rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 150,"A Gift Idea For Your Users: Respect, Yo","If, indeed, it is the thought that counts, maybe we should pledge to make more thoughtful design decisions. In addition to wowing people who use the Web sites we build with novel features, nuanced aesthetics and the new new thing, maybe we should also thread some subtle things throughout our work that let folks know: hey, I’m feeling ya. We’re simpatico. I hear you loud and clear. It’s not just holiday spirit that moves me to talk this way. As good as people are, we need more than the horizon of karma to overcome that invisible demon, inertia. Makers of the Web, respectful design practices aren’t just the right thing, they are good for business. Even if your site is the one and only place to get experience x, y or zed, you don’t rub someone’s face in it. You keep it free flowing, you honor the possible back and forth of a healthy transaction, you are Johnny Appleseed with the humane design cues. You make it clear that you are in it for the long haul. A peek back: Think back to what search (and strategy) was like before Google launched a super clean page with “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Aggregation was the order of the day (just go back and review all the ‘strategic alliances’ that were announced daily.) Yet the GOOG comes along with this zen layout (nope, we’re not going to try to make you look at one of our media properties) and a bold, brash, teleport-me-straight-to-the-first-search-result button. It could have been titled “We’re Feeling Cocky”. These were radical design decisions that reset how people thought about search services. Oh, you mean I can just find what I want and get on with it? It’s maybe even more impressive today, after the GOOG has figured out how to monetize attention better than anyone. “I’m Feeling Lucky” is still there. No doubt, it costs the company millions. But by leaving a little money on the table, they keep the basic bargain they started to strike in 1997. We’re going to get you where you want to go as quickly as possible. Where are the places we might make the same kind of impact in our work? Here are a few ideas: Respect People’s Time As more services become more integrated with our lives, this will only become more important. How can you make it clear that you respect the time a user has granted you? User-Oriented Defaults Default design may be the psionic tool in your belt. Unseen, yet pow-er-ful. Look at your defaults. Who are they set up to benefit? Are you depending on users not checking off boxes so you can feel ok about sending them email they really don’t want? Are you depending on users not checking off boxes so you tilt privacy values in ways most beneficial for your SERPs? Are you making it a little too easy for 3rd party applications to run buckwild through your system? There’s being right and then there’s being awesome. Design to the spirit of the agreement and not the letter. See this? Make sure that’s really the experience you think people want. Whenever I see a service that defaults to not opting me in their newsletter just because I bought a t shirt from them, you can be sure that I trust them that much more. And they are likely to see me again. Reduce, Reuse It’s likely that people using your service will have data and profile credentials elsewhere. You should really think hard about how you can let them repurpose some of that work within your system. Can you let them reduce the number of logins/passwords they have to manage by supporting OpenID? Can you let them reuse profile information from another service by slurping in (or even subscribing) to hCards? Can you give them a leg up by reusing a friends list they make available to you? (Note: please avoid the anti-pattern of inviting your user to upload all her credential data from 3rd party sites into your system.) This is a much larger issue, and if you’d like to get involved, have a look at the wiki, and dive in. Make it simple to leave Oh, this drives me bonkers. Again, the more simple you make it to increase or decrease involvement in your site, or to just opt-out altogether, the better. This example from Basecamp is instructive: At a glance, I can see what the implications are of choosing a different type of account. I can also move between account levels with one click. Finally, I can cancel the service easily. No hoop jumping. Also, it should be simple for users to take data with them or delete it. Let Them Have Fun Don’t overlook opportunities for pleasure. Even the most mundane tasks can be made more enjoyable. Check out one of my favorite pieces of interaction design from this past year: Holy knob fiddling, Batman! What a great way to get people to play with preference settings: an equalizer metaphor. Those of a certain age will recall how fun it was to make patterns with your uncle’s stereo EQ. I think this is a delightful way to encourage people to optimize their own experience of the news feed feature. Given the killer nature of this feature, it was important for Facebook to make it easy to fine tune. I’d also point you to Flickr’s Talk Like A Pirate Day Easter egg as another example of design that delights. What a huge amount of work for a one-off, totally optional way to experience the site. And what fun. And how true to its brand persona. Brill. Anti-hype Don’t talk so much. Rather, ship and sample. Release code, tell the right users. See what happens. Make changes. Extend the circle a bit by showing some other folks. Repeat. The more you hype coming features, the more you talk about what isn’t yet, the more you build unrealistic expectations. Your genius can’t possibly match our collective dreaming. Disappointment is inevitable. Yet, if you craft the right melody and make it simple for people to hum your tune, it will spread. Give it time. Listen. Speak the Language of the Tribe It’s respectful to speak in a human way. Not that you have to get all zOMGWTFBBQ!!1 in your messaging. People respond when you speak to them in a way that sounds natural. Natural will, of course, vary according to context. Again, listen in and people will signal the speech that works in that group for those tasks. Reveal those cues in your interface work and you’ll have powerful proof that actual people are working on your Web site. This example of Pownce‘s gender selector is the kind of thing I’m talking about: Now, this doesn’t mean you should mimic the lingo on some cool kidz site. Your service doesn’t need to have a massage when it’s down. Think about what works for you and your tribe. Excellent advice here from Feedburner’s Dick Costolo on finding a voice for your service. Also, Mule Design’s Erika Hall has an excellent talk on improving your word fu. Pass the mic, yo Here is a crazy idea: you could ask your users what they want. Maybe you could even use this input to figure out what they really want. Tools abound. Comments, wikis, forums, surveys. Embed the sexy new Get Satisfaction widget and have a dynamic FAQ running. The point is that you make it clear to people that they have a means of shaping the service with you. And you must showcase in some way that you are listening, evaluating and taking action against some of that user input. You get my drift. There are any number of ways we can show respect to those who gift us with their time, data, feedback, attention, evangelism, money. Big things are in the offing. I can feel the love already.",2007,Brian Oberkirch,brianoberkirch,2007-12-23T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2007/a-gift-idea-for-your-users-respect-yo/,ux 262,Be the Villain,"Inclusive Design is the practice of making products and services accessible to, and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for specialized accommodations. The practice was popularized by author and User Experience Design Director Kat Holmes. If getting you to discover her work is the only thing this article succeeds in doing then I’ll consider it a success. As a framework for creating resilient solutions to problems, Inclusive Design is incredible. However, the aimless idealistic aspirations many of its newer practitioners default to can oftentimes run into trouble. Without outlining concrete, actionable outcomes that are then vetted by the people you intend to serve, there is the potential to do more harm than good. When designing, you take a user flow and make sure it can’t be broken. Ensuring that if something is removed, it can be restored. Or that something editable can also be updated at a later date—you know, that kind of thing. What we want to do is avoid surprises. Much like a water slide with a section of pipe missing, a broken flow forcibly ejects a user, to great surprise and frustration. Interactions within a user flow also have to be small enough to be self-contained, so as to avoid creating a none pizza with left beef scenario. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how to expand on this practice. Watertight user flows make for a great immediate experience, but it’s all too easy to miss the forest for the trees when you’re a product designer focused on cranking out features. What I’m concerned about is while to trying to envision how a user flow could be broken, you also think about how it could be subverted. In addition to preventing the removal of a section of water slide, you also keep someone from mugging the user when they shoot out the end. If you pay attention, you’ll start to notice this subversion with increasing frequency: Domestic abusers using internet-controlled devices to spy on and control their partner. Zealots tanking a business’ rating on Google because its owners spoke out against unchecked gun violence. Forcing people to choose between TV or stalking because the messaging center portion of a cable provider’s entertainment package lacks muting or blocking features. White supremacists tricking celebrities into endorsing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Facebook repeatedly allowing housing, credit, and employment advertisers to discriminate against users by their race, ability, and religion. White supremacists also using a video game chat service as a recruiting tool. The unchecked harassment of minors on Instagram. Swatting. If I were to guess why we haven’t heard more about this problem, I’d say that optimistically, people have settled out of court. Pessimistically, it’s most likely because we ignore, dismiss, downplay, and suppress those who try to bring it to our attention. Subverted design isn’t the practice of employing Dark Patterns to achieve your business goals. If you are not familiar with the term, Dark Patterns are the use of cheap user interface tricks and psychological manipulation to get users to act against their own best interests. User Experience consultant Chris Nodder wrote Evil By Design, a fantastic book that unpacks how to detect and think about them, if you’re interested in this kind of thing Subverted design also isn’t beholden design, or simple lack of attention. This phenomenon isn’t even necessarily premeditated. I think it arises from naïve (or willfully ignorant) design decisions being executed at a historically unprecedented pace and scale. These decisions are then preyed on by the shrewd and opportunistic, used to control and inflict harm on the undeserving. Have system, will game. This is worth discussing. As the field of design continues to industrialize empathy, it also continues to ignore the very established practice of threat modeling. Most times, framing user experience in terms of how to best funnel people into a service comes with an implicit agreement that the larger system that necessitates the service is worth supporting. To achieve success in the eyes of their superiors, designers may turn to emotional empathy exercises. By projecting themselves into the perceived surface-level experiences of others, they play-act at understanding how to nudge their targeted demographics into a conversion funnel. This roleplaying exercise has the effect of scoping concerns to the immediate, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea of engagement at all cost within the identified demographic. The thing is, pure engagement leaves the door wide open for bad actors. Even within the scope of a limited population, the assumption that everyone entering into the funnel is acting with good intentions is a poor one. Security researchers, network administrators, and other professionals who practice threat modeling understand that the opposite is true. By preventing everyone save for well-intentioned users from operating a system within the parameters you set for them, you intentionally limit the scope of abuse that can be enacted. Don’t get me wrong: being able to escort as many users as you can to the happy path is a foundational skill. But we should also be having uncomfortable conversations about why something unthinkable may in fact not be. They’re not going to be fun conversations. It’s not going to be easy convincing others that these aren’t paranoid delusions best tucked out of sight in the darkest, dustiest corner