkward putting the player in your pocket with the cord on the bottom. If you use the player controls right from your pocket, like I do, the headphone cord is always in the way.
• The headphone jack is too close to the USB cord connector jack, so depending on your headphones, you may not be able to have both plugged in at the same time.

I would think something like headphone jacks would be standardized by now. Everyone has headphones, almost all digital devices have headphone jacks… how hard is it to make something that just works? A simple non-recessed connector at the top of the device does the trick quite well. What problems are designers trying to solve by introducing these non-standard designs?