of the backlog. Realistically, talking about it may even harm your career. But consider the alternative. The controlled environment of the hypothetical allows us to explore these issues without propagating harm. Better to be viewed as the office’s resident villain than to have to live with something like this: If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the choices we make—or avoid making—have consequences. Design has been doing a lot of growing up as of late, including waking up to the idea that technology isn’t neutral. You’re going to have to start thinking the way a monster does—if you can imagine it, chances are someone else can as well. To get into this kind of mindset, inverting the Inclusive Design Principles is a good place to start: Providing a comparable experience becomes forcing a single path. Considering situation becomes ignoring circumstance. Being consistent becomes acting capriciously. Giving control becomes removing autonomy. Offering choice becomes limiting options. Prioritizing content becomes obfuscating purpose. Adding value becomes filling with gibberish. Combined, these inverted principles start to paint a picture of something we’re all familiar with: a half-baked, unscrupulous service that will jump at the chance to take advantage of you. This environment is also a perfect breeding ground for spawning bad actors. These kinds of services limit you in the ways you can interact with them. They kick you out or lock you in if you don’t meet their unnamed criteria. They force you to parse layout, prices, and policies that change without notification or justification. Their controls operate in ways that are unexpected and may shift throughout the experience. Their terms are dictated to you, gaslighting you to extract profit. Heaps of jargon and flashy, unnecessary features are showered on you to distract from larger structural and conceptual flaws. So, how else can we go about preventing subverted design? Marli Mesibov, Content Strategist and Managing Editor of UX Booth, wrote a brilliant article about how to use Dark Patterns for good—perhaps the most important takeaway being admitting you have a problem in the first place. Another exercise is asking the question, “What is the evil version of this feature?” Ask it during the ideation phase. Ask it as part of acceptance criteria. Heck, ask it over lunch. I honestly don’t care when, so long as the question is actually raised. In keeping with the spirit of this article, we can also expand on this line of thinking. Author, scientist, feminist, and pacifist Ursula Franklin urges us to ask, “Whose benefits? Whose risks?” instead of “What benefits? What risks?” in her talk, When the Seven Deadly Sins Became the Seven Cardinal Virtues. Inspired by the talk, Ethan Marcotte discusses how this relates to the web platform in his powerful post, Seven into seven. Few things in this world are intrinsically altruistic or good—it’s just the nature of the beast. However, that doesn’t mean we have to stand idly by when harm is created. If we can add terms like “anti-pattern” to our professional vocabulary, we can certainly also incorporate phrases like “abuser flow.” Design finally got a seat at the table. We should use this newfound privilege wisely. Listen to women. Listen to minorities, listen to immigrants, the unhoused, the less economically advantaged, and the less technologically-literate. Listen to the underrepresented and the underprivileged. Subverted design is a huge problem, likely one that will never completely go away. However, the more of us who put the hard work into being the villain, the more we can lessen the scope of its impact.",2018,Eric Bailey,ericbailey,2018-12-06T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2018/be-the-villain/,ux 33,Five Ways to Animate Responsibly,"It’s been two years since I wrote about “Flashless Animation” on this very site. Since then, animation has steadily begun popping up on websites, from sleek app-like user interfaces to interactive magazine-like spreads. It’s an exciting time for web animation wonks, interaction developers, UXers, UI designers and a host of other acronyms! But in our rush to experiment with animation it seems that we’re having fewer conversations about whether or not we should use it, and more discussions about what we can do with it. We spend more time fretting over how to animate all the things at 60fps than we do devising ways to avoid incapacitating users with vestibular disorders. I love web animation. I live it. And I make adorably silly things with it that have no place on a self-respecting production website. I know it can be abused. We’ve all made fun of Flash-turbation. But how quickly we forget the lessons we learned from that period of web design. Parallax scrolling effects may be the skip intro of this generation. Surely we have learned better in the sobering up period between Flash and the web animation API. So here are five bits of advice we can use to pull back from the edge of animation abuse. With these thoughts in mind, we can make 2015 the year web animation came into its own. Animate deliberately Sadly, animation is considered decorative by the bulk of the web development community. UI designers and interaction developers know better, of course. But when I’m teaching a workshop on animation for interaction, I know that my students face an uphill battle against decision makers who consider it nice to have, and tack it on at the end of a project, if at all. This stigma is hard to shake. But it starts with us using animation deliberately or not at all. Poorly considered, tacked-on animation will often cause more harm than good. Users may complain that it’s too slow or too fast, or that they have no idea what just happened. When I was at Chrome Dev Summit this year, I had the privilege to speak with Roma Sha, the UX lead behind Polymer’s material design (with the wonderful animation documentation). I asked her what advice she’d give to people using animation and transitions in their own designs. She responded simply: animate deliberately. If you cannot afford to slow down to think about animation and make well-informed and well-articulated decisions on behalf of the user, it is better that you not attempt it at all. Animation takes energy to perform, and a bad animation is worse than none at all. It takes more than twelve principles We always try to draw correlations between disparate things that spark our interest. Recently it feels like more and more people are putting the The Illusion of Life on their reading shelf next to Understanding Comics. These books give us so many useful insights from other industries. However, we should never mistake a website for a comic book or an animated feature film. Some of these concepts, while they help us see our work in a new light, can be more or less relevant to producing said work. The illusion of life from cento lodigiani on Vimeo. I am specifically thinking of the twelve principles of animation put forth by Disney studio veterans in that great tome The Illusion of Life. These principles are very useful for making engaging, lifelike animation, like a ball bouncing or a squirrel scampering, or the physics behind how a lightbox should feel transitioning off a page. But they provide no direction at all for when or how something should be animated as part of a greater interactive experience, like how long a drop-down should take to fully extend or if a group of manipulable objects should be animated sequentially or as a whole. The twelve principles are a great place to start, but we have so much more to learn. I’ve documented at least six more functions of interactive animation that apply to web and app design. When thinking about animation, we should consider why and how, not just what, the physics. Beautiful physics mean nothing if the animation is superfluous or confusing. Useful and necessary, then beautiful There is a Shaker saying: “Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” When it comes to animation and the web, currently there is very little documentation about what makes it useful or necessary. We tend to focus more on the beautiful, the delightful, the aesthetic. And while aesthetics are important, they take a back seat to the user’s overall experience. The first time I saw the load screen for Pokemon Yellow on my Game Boy, I was enthralled. By the sixth time, I was mashing the start button as soon as Game Freak’s logo hit the screen. What’s delightful and meaningful to us while working on a project is not always so for our users. And even when a purely delightful animation is favorably received, as with Pokemon Yellow’s adorable opening screen, too many repetitions of the cutest but ultimately useless animation, and users start to resent it as a hindrance. If an animation doesn’t help the user in some way, by showing them where they are or how two elements on a page relate to each other, then it’s using up battery juice and processing cycles solely for the purpose of delight. Hardly the best use of resources. Rather than animating solely for the sake of delight, we should first be able to articulate two things the animation does for the user. As an example, take this menu icon from Finethought.com (found via Use Your Interface). The menu icon does two things when clicked: It gives the user feedback by animating, letting the user know its been clicked. It demonstrates its changed relationship to the page’s content by morphing into a close button. Assuming we have two good reasons to animate something, there is no reason our third cannot be to delight the user. Go four times faster There is a rule of thumb in the world of traditional animation which is applicable to web animation: however long you think your animation should last, take that time and halve it. Then halve it again! When we work on an animation for hours, our sense of time dilates. What seems fast to us is actually unbearably slow for most users. In fact, the most recent criticism from users of animated interfaces on websites seems to be, “It’s so slow!” A good animation is unobtrusive, and that often means running fast. When getting your animations ready for prime time, reduce those durations to 25% of their original speed: a four-second fade out should be over in one. Install a kill switch No matter how thoughtful and necessary an animation, there will be people who become physically sick from seeing it. For these people, we must add a way to turn off animations on the website. Fortunately, web designers are already thinking of ways to empower users to make their own decisions about how they experience the web. As an example, this site for the animated film Little from the Fish Shop allows users to turn off most of the parallax effects. While it doesn’t remove the animation entirely, this website does reduce the most nauseating of the animations. Animation is a powerful tool in our web design arsenal. But we must take care: if we abuse animation it might get a bad reputation; if we underestimate it, it won’t be prioritized. But if we wield it thoughtfully, use it where it is both necessary and useful, and empower users to turn it off, animation is a tool that will help us build things that are easier to use and more delightful for years to come. Let’s make 2015 the year web animation went to work for users.",2014,Rachel Nabors,rachelnabors,2014-12-14T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2014/five-ways-to-animate-responsibly/,ux 278,Going Both Ways,"It’s that time of the year again: Santa is getting ready to travel the world. Up until now, girls and boys from all over have sent in letters asking for what they want. I hope that Santa and his elves have—unlike me—learned more than just English. On the Internet, those girls and boys want to participate in sharing their stories and videos of opening presents and of being with friends and family. Ah, yes, the wonders of user generated content. But more than that, people also want to be able to use sites in the language they know. While you and I might expect the text to read from left to right, not all languages do. Some go from right to left, such as Arabic and Hebrew. (Some also go from top to bottom, but for now, let’s just worry about those first two directions!) If we were building a site for girls and boys to send their letters to Santa, we need to consider having the interface in the language and direction that they prefer. On the elves’ side, they may be viewing the site in one direction but reading the user generated content in the other direction. We need to build a site that supports bidirectional (or bidi) text. Let’s take a look at some things to be aware of when it comes to building bidi interfaces. Setting the direction of the interface Right off the bat, we need to tell the browser what direction the text should be going in. To do this, we add the dir attribute to an HTML element and set it to either LTR (for left to right) or RTL (for right to left). You can add the dir attribute to any element and it will set or change the direction for the content within that element. Here is English Content.
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You can also set the direction via CSS. .rtl { direction: rtl; } It’s generally recommended that you don’t use CSS to set the direction of the text. Text direction is an important part of the content that should be retained even in environments where the CSS may not be available or fails to load. How things change with the direction attribute Just adding the dir attribute tells the browser to render the content within it differently. The text aligns to the right of the page and, interestingly, punctuation appears at the left of the sentence. (We’ll get to that in a little bit.) Scrollbars in most browsers will appear on the left instead of the right. Webkit is the notable exception here which always shows the scrollbar on the right, no matter what the text direction is. Avoid having a design that has an expectation that the scrollbar will be in a specific place (and a specific size). Changing the order of text mid-way As we saw in that previous example, the punctuation appeared at the beginning of the sentence instead of the end, even though the text was English. At Yahoo!, we have an interesting dilemma where the company name has punctuation in it. Therefore, when the name appears in the middle of (for example) Arabic text, the exclamation mark appears at the beginning of the word instead of the end. There are two ways in which this problem can be solved: 1. Use HTML around the left-to-right content, or To solve the problem of the Yahoo! name in the midst of Arabic text, we can wrap a span around it and change the direction on that element. 2. Use a text direction mark in the content. Unicode has two marks, U+200E and U+200F, that tell the browser that the text is in a particular direction. Placing this right after the punctuation will correct the placement. Using the HTML entity: Yahoo!‎ Tables Thankfully, the cells of a data table also get reordered from right to left. Equally as nice, if you’re using display:table, the content will still get reordered. CSS So far, we’ve seen that the dir attribute does a pretty decent job of getting content flowing in the direction that we need it. Unfortunately, there are huge swaths of design that is handled by CSS that the handy dir attribute has zero effect over. Many properties, like float or absolute positioning with left and right values, are unaffected and must be handled manually. Elements that were floated left must now by floated right. Left margins and paddings must now move to the right and the right margins and paddings must now move to the left. Since the browser won’t handle this for us, we have a couple approaches that we can use: CSS Only We can take advantage of the attribute selector to target CSS to apply in one direction or another. [dir=ltr] .module { float: left; margin: 0 0 0 20px; } [dir=rtl] .module { float: right; margin: 0 20px 0 0; } As you can see from this example, both of the properties have been modified for the flipped interface. If your interface is rather complicated, you will have to create a lot of duplicate rules to have the site looking good in both directions while serving up a single stylesheet. CSSJanus Google has a tool called CSSJanus. It’s a Python script that runs over the LTR versions of your CSS files and generates RTL versions. For the RTL version of the site, just serve up those CSS files instead of the LTR versions. The script looks for keywords and value combinations and automatically swaps them so you don’t have to. At Yahoo!, CSSJanus was a huge help in speeding up our development of a bidi interface. We’ve also made a number of improvements to the script to better handle border radius, background positioning, and gradients. We will be pushing those changes back into the CSSJanus project. Background Images Background images, especially for things like CSS sprites, also raise an interesting dilemma. Background images are positioned relative to the left of the element. In a flipped interface, however, we need to position it relative to the right. An icon that would be to the left of some text will now need to appear on the right. If the x position of the background is percentage-based, then it’s fairly easy to swap the values. 0 becomes 100%, 10% becomes 90% and so on. If the x position is pixel-based, then we’re in a bit of a pickle. There’s no way to say that the image should be a certain number of pixels from the right. Therefore, you’ll need to ensure that any background image that needs to be swapped should be percentage-based. (99.9% of the the time, the background position will need to be 0 so that it can be changed to 100% for RTL.) If you’re taking an existing implementation, background positioning will likely be the biggest hurdle you’ll have to overcome in swapping your interface around. If you make sure your x position is always percentage-based from the beginning, you’ll have a much smoother process ahead of you! Flipping Images This is a more subtle point and one where you’ll really want an expert with the region to weigh in on. In RTL interfaces, users may expect certain icons to also be flipped. Pencil icons that skew to the right in LTR interfaces might need to be swapped to skew to the left, instead. Chat bubbles that come from the left will need to come from the right. The easiest way to handle this is to create new images. Name the LTR versions with -ltr in the name and name the RTL versions with -rtl in the name. CSSJanus will automatically rename all file references from -ltr to -rtl. The Future Thankfully, those within the W3C recognize that CSS should be more agnostic. As a result, they’ve begun introducing new properties that allow the browser to manage the swapping from left to right for us. The CSS3 specification for backgrounds allows for the background-position to be relative to other corners other than the top left by specifying keywords before each position. This will position the background 5px from the bottom right of the element. background-position: right 5px bottom 5px; Opera 11.60 is currently the only browser that supports this syntax. For margin and padding, we have margin-start and margin-end. In LTR interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-left and in RTL interfaces, margin-start would be the same as margin-right. Firefox and Webkit support these but with vendor prefixes right now: -webkit-margin-start: 20px; -moz-margin-start: 20px; In the CSS3 Images working draft specification, there’s an image() property that allows us to specify image fallbacks and whether those fallbacks are for LTR or RTL interfaces. background: image('sprite.png' ltr, 'sprite-rtl.png' rtl); Unfortunately, no browser supports this yet but it’s nice to be able to dream of how much easier this will be in the future! Ho Ho Ho Hopefully, after all of this, you’re full of cheer knowing that you’re well on your way to creating interfaces that can go both ways!",2011,Jonathan Snook,jonathansnook,2011-12-19T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/going-both-ways/,ux 106,Checking Out: Progress Meters,"It’s the holiday season, so you know what that means: online shopping! When I started developing Web sites back in the 90s, many of my first clients were small local shops wanting to sell their goods online, so I developed many a checkout system. And because of slow dial-up speeds back then, informing the user about where they were in the checkout process was pretty important. Even though we’re (mostly) beyond the dial-up days, informing users about where they are in a flow is still important. In usability tests at the companies I’ve worked at, I’ve seen time and time again how not adequately informing the user about their state can cause real frustration. This is especially true for two sets of users: mobile users and users of assistive devices, in particular, screen readers. The progress meter is a very common design solution used to indicate to the user’s state within a flow. On the design side, much effort may go in to crafting a solution that is as visually informative as possible. On the development side, however, solutions range widely. I’ve checked out the checkouts at a number of sites and here’s what I’ve found when it comes to progress meters: they’re sometimes inaccessible and often confusing or unhelpful — all because of the way in which they’re coded. For those who use assistive devices or text-only browsers, there must be a better way to code the progress meter — and there is. (Note: All code samples are from live sites but have been tweaked to hide the culprits’ identities.) How not to make progress A number of sites assemble their progress meters using non- or semi-semantic markup and images with no alternate text. On text-only browsers (like my mobile phone) and to screen readers, this looks and reads like chunks of content with no context given.
Shipping information Payment information Place your order
In the above example, the third state, “Place your order”, is the current state. But a screen reader may not know that, and my cell phone only displays ""Shipping informationPayment informationPlace your order"". Not good. Is this progress? Other sites present the entire progress meter as a graphic, like the following: Now, I have no problem with using a graphic to render a very stylish progress meter (my sample above is probably not the most stylish example, of course, but you understand my point). What becomes important in this case is the use of appropriate alternate text to describe the image. Disappointingly, sites today have a wide range of solutions, including using no alternate text. Check out these code samples which call progress meter images. I think we can all agree that the above is bad, unless you really don’t care whether or not users know where they are in a flow. The alt text in the example above just copies all of the text found in the graphic, but it doesn’t represent the status at all. So for every page in the checkout, the user sees or hears the same text. Sure, by the second or third page in the flow, the user has figured out what’s going on, but she or he had to think about it. I don’t think that’s good. The above probably has the best alternate text out of these examples, because the user at least understands that they’re in the Checkout process, on the Place your order page. But going through the flow with alt text like this, the user doesn’t know how many steps are in the flow. Semantic progress Of course, there are some sites that use an ordered list when marking up the progress meter. Hooray! Unfortunately, no text-only browser or screen reader would be able to describe the user’s current state given this markup.
  1. shipping information
  2. payment information
  3. place your order
Without CSS enabled, the above is rendered as follows: Progress at last We all know that semantic markup makes for the best foundation, so we’ll start with the markup found above. In order to make the state information accessible, let’s add some additional text in paragraph and span elements.

There are three steps in this checkout process.

  1. Enter your shipping information
  2. Enter your payment information
  3. Review details and place your order
Add on some simple CSS to hide the paragraph and spans, and arrange the list items on a single line with a background image to represent the large number, and this is what you’ll get: There are three steps in this checkout process. Enter your shipping information Enter your payment information Review details and place your order To display and describe a state as active, add the class “current” to one of the list items. Then change the hidden content such that it better describes the state to the user.

There are three steps in this checkout process.

  1. You are currently entering your shipping information
  2. In the next step, you will enter your payment information
  3. In the last step, you will review the details and place your order
The end result is an attractive progress meter that gives much greater semantic and contextual information. There are three steps in this checkout process. You are currently entering your shipping information In the next step, you will enter your payment information In the last step, you will review the details and place your order For example, the above example renders in a text-only browser as follows: There are three steps in this checkout process. You are currently entering your shipping information In the next step, you will enter your payment information In the last step, you will review the details and place your order And the screen reader I use for testing announces the following: There are three steps in this checkout process. List of three items. You are currently entering your shipping information. In the next step, you will enter your payment information. In the last step, you will review the details and place your order. List end. Here’s a sample code page that summarises this approach. Happy frustration-free online shopping with this improved progress meter!",2008,Kimberly Blessing,kimberlyblessing,2008-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/checking-out-progress-meters/,ux 267,Taming Complexity,"I’m going to step into my UX trousers for this one. I wouldn’t usually wear them in public, but it’s Christmas, so there’s nothing wrong with looking silly. Anyway, to business. Wherever I roam, I hear the familiar call for simplicity and the denouncement of complexity. I read often that the simpler something is, the more usable it will be. We understand that simple is hard to achieve, but we push for it nonetheless, convinced it will make what we build easier to use. Simple is better, right? Well, I’ll try to explore that. Much of what follows will not be revelatory to some but, like all good lessons, I think this serves as a welcome reminder that as we live in a complex world it’s OK to sometimes reflect that complexity in the products we build. Myths and legends Less is more, we’ve been told, ever since master of poetic verse Robert Browning used the phrase in 1855. Well, I’ve conducted some research, and it appears he knew nothing of web design. Neither did modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a later pedlar of this worthy yet contradictory notion. Broad is narrow. Tall is short. Eggs are chips. See: anyone can come up with this stuff. To paraphrase Einstein, simple doesn’t have to be simpler. In other words, simple doesn’t dictate that we remove the complexity. Complex doesn’t have to be confusing; it can be beautiful and elegant. On the web, complex can be necessary and powerful. A website that simplifies the lives of its users by offering them everything they need in one site or screen is powerful. For some, the greater the density of information, the more useful the site. In our decision-making process, principles such as Occam’s razor’s_razor (in a nutshell: simple is better than complex) are useful, but simple is for the user to determine through their initial impression and subsequent engagement. What appears simple to me or you might appear very complex to someone else, based on their own mental model or needs. We can aim to deliver simple, but they’ll be the judge. As a designer, developer, content alchemist, user experience discombobulator, or whatever you call yourself, you’re often wrestling with a wealth of material, a huge number of features, and numerous objectives. In many cases, much of that stuff is extraneous, and goes in the dustbin. However, it can be just as likely that there’s a truckload of suggested features and content because it all needs to be there. Don’t be afraid of that weight. In the right hands, less can indeed mean more, but it’s just as likely that less can very often lead to, well… less. Complexity is powerful Simple is the ability to offer a powerful experience without overwhelming the audience or inducing information anxiety. Giving them everything they need, without having them ferret off all over a site to get things done, is important. It’s useful to ask throughout a site’s lifespan, “does the user have everything they need?” It’s so easy to let our designer egos get in the way and chop stuff out, reduce down to only the things we want to see. That benefits us in the short term, but compromises the audience long-term. The trick is not to be afraid of complexity in itself, but to avoid creating the perception of complexity. Give a user a flight simulator and they’ll crash the plane or jump out. Give them everything they need and more, but make it feel simple, and you’re building a relationship, empowering people. This can be achieved carefully with what some call gradual engagement, and often the sensible thing might be to unleash complexity in carefully orchestrated phases, initially setting manageable levels of engagement and interaction, gradually increasing the inherent power of the product and fostering an empowered community. The design aesthetic Here’s a familiar scenario: the client or project lead gets overexcited and skips most of the important decision-making, instead barrelling straight into a bout of creative direction Tourette’s. Visually, the design needs to be minimal, white, crisp, full of white space, have big buttons, and quite likely be “clean”. Of course, we all like our websites to be clean as that’s more hygienic. But what do these words even mean, really? Early in a project they’re abstract distractions, unnecessary constraints. This premature narrowing forces us to think much more about throwing stuff out rather than acknowledging that what we’re building is complex, and many of the components perhaps necessary. Simple is not a formula. It cannot be achieved just by using a white background, by throwing things away, or by breathing a bellowsful of air in between every element and having it all float around in space. Simple is not a design treatment. Simple is hard. Simple requires deep investigation, a thorough understanding of every aspect of a project, in line with the needs and expectations of the audience. Recognizing this helps us empathize a little more with those most vocal of UX practitioners. They usually appreciate that our successes depend on a thorough understanding of the user’s mental models and expected outcomes. I personally still consider UX people to be web designers like the rest of us (mainly to wind them up), but they’re web designers that design every decision, and by putting the user experience at the heart of their process, they have a greater chance of finding simplicity in complexity. The visual design aesthetic — the façade — is only a part of that. Divide and conquer I’m currently working on an app that’s complex in architecture, and complex in ambition. We’ll be releasing in carefully orchestrated private phases, gradually introducing more complexity in line with the unavoidably complex nature of the objective, but my job is to design the whole, the complete system as it will be when it’s out of beta and beyond. I’ve noticed that I’m not throwing much out; most of it needs to be there. Therefore, my responsibility is to consider interesting and appropriate methods of navigation and bring everything together logically. I’m using things like smart defaults, graphical timelines and colour keys to make sense of the complexity, techniques that are sympathetic to the content. They act as familiar points of navigation and reference, yet are malleable enough to change subtly to remain relevant to the information they connect. It’s really OK to have a lot of stuff, so long as we make each component work smartly. It’s a divide and conquer approach. By finding simplicity and logic in each content bucket, I’ve made more sense of the whole, allowing me to create key layouts where most of the simplified buckets are collated and sometimes combined, providing everything the user needs and expects in the appropriate places. I’m also making sure I don’t reduce the app’s power. I need to reflect the scale of opportunity, and provide access to or knowledge of the more advanced tools and features for everyone: a window into what they can do and how they can help. I know it’s the minority who will be actively building the content, but the power is in providing those opportunities for all. Much of this will be familiar to the responsible practitioners who build websites for government, local authorities, utility companies, newspapers, magazines, banking, and we-sell-everything-ever-made online shops. Across the web, there are sites and tools that thrive on complexity. Alas, the majority of such sites have done little to make navigation intuitive, or empower audiences. Where we can make a difference is by striving to make our UIs feel simple, look wonderful, not intimidating — even if they’re mind-meltingly complex behind that façade. Embrace, empathize and tame So, there are loads of ways to exploit complexity, and make it seem simple. I’ve hinted at some methods above, and we’ve already looked at gradual engagement as a way to make sense of complexity, so that’s a big thumbs-up for a release cycle that increases audience power. Prior to each and every release, it’s also useful to rest on the finished thing for a while and use it yourself, even if you’re itching to release. ‘Ready’ often isn’t, and ‘finished’ never is, and the more time you spend browsing around the sites you build, the more you learn what to question, where to add, or subtract. It’s definitely worth building in some contingency time for sitting on your work, so to speak. One thing I always do is squint at my layouts. By squinting, I get a sort of abstract idea of the overall composition, and general feel for the thing. It makes my face look stupid, but helps me see how various buckets fit together, and how simple or complex the site feels overall. I mentioned the need to put our design egos to one side and not throw out anything useful, and I think that’s vital. I’m a big believer in economy, reduction, and removing the extraneous, but I’m usually referring to decoration, bells and whistles, and fluff. I wouldn’t ever advocate the complete removal of powerful content from a project roadmap. Above all, don’t fear complexity. Embrace and tame it. Work hard to empathize with audience needs, and you can create elegant, playful, risky, surprising, emotive, delightful, and ultimately simple things.",2011,Simon Collison,simoncollison,2011-12-21T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/taming-complexity/,ux 197,Designing for Mobile Performance,"Last year, some colleagues at Google ran a research study titled “The Need for Mobile Speed” to find out what the impact of performance and perception of speed had on the way people use the web on their mobile devices. That’s not a trivial distinction; when considering performance, how fast something feels is often more important than how fast it actually is. When dealing with sometimes underpowered mobile devices and slow mobile networks, designing experiences that feel fast is exceptionally important. One of the most startling numbers we found in the study was that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. We wanted to find out more, so following on from this study, we conducted research to define what the crucial elements of speed are. We took into consideration the user experience (UX), overall perception of speed, and how differing contexts the user finds themselves in can alter how fast a user thinks something loaded. To understand speed and load times first we must understand that user mobile web behaviour is broken down into three buckets; Intention Location State of mind Let’s look at each of those in turn. Intention Users browse sites on a mobile device for many different reasons. To be able to effectively design a performant user experience for them, it’s important to understand what those reasons might be. When asked to describe their reason for visiting a site, approximately 30% of people asked by the study claimed that they were simply browsing without a particular purpose in mind. Looking deeper, we found that this number increased slightly (34%) for retail sites. 30% said they were just there to find out some information for a future task or action, such as booking a flight. Interestingly, the research shows that users are actually window shopping using their mobile browser. Only 29% actually said they had a specific goal or intent in mind, and this number increases significantly for financial services like banking sites (57%). This goes against a traditionally held view of users wanting to perform simple actions efficiently on their mobile device. Sure, some users are absolutely doing that, but many are just browsing around without a goal in mind, just like they would on a desktop browser. This gives great insight into the user’s intentions. It tells us that users are actively using sites on their mobile, but a large majority do not intend to do anything instantly. There’s no goal they’re under pressure to achieve. If a site’s performance is lousy or janky, this will only reaffirm to the user to that they can hold off on completing a task, so they might just give up. However, if a site is quick to load, sophisticated in expressing its value proposition quickly, and enables the user to perform their actions seamlessly, then turning that “browsing user” into a “buying user” becomes all that much easier. When the user has no goal, there’s more opportunity to convert, and you stand a greater chance of doing that if the performance is good enough so they stick around. Location Obviously, mobile devices by their nature can be used in many different locations. This is an interesting consideration, because it’s not something we traditionally need to take into account designing experiences for static platforms like desktop computers. The in the study, we found that 82% of users browse the web on their mobile phone while in their home. In contrast, only 7% do the same while at work. This might come across as a bit of a shock, but when you look at mobile usage – in particular app usage – most of the apps being used are either a social network or some sort of entertainment or media app. Due to the unreliability of network connections, users will often alternate between these two types of apps. The consequence being that if a site doesn’t work offline, or otherwise compensate for bad network connectivity in some way by providing opportunities to allow users to browse their site, then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as to why users mostly view the mobile web from the comfort of their homes where there is a strong WiFi connection. They’re using mobile devices, but they’re not actually mobile themselves. Another thing to bear in mind is how users alternate between devices, a study by comScore found that 80% of transactions take place on desktop while 69% of the browsing takes place on mobile. Any given user might access from more than one location - they might visit one day from a bus queue on their phone, and then next day from a laptop at home. State of mind One more thing we need to take into consideration is the user’s state of mind. Whilst browsing at home, users tend to be more relaxed, and in the research 76% stated they were generally calmer at home. The user’s state of mind can have quite a big impact on how they perceive things. The calmer they are, the quicker a site might appear to load. If the user is anxious and impatiently drumming their fingers on the table, things seem to take longer, and even a small wait can feel like an eternity. This is quite key. Over 40% of sites take longer than 4 seconds to load for users who are are out and about and using a mobile data connection. Coupled with our perception, and amplified by a potentially less-than-calm state of mind, this can seem like an age. What does this all mean? I think we can all agree that users prefer strong, steady connections and comfort when completing transactions. It seems like common sense when we say it out loud. Recreating these feelings and sensations of comfort and predictability under all circumstances therefore becomes paramount. Equally, when asked in the study, users all claimed that speed was the most important factor impacting their mobile web usage. Over 40%, in fact, said it was the most important UX feature of a site, and nobody asked considered it to be of no importance at all. The meaning of speed When it comes to performance, speed is measured in two ways – real speed; as measured on a clock, and perceived speed; how responsive an interaction feels. We can, of course, improve how quickly a site loads by simply making files smaller. Even then, the study showed that 32% of users felt a site can feel slow even when it loads in less than 4 seconds. This gets even worse when you look at it by age group, with 50% if young people (18-24 year olds) thinking a site was slower than it actually was. When you add to the mix that users think a site loaded faster when they are sitting compared to when they are standing up, then you are in a world of trouble if your site doesn’t have any clear indicators to let the user know the loading state of you website or app. So what can we do about this to improve our designs? How to fix / hack user perception There are some golden rules of speed, the first thing is hacking response time. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, you will certainly start to lose your users. However, if that slowness is part of a UX flow such as processing information, the user understands it might take a little time. Under those circumstances, a load time of under 5 seconds is acceptable, but even then, you should take caution. Anything above 8 seconds and you are in very real danger of losing your audience completely. Load time User impression 200 ms Feels instant 1 s Feels it is performing smoothly 5 s Part of user flow 8 s Lose attention Remove the tap delay Mobile browsers often use a 300-350ms delay between the triggering of the touchend and click events. This delay was added so the browser could determine if there was going to be a double-tap triggered or not, since double-tap is a common gesture used to zoom into text. This delay can have the side effect of making interactions feel laggy, and therefore giving the user the impression that the site is slow, even if it’s their own browser causing the problem. Fortunately there’s a way to remove the delay. Add following in the of your page, and the delay no longer takes effect: You can also use touch-action: manipulation in newer browsers to eliminate click delay. For old browsers, FastClick by FT Labs uses touch events to trigger clicks faster and remove the double-tap gesture. Make use of Skeleton Screens A skeleton layout is a wireframe version of your app that displays while content is being loaded. This demonstrates to the user that content is about to be loaded, giving the impression that something is happening more quickly than it really is. Consider also using a preloader UI as well, with a text label informing the user that the app is loading. One example would be to pulsate the wireframe content giving the app the feeling that it is alive and loading. This reassures the user that something is happening and helps prevent resubmissions or refreshes of your app. Razvan Caliman created a Codepen example of how to create this effect in purely CSS. One thing to consider though, if data doesn’t load then you might need to create a fallback 404 or error page to let the user know what happened. Example by Owen-Campbell Moore Responsive Touch Feedback Carefully designing the process by which items load is one aspect of increasing the perceived speed of your page, but reassuring the user that an action they have taken is in process is another. At Google we use something called a Ripple, which is is animating dot that expands or ripples in order to confirm to the user that their input has been triggered. This happens immediately, expanding outward from the point of touch. This reaffirms to the user that their input has been received and is being acted on, even before the site has had a chance to process or respond to the action. From the user’s point of view, they’ve tapped and the page has responded immediately, so it feels really quick and satisfying. You can mimic this same behavior using our Material Design Components Web GitHub repo. Progress bars These UI elements have existed for a very long time, but research conducted by Chris Harrison and published in New Scientist found that the style of a progress bar can alter the perception of speed drastically. As a matter of fact, progress bars with ripples that animate towards the left appear like they are loading faster by at least 11% percent. So when including them in your site, take into consideration that ripples and progress bars that pulsate faster as they get to the end will make your sites seem quicker. Faster Progress Bars: Manipulating Perceived Duration with Visual Augmentations Navigation The speed with which a user can locate navigational items or call to actions adds to their perceived performance of a site. If the user’s next action is quick to spot on the screen, they don’t spend time hunting around the interface with their eyes and fingers. So no matter how quickly your code runs, hiding items behind a nav bar will make a site feel slower than it actually is. Facebook found that switching to using bottom navigation saw an increase in engagement, satisfaction, revenue, speed, and importantly, perception of speed. If the user sees the navigation items they’re looking for quickly, the interaction feels fast. What’s more, end-to-end task completion is quicker too, as the interface not only feels quicker, but actually measures quicker as well. Similar reactions were found with Spotify and Redbooth. Luke Wroblewski gave a talk last year in Ireland titled “Obvious Always Wins” which he demonstrated through the work he did with Google+. Luke’s message is that by making the core features of your app obvious to your user, you will see engagement go up. This again seems obvious, right? However, it is important to note that adding bottom navigation doesn’t just mean a black bar at the bottom of your screen like some kind of performance magic bullet. The goal is to make the items clear to the user so they know what they need to be doing, and how you achieve that could be different from one interface to the next. Google keeps experimenting with different navigation styles, but finally settled with the below when they conducted user research and testing. Conclusion By utilizing a collection of UI patterns and speed optimisation techniques, you can improve not only the actual speed of a site, but the perception of how quickly a user thinks your site is loading. It is critical to remember that users will not always be using your site in a calm and relaxed manner and that even their age can impact how they will use or not use your site. By improving your site’s stability, you increase the likelihood of positive user engagement and task completion. You can learn more about techniques to hack user perception and improve user speed by taking a look at an E-Book we published with Awwwards.com called Speed Matters: Design for Mobile Performance.",2017,Mustafa Kurtuldu,mustafakurtuldu,2017-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/designing-for-mobile-performance/,ux 280,Conditional Loading for Responsive Designs,"On the eighteenth day of last year’s 24 ways, Paul Hammond wrote a great article called Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content. He outlined a technique for loading some content — like profile avatars — after the initial page load. This gives you a nice performance boost. There’s another situation where this kind of delayed loading could be really handy: mobile-first responsive design. Responsive design combines three techniques: a fluid grid flexible images media queries At first, responsive design was applied to existing desktop-centric websites to allow the layout to adapt to smaller screen sizes. But more recently it has been combined with another innovative approach called mobile first. Rather then starting with the big, bloated desktop site and then scaling down for smaller devices, it makes more sense to start with the constraints of the small screen and then scale up for larger viewports. Using this approach, your layout grid, your large images and your media queries are applied on top of the pre-existing small-screen design. It’s taking progressive enhancement to the next level. One of the great advantages of the mobile-first approach is that it forces you to really focus on the core content of your page. It might be more accurate to think of this as a content-first approach. You don’t have the luxury of sidebars or multiple columns to fill up with content that’s just nice to have rather than essential. But what happens when you apply your media queries for larger viewports and you do have sidebars and multiple columns? Well, you can load in that nice-to-have content using the same kind of Ajax functionality that Paul described in his article last year. The difference is that you first run a quick test to see if the viewport is wide enough to accommodate the subsidiary content. This is conditional delayed loading. Consider this situation: I’ve published an article about cats and I’d like to include relevant cat-related news items in the sidebar …but only if there’s enough room on the screen for a sidebar. I’m going to use Google’s News API to return the search results. This is the ideal time to use delayed loading: I don’t want a third-party service slowing down the rendering of my page so I’m going to fire off the request after my document has loaded. Here’s an example of the kind of Ajax function that I would write: var searchNews = function(searchterm) { var elem = document.createElement('script'); elem.src = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/news?v=1.0&q='+searchterm+'&callback=displayNews'; document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(elem); }; I’ve provided a callback function called displayNews that takes the JSON result of that Ajax request and adds it an element on the page with the ID newsresults: var displayNews = function(news) { var html = '', items = news.responseData.results, total = items.length; if (total>0) { for (var i=0; i'; html+= '

'+item.titleNoFormatting+'

'; html+= ''; html+= '

'; html+= item.content; html+= '

'; html+= ''; } document.getElementById('newsresults').innerHTML = html; } }; Now, I can call that function at the bottom of my document: If I only want to run that search when there’s room for a sidebar, I can wrap it in an if statement: If the browser is wider than 640 pixels, that will fire off a search for news stories about cats and put the results into the newsresults element in my markup:
This works pretty well but I’m making an assumption that people with small-screen devices wouldn’t be interested in seeing that nice-to-have content. You know what they say about assumptions: they make an ass out of you and umptions. I should really try to give everyone at least the option to get to that extra content:
Search Google News
See the result Visitors with small-screen devices will see that link to the search results; visitors with larger screens will get the search results directly. I’ve been concentrating on HTML and JavaScript, but this technique has consequences for content strategy and information architecture. Instead of thinking about possible page content in a binary way as either ‘on the page’ or ‘not on the page’, conditional loading introduces a third ‘it’s complicated’ option. This was just a simple example but I hope it illustrates that conditional loading could become an important part of the content-first responsive design approach.",2011,Jeremy Keith,jeremykeith,2011-12-02T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/conditional-loading-for-responsive-designs/,ux 203,Jobs-to-Be-Done in Your UX Toolbox,"Part 1: What is JTBD? The concept of a “job” in “Jobs-To-Be-Done” is neatly encapsulated by a oft-quoted line from Theodore Levitt: “People want a quarter-inch hole, not a quarter inch drill”. Even so, Don Norman pointed out that perhaps Levitt “stopped too soon” at what the real customer goal might be. In the “The Design of Everyday Things”, he wrote: “Levitt’s example of the drill implying that the goal is really a hole is only partially correct, however. When people go to a store to buy a drill, that is not their real goal. But why would anyone want a quarter-inch hole? Clearly that is an intermediate goal. Perhaps they wanted to hang shelves on the wall. Levitt stopped too soon. Once you realize that they don’t really want the drill, you realize that perhaps they don’t really want the hole, either: they want to install their bookshelves. Why not develop methods that don’t require holes? Or perhaps books that don’t require bookshelves.” In other words, a “job” in JTBD lingo is a way to express a user need or provide a customer-centric problem frame that’s independent of a solution. As Tony Ulwick says: “A job is stable, it doesn’t change over time.” An example of a job is “tiding you over from breakfast to lunch.” You could hire a donut, a flapjack or a banana for that mid-morning snack—whatever does the job. If you can arrive at a clearly identified primary job (and likely some secondary ones too), you can be more creative in how you come up with an effective solution while keeping the customer problem in focus. The team at Intercom wrote a book on their application of JTBD. In it, Des Traynor cleverly characterised how JTBD provides a different way to think about solutions that compete for the same job: “Economy travel and business travel are both capable candidates applying for [the job: Get me face-to-face with my colleague in San Francisco], though they’re looking for significantly different salaries. Video conferencing isn’t as capable, but is willing to work for a far smaller salary. I’ve a hiring choice to make.” So far so good: it’s relatively simple to understand what a job is, once you understand how it’s different from a “task”. Business consultant and Harvard professor Clay Christensen talks about the concept of “hiring” a product to do a “job”, and firing it when something better comes along. If you’re a company that focuses solutions on the customer job, you’re more likely to succeed. You’ll find these concepts often referred to as “Jobs-to-be-Done theory”. But the application of Jobs-to-Be-Done theory is a little more complicated; it comprises several related approaches. I particularly like Jim Kalbach’s description of how JTBD is a “lens through which to understand value creation”. But it is also more. In my view, it’s a family of frameworks and methods—and perhaps even a philosophy. Different facets in a family of frameworks JTBD has its roots in market research and business strategy, and so it comes to the research table from a slightly different place compared to traditional UX or design research—we have our roots in human-computer interaction and ergonomics. I’ve found it helpful to keep in mind is that the application of JTBD theory is an evolving beast, so it’s common to find contradictions across different resources. My own use of it has varied from project to project. In speaking to others who have adopted it in different measures, it seems that we have all applied it in somewhat multifarious ways. As we like to often say in interviews: there are no wrong answers. Outcome Driven Innovation Tony Ulwick’s version of the JTBD history began with Outcome Driven Innovation (ODI), and this approach is best outlined in his seminal article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2002. To understand his more current JTBD approach in his new book “Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice”, I actually found it beneficial to read his approach in the original 2002 article for a clearer reference point. In the earlier article, Ulwick presented a rigorous approach that combines interviews, surveys and an “opportunity” algorithm—a sequence of steps to determine the business opportunity. ODI centres around working with “desired outcome statements” that you unearth through interviews, followed by a means to quantify the gap between importance and satisfaction in a survey to different types of customers. Since 2008, Ulwick has written about using job maps to make sense of what the customer may be trying to achieve. In a recent article, he describes the aim of the activity is “to discover what the customer is trying to get done at different points in executing a job and what must happen at each juncture in order for the job to be carried out successfully.” A job map is not strictly a journey map, however tempting it is to see it that way. From a UX perspective, is one of many models we can use—and as our research team at Clearleft have found, how we use model can depend on the nature of the jobs we’ve uncovered in interviews and the characteristics of the problem we’re attempting to solve. Figure 1. Universal job map Ulwick’s current methodology is outlined in his new book, where he describes a complete end-to-end process: from customer and competitor research to framing market and product strategy. The Jobs-To-Be-Done Interview Back in 2013, I attended a workshop by Chris Spiek and Bob Moesta from the ReWired Group on JTBD at the behest of a then-MailChimp colleague, and I came away excited about their approach to product research. It felt different from anything I’d done before and for the first time in years, I felt that I was genuinely adding something new to my research toolbox. A key idea is that if you focus on the stories of those who switched to you, and those who switch away from you, you can uncover the core jobs through looking at these opposite ends of engagement. This framework centres around the JTBD interview method, which harnesses the power of a narrative framework to elicit the real reasons why someone “hired” something to do a job—be it something physical like a new coffee maker, or a digital service, such as a to-do list app. As you interview, you are trying to unearth the context around the key moments on the JTBD timeline (Figure 2). A common approach is to begin from the point the customer might have purchased something, back to the point where the thought of buying this thing first occurred to them. Figure 2. JTBD Timeline Figure 3. The Four Forces The Forces Diagram (Figure 3) is a post-interview analysis tool where you can map out what causes customers to switch to something new and what holds them back. The JTBD interview is effective at identifying core and secondary jobs, as well as some context around the user need. Because this method is designed to extract the story from the interviewee, it’s a powerful way to facilitate recall. Having done many such interviews, I’ve noticed one interesting side effect: participants often remember more details later on after the conversation has formally ended. It is worth scheduling a follow-up phone call or keep the channels open. Strengths aside, it’s good to keep in mind that the JTBD interview is still primarily an interview technique, so you are relying on the context from the interviewee’s self-reported perspective. For example, a stronger research methodology combines JTBD interviews with contextual research and quantitative methods. Job Stories Alan Klement is credited for coming up with the term “job story” to describe the framing of jobs for product design by the team at Intercom: “When … I want to … so I can ….” Figure 4. Anatomy of a Job Story Unlike a user story that traditionally frames a requirement around personas, job stories frame the user need based on the situation and context. Paul Adams, the VP of Product at Intercom, wrote: “We frame every design problem in a Job, focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome. […] We can map this Job to the mission and prioritise it appropriately. It ensures that we are constantly thinking about all four layers of design. We can see what components in our system are part of this Job and the necessary relationships and interactions required to facilitate it. We can design from the top down, moving through outcome, system, interactions, before getting to visual design.” Systems of Progress Apart from advocating using job stories, Klement believes that a core tenet of applying JTBD revolves around our desire for “self-betterment”—and that focusing on everyone’s desire for self-betterment is core to a successful strategy. In his book, Klement takes JTBD further to being a tool for change through applying systems thinking. There, he introduces the systems of progress and how it can help focus product strategy approach to be more innovative. Coincidentally, I applied similar thinking on mapping systemic change when we were looking to improve users’ trust with a local government forum earlier this year. It’s not just about capturing and satisfying the immediate job-to-be-done, it’s about framing the job so that you can a clear vision forward on how you can help your users improve their lives in the ways they want to. This is really the point where JTBD becomes a philosophy of practice. Part 2: Mixing It Up There has been some misunderstanding about how adopting JTBD means ditching personas or some of our existing design tools or research techniques. This couldn’t have been more wrong. Figure 5: Jim Kalbach’s JTBD model Jim Kalbach has used Outcome-Driven Innovation for around 10 years. In a 2016 article, he presents a synthesised model of how to think about that has key elements from ODI, Christensen’s theories and the structure of the job story. More interestingly, Kalbach has also combined the use of mental models with JTBD. Claire Menke of UDemy has written a comprehensive article about using personas, JTBD and customer journey maps together in order to communicate more complete story from the users’ perspective. Claire highlights an especially interesting point in her article as she described her challenges: “After much trial and error, I arrived at a foundational research framework to suit every team’s needs — allowing everyone to share the same holistic understanding, but extract the type of information most applicable to their work.” In other words, the organisational context you are in likely can dictate what works best—after all the goal is to arrive at the best user experience for your audiences. Intercom can afford to go full-on on applying JTBD theory as a dominant approach because they are a start-up, but a large company or organisation with multiple business units may require a mix of tools, outputs and outcomes. JTBD is an immensely powerful approach on many fronts—you’ll find many different references that lists the ways you can apply JTBD. However, in the context of this discussion, it might also be useful to we examine where it lies in our models of how we think about our UX and product processes. JTBD in the UX ecosystem Figure 6. The Elements of User Experience (source) There are many ways we have tried to explain the UX discipline but I think Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience is a good place to begin. I sometimes also use little diagram to help me describe the different levels you might work at when you work through the complexity of designing and developing a product. A holistic UX strategy needs to address all the different levels for a comprehensive experience: your individual product UI, product features, product propositions and brand need to have a cohesive definition. Figure 7. Which level of product focus? We could, of course, also think about where it fits best within the double diamond. Again, bearing in mind that JTBD has its roots in business strategy and market research, it is excellent at clarifying user needs, defining high-level specifications and content requirements. It is excellent for validating brand perception and value proposition —all the way down to your feature set. In other words, it can be extremely powerful all the way through to halfway of the second diamond. You could quite readily combine the different JTBD approaches because they have differences as much as overlaps. However, JTBD generally starts getting a little difficult to apply once we get to the details of UI design. The clue lies in JTBD’s raison d’être: a job statement is solution independent. Hence, once we get to designing solutions, we potentially fall into a existential black hole. That said, Jim Kalbach has a quick case study on applying JTBD to content design tucked inside the main article on a synthesised JTBD model. Alan Klement has a great example of how you could use UI to resolve job stories. You’ll notice that the available language of “jobs” drops off at around that point. Job statements and outcome statements provide excellent “mini north-stars” as customer-oriented focal points, but purely satisfying these statements would not necessarily guarantee that you have created a seamless and painless user experience. Playing well with others You will find that JTBD plays well with Lean, and other strategy tools like the Value Proposition Canvas. With every new project, there is potential to harness the power of JTBD alongside our established toolbox. When we need to understand complex contexts where cultural or socioeconomic considerations have to be taken into account, we are better placed with combining JTBD with more anthropological approaches. And while we might be able to evaluate if our product, website or app satisfies the customer jobs through interviews or surveys, without good old-fashioned usability testing we are unlikely to be able to truly validate why the job isn’t being represented as it should. In this case, individual jobs solved on the UI can be set up as hypotheses to be proven right or wrong. The application of Jobs-to-be-Done is still evolving. I’ve found it to be very powerful and I struggle to remember what my UX professional life was like before I encountered it—it has completely changed my approach to research and design. The fact JTBD is still evolving as a practice means we need to be watchful of dogma—there’s no right way to get a UX job done after all, it nearly always depends. At the end of the day, isn’t it about having the right tool for the right job?",2017,Steph Troeth,stephtroeth,2017-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2017/jobs-to-be-done-in-your-ux-toolbox/,ux 274,Adaptive Images for Responsive Designs,"So you’ve been building some responsive designs and you’ve been working through your checklist of things to do: You started with the content and designed around it, with mobile in mind first. You’ve gone liquid and there’s nary a px value in sight; % is your weapon of choice now. You’ve baked in a few media queries to adapt your layout and tweak your design at different window widths. You’ve made your images scale to the container width using the fluid Image technique. You’ve even done the same for your videos using a nifty bit of JavaScript. You’ve done a good job so pat yourself on the back. But there’s still a problem and it’s as tricky as it is important: image resolutions. HTML has an problem CSS is great at adapting a website design to different window sizes – it allows you not only to tweak layout but also to send rescaled versions of the design’s images. And you want to do that because, after all, a smartphone does not need a 1,900-pixel background image1. HTML is less great. In the same way that you don’t want CSS background images to be larger than required, you don’t want that happening with s either. A smartphone only needs a small image but desktop users need a large one. Unfortunately s can’t adapt like CSS, so what do we do? Well, you could just use a high resolution image and the fluid image technique would scale it down to fit the viewport; but that’s sending an image five or six times the file size that’s really needed, which makes it slow to download and unpleasant to use. Smartphones are pretty impressive devices – my ancient iPhone 3G is more powerful in every way than my first proper computer – but they’re still terribly slow in comparison to today’s desktop machines. Sending a massive image means it has to be manipulated in memory and redrawn as you scroll. You’ll find phones rapidly run out of RAM and slow to a crawl. Well, OK. You went mobile first with everything else so why not put in mobile resolution s too? Because even though mobile devices are rapidly gaining share in your analytics stats, they’re still not likely to be the major share of your user base. I don’t think desktop users would be happy with pokey little mobile resolution images, do you? What we need are adaptive images. Adaptive image techniques There are a number of possible solutions, each with pros and cons, and it’s not as simple to find a graceful solution as you might expect. Your first thought might be to use JavaScript to trawl through the markup and rewrite the source attribute. That’ll get you the right end result, but it’ll have done it in a way you absolutely don’t want. That’s because of the way browsers load resources. It starts to load the HTML and builds the page on-the-fly; as soon as it finds an element it immediately asks the server for that image. After the HTML has finished loading, the JavaScript will run, change the src attribute, and then the browser will request that new image too. Not instead of, but as well as. Not good: that’s added more bloat instead of cutting it. Plain JavaScript is out then, which is a problem, because what other tools do we have to work with as web designers? Let’s ignore that for now and I’ll outline another issue with the concept of serving different resolution images for different window widths: a basic file management problem. To request a different image, that image has to exist on the server. How’s it going to get there? That’s not a trivial problem, especially if you have non-technical users that update content through a CMS. Let’s say you solve that – do you plan on a simple binary switch: big image|little image? Is that really efficient or future-proof? What happens if you have an archive of existing content that needs to behave this way? Can you apply such a solution to existing content or markup? There’s a detailed round-up of potential techniques for solving the adaptive images problem over at the Cloud Four blog if you fancy a dig around exploring all the options currently available. But I’m here to show you what I think is the most flexible and easy to implement solution, so here we are. Adaptive Images Adaptive Images aims to mitigate most of the issues surrounding the problems of bringing the venerable tag into the 21st century. And it works by leaving that tag completely alone – just add that desktop resolution image into the markup as you’ve been doing for years now. We’ll fix it using secret magic techniques and bottled pixie dreams. Well, fine: with one .htaccess file, one small PHP file and one line of JavaScript. But you’re killing the mystique with that kind of talk. So, what does this solution do? It allows s to adapt to the same break points you use in your media queries, giving granular control in the same way you get with your CSS. It installs on your server in five minutes or less and after that is automatic and you don’t need to do anything. It generates its own rescaled images on the server and doesn’t require markup changes, so you can apply it to existing web content. If you wish, it will make all of your images go mobile-first (just in case that’s what you want if JavaScript and cookies aren’t available). Sound good? I hope so. Here’s what you do. Setting up and rolling out I’ll assume you have some basic server knowledge along with that wealth of front-end wisdom exploding out of your head: that you know not to overwrite any existing .htaccess file for example, and how to set file permissions on your server. Feeling up to it? Excellent. Download the latest version of Adaptive Images either from the website or from the GitHub repository. Upload the included .htaccess and adaptive-images.php files into the root folder of your website. Create a directory called ai-cache and make sure the server can write to it (CHMOD 755 should do it). Add the following line of JavaScript into the of your site: That’s it, unless you want to tweak the default settings. You likely do, but essentially you’re already up and running. How it works Adaptive Images does a number of things depending on the scenario the script has to handle, but here’s a basic overview of what it does when you load a page running it: A session cookie is written with the value of the visitor’s screen size in pixels. The HTML encounters an tag and sends a request to the server for that image. It also sends the cookie, because that’s how browsers work. Apache sits on the server and receives the request for the image. Apache then has a look in the .htaccess file to see if there are any special instructions for files in the requested URL. There are! The .htaccess says “Hey, server! Any request you get for a JPG, GIF or PNG file just send to the adaptive-images.php file instead.” The PHP file then does some intelligent thinking which can cover a number of scenarios, but I’ll illustrate one path that can happen: The PHP file looks for the cookie and finds out that the user has a maximum screen width of 480px. The PHP has a look at the available media query sizes that were configured and decides which one matches the user’s device. It then has a look inside the /ai-cache/480/ folder to see if a rescaled image already exists there. We’ll pretend it doesn’t – the PHP then goes to the actual requested URI and finds that the original file does exist. It has a look to see how wide that image is. If it’s already smaller than the user’s screen width it sends it along and stops there. But, let’s pretend the image is 1,000px wide. The PHP then resizes the image and saves it into the /ai-cache/480 folder ready for the next time someone needs it. It also does a few other things when needs arise, for example: It sends images with a cache header field that tells proxies not to cache the image, while telling browsers they should. This avoids problems with proxy servers and network caching systems grabbing the wrong image and storing it. It handles cases where there isn’t a cookie set, and you can choose whether to then send the mobile version or the largest configured media query size. It compares timestamps between the source image and the generated cache image – to ensure that if the source image gets updated, the old cached file won’t be sent. Customizing There are a few options you can customize if you don’t like the default values. By looking in the PHP’s configuration section at the top of the file, you can: Set the resolution breakpoints to match your media query break points. Change the name and location of the ai-cache folder. Change the quality level any generated JPG images are saved at. Have it perform a subtle sharpen on rescaled images to help keep detail. Toggle whether you want it to compare the files in the cache folder with the source ones or not. Set how long the browser should cache the images for. Switch between a mobile-first or desktop-first approach when a cookie isn’t found. More importantly, you probably want to omit a few folders from the AI behaviour. You don’t need or want it resizing the images you’re using in your CSS, for example. That’s fine – just open up the .htaccess file and follow the instructions to list any directories you want AI to ignore. Or, if you’re a dab hand at RewriteRules you can remove the exclamation mark at the start of the rule and it’ll only apply AI behaviour to a given list of folders. Caveats As I mentioned, I think this is one of the most flexible, future-proof, retrofittable and easy to use solutions available today. But, there are problems with this approach as there are with all of the ones I’ve seen so far. This is a PHP solution I wish I was smarter and knew some fancy modern languages the cool kids discuss at parties, but I don’t. So, you need PHP on your server. That said, Adaptive Images has a Creative Commons licence2 and I would welcome anyone to contribute a port of the code3. Content delivery networks Adaptive Images relies on the server being able to: intercept requests for images; do some logic; and send one of a given number of responses. Content delivery networks are generally dumb caches, and they won’t allow that to happen. Adaptive Images will not work if you’re using a CDN to deliver your website. A minor but interesting cookie issue. As Yoav Weiss pointed out in his article Preloaders, cookies and race conditions, there is no way to guarantee that a cookie will be set before images are requested – even though the JavaScript that sets the cookie is loaded by the browser before it finds any tags. That could mean images being requested without a cookie being available. Adaptive Images has a two-fold mechanism to avoid this being a problem: The $mobile_first toggle allows you to choose what to send to a browser if a cookie isn’t set. If FALSE then it will send the highest configured resolution; if TRUE it will send the lowest. Even if set to TRUE, Adaptive Images checks the User Agent String. If it discovers the user is on a desktop environment, it will override $mobile_first and set it to FALSE. This means that if $mobile_first is set to TRUE and the user was unlucky (their browser didn’t write the cookie fast enough), mobile devices will be supplied with the smallest image, and desktop devices will get the largest. The best way to get a cookie written is to use JavaScript as I’ve explained above, because it’s the fastest way. However, for those that want it, there is a JavaScript-free method which uses CSS and a bogus PHP ‘image’ to set the cookie. A word of caution: because it requests an external file, this method is slower than the JavaScript one, and it is very likely that the cookie won’t be set until after images have been requested. The future For today, this is a pretty good solution. It works, and as it doesn’t interfere with your markup or source material in any way, the process is non-destructive. If a future solution is superior, you can just remove the Adaptive Images files and you’re good to go – you’d never know AI had been there. However, this isn’t really a long-term solution, not least because of the intermittent problem of the cookie and image request race condition. What we really need are a number of standardized ways to handle this in the future. First, we could do with browsers sending far more information about the user’s environment along with each HTTP request (device size, connection speed, pixel density, etc.), because the way things work now is no longer fit for purpose. The web now is a much broader entity used on far more diverse devices than when these technologies were dreamed up, and we absolutely require the server to have better knowledge about device capabilities than is currently possible. Relying on cookies to do this job doesn’t cut it, and the User Agent String is a complete mess incapable of fulfilling the various purposes we are forced to hijack it for. Secondly, we need a W3C-backed markup level solution to supply semantically different content at different resolutions, not just rescaled versions of the same content as Adaptive Images does. I hope you’ve found this interesting and will find Adaptive Images useful. Footnotes 1 While I’m talking about preventing smartphones from downloading resources they don’t need: you should be careful of your media query construction if you want to stop WebKit downloading all the images in all of the CSS files. 2 Adaptive Images has a very broad Creative Commons licence and I warmly welcome feedback and community contributions via the GitHub repository. 3 There is a ColdFusion port of an older version of Adaptive Images. I do not have anything to do with ported versions of Adaptive Images.",2011,Matt Wilcox,mattwilcox,2011-12-04T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/adaptive-images-for-responsive-designs/,ux 219,Speed Up Your Site with Delayed Content,"Speed remains one of the most important factors influencing the success of any website, and the first rule of performance (according to Yahoo!) is reducing the number of HTTP requests. Over the last few years we’ve seen techniques like sprites and combo CSS/JavaScript files used to reduce the number of HTTP requests. But there’s one area where large numbers of HTTP requests are still a fact of life: the small avatars attached to the comments on articles like this one. Avatars Many sites like 24 ways use a fantastic service called Gravatar to provide user images. As a user, you can sign up to Gravatar, give them your e-mail address, and upload an image to represent you. Sites can then include your image by generating a one way hash of your e-mail address and using that to build an image URL. For example, the markup for the comments on this page looks something like this:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

The Gravatar URL contains two parts. 100 is the size in pixels of the image we want. 13734b0cb20708f79e730809c29c3c48 is an MD5 digest of Drew’s e-mail address. Using MD5 means we can request an image for a user without sharing their e-mail address with anyone who views the source of the page. So what’s wrong with avatars? The problem is that a popular article can easily get hundreds of comments, and every one of them means another image has to be individually requested from Gravatar’s servers. Each request is small and the Gravatar servers are fast but, when you add them up, it can easily add seconds to the rendering time of a page. Worse, they can delay the loading of more important assets like the CSS required to render the main content of the page. These images aren’t critical to the page, and don’t need to be loaded up front. Let’s see if we can delay loading them until everything else is done. That way we can give the impression that our site has loaded quickly even if some requests are still happening in the background. Delaying image loading The first problem we find is that there’s no way to prevent Internet Explorer, Chrome or Safari from loading an image without removing it from the HTML itself. Tricks like removing the images on the fly with JavaScript don’t work, as the browser has usually started requesting the images before we get a chance to stop it. Removing the images from the HTML means that people without JavaScript enabled in their browser won’t see avatars. As Drew mentioned at the start of the month, this can affect a large number of people, and we can’t completely ignore them. But most sites already have a textual name attached to each comment and the avatars are just a visual enhancement. In most cases it’s OK if some of our users don’t see them, especially if it speeds up the experience for the other 98%. Removing the images from the source of our page also means we’ll need to put them back at some point, so we need to keep a record of which images need to be requested. All Gravatar images have the same URL format; the only thing that changes is the e-mail hash. Storing this is a great use of HTML5 data attributes. HTML5 data what? Data attributes are a new feature in HTML5. The latest version of the spec says: A custom data attribute is an attribute in no namespace whose name starts with the string “data-”, has at least one character after the hyphen, is XML-compatible, and contains no characters in the range U+0041 to U+005A (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z). […] Custom data attributes are intended to store custom data private to the page or application, for which there are no more appropriate attributes or elements. These attributes are not intended for use by software that is independent of the site that uses the attributes. In other words, they’re attributes of an HTML element that start with “data-” which you can use to share data with scripts running on your site. They’re great for adding small bits of metadata that don’t fit into an existing markup pattern the way microformats do. Let’s see this in action Take a look at the markup for comments again:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

Let’s replace the element with a data-gravatar-hash attribute on the element:

Drew McLellan

This is a great article!

Once we’ve done this, we’ll need a small bit of JavaScript to find all these attributes, and replace them with images after the page has loaded. Here’s an example using jQuery: $(window).load(function() { $('a[data-gravatar-hash]').prepend(function(index){ var hash = $(this).attr('data-gravatar-hash') return '' }) }) This code waits until everything on the page is loaded, then uses jQuery.prepend to insert an image into every link containing a data-gravatar-hash attribute. It’s short and relatively simple, but in tests it reduced the rendering time of a sample page from over three seconds to well under one. Finishing touches We still need to consider the appearance of the page before the avatars have loaded. When our script adds extra content to the page it will cause a browser reflow, which is visually annoying. We can avoid this by using CSS to reserve some space for each image before it’s inserted into the HTML: #comments div { padding-left: 110px; min-height: 100px; position: relative; } #comments div h4 img { display: block; position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } In a real world example, we’ll also find that the HTML for a comment is more varied as many users don’t provide a web page link. We can make small changes to our JavaScript and CSS to handle this case. Put this all together and you get this example. Taking this idea further There’s no reason to limit this technique to sites using Gravatar; we can use similar code to delay loading any images that don’t need to be present immediately. For example, this year’s redesigned Flickr photo page uses a “data-defer-src” attribute to describe any image that doesn’t need to be loaded straight away, including avatars and map tiles. You also don’t have to limit yourself to loading the extra resources once the page loads. You can get further bandwidth savings by waiting until the user takes an action before downloading extra assets. Amazon has taken this tactic to the extreme on its product pages – extra content is loaded as you scroll down the page. So next time you’re building a page, take a few minutes to think about which elements are peripheral and could be delayed to allow more important content to appear as quickly as possible.",2010,Paul Hammond,paulhammond,2010-12-18T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2010/speed-up-your-site-with-delayed-content/,ux 96,Unwrapping the Wii U Browser,"The Wii U was released on 18 November 2012 in the US, and 30 November in the UK. It’s the first eighth generation home console, the first mainstream second-screen device, and it has some really impressive browser specs. Consoles are not just for games now: they’re marketed as complete entertainment solutions. Internet connectivity and browser functionality have gone from a nice-to-have feature in game consoles to a selling point. In Nintendo’s case, they see it as a challenge to design an experience that’s better than browsing on a desktop. Let’s make a browser that users can use on a daily basis, something that can really handle everything we’ve come to expect from a browser and do it more naturally. Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com With 11% of people using console browsers to visit websites, it’s important to consider these devices right from the start of projects. Browsing the web on a TV or handheld console is a very different experience to browsing on a desktop or a mobile phone, and has many usability implications. Console browser testing When I’m testing a console browser, one of the first things I do is run Niels Leenheer’s HTML5 test and Lea Verou’s CSS3 test. I use these benchmarks as a rough comparison of the standards each browser supports. In October, IE9 came out for the Xbox 360, scoring 120/500 in the HTML5 test and 32% in the CSS3 test. The PS Vita also had an update to its browser in recent weeks, jumping from 58/500 to 243/500 in the HTML5 test, and 32% to 55% in the CSS3 test. Manufacturers have been stepping up their game, trying to make their browsing experiences better. To give you an idea of how the Wii U currently compares to other devices, here are the test results of the other TV consoles I’ve tested. I’ve written more in-depth notes on TV and portable console browsers separately. Year of releaseHTML5 scoreCSS3 scoreNotes Wii U2012258/50048%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit). Wii200689/500Wouldn’t runRuns an Opera browser. PS3200668/50038%Runs a Netfront browser (WebKit). Xbox 3602005120/50032%A browser for the Xbox (IE9) was only recently released in October 2012. The Kinect provides voice and gesture support. There’s also SmartGlass, a second-screen app for platforms including Android and iOS. The Wii U browser is Nintendo’s fifth attempt at a console browser. Based on these tests, it’s already looking promising. Why console browsers used to suck It takes a lot of system memory to run a good browser, and the problem of older consoles is that they don’t have much memory available. The original Nintendo DS needs a memory expansion pack just to run the browser, because the 4MB it has on board isn’t enough. I noticed that even on newer devices, some sites fail to load because the system runs out of memory. The Wii came out six years ago with an Opera browser. Still being used today and with such low resources available, the latest browser features can’t reasonably be supported. There’s also pressure to add features such as tabs, and enable gamers to use the browser while a game is paused. Nintendo’s browser team have the advantage of higher specs to play with on their new console (1GB of memory dedicated to games, 1GB for the system), which makes it easier to support the latest standards. But it’s still a challenge to fit everything in. …even though we have more memory, the amount of memory we can use for the browser is limited compared to a PC, so we’ve worked in ways that efficiently allocates the available memory per tab. To work on this, the experience working on the browser for the Nintendo 3DS system under a limited memory constraint helped us greatly. Sasaki – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com In the box The Wii U consists of a console unit which plugs into a TV (the first to support HD), and a wireless controller known as a gamepad. The gamepad is a lot bigger than typical TV console controllers, and it has a touchscreen on the front. The touchscreen is resistive, responding to pressure rather than electrical current. It’s intended to be used with a stylus (provided) but fingers can be used. It might look a bit like one, but the gamepad isn’t a portable console designed to be taken out like the PS Vita. The gamepad can be used as a standalone screen with the TV switched off, as long as it’s within range of the console unit – it basically piggybacks off it. It’s surprisingly lightweight for its size. It has a wealth of detectors including 9-axis control. Sensors wake the device from sleep when it’s picked up. There’s also a camera on the front, and a headphone port and speakers, with audio coming through both the TV and the gamepad giving a surround sound feel. Up to six tabs can be opened at once, and the browser can be used while games are paused. There’s a really nice little feature here – the current game’s name is saved as a search option, so it’s really quick to look up contextual content such as walk-throughs. Controls Only one gamepad can be used to control the browser, but if there are Wiimotes connected, they can be used as pointers. This doesn’t let the user do anything except point (they each get a little hand icon with a number on it displayed on the screen), but it’s interesting that multiple people can be interacting with a site at once. See a bigger version The gamepad can also be used as a simple TV remote control, with basic functions such as bringing up the programme guide, adjusting volume and changing channel. I found the simplified interface much more usable than a full-featured remote control. I’m used to scrolling being sluggish on consoles, but the Wii U feels almost as snappy as a desktop browser. Sites load considerably faster compared with others I’ve tested. Tilt-scroll Holding down ZL and ZR while tilting the screen activates an Instapaper-style tilt to scroll for going up and down the page quickly, useful for navigating very long pages. Second screen The TV mirrors most of what’s on the gamepad, although the TV screen just displays the contents of the browser window, while the gamepad displays the site along with the browser toolbar. When the user with the gamepad is typing, the keyboard is hidden from the TV screen – there’s just a bit of text at the top indicating what’s happening on the gamepad. Pressing X draws an on-screen curtain over the TV, hiding the content that’s on the gamepad from the TV. Pressing X again opens the curtains, revealing what’s on the gamepad. Holding the button down plays a drumroll before it’s released and the curtains are opened. I can imagine this being used in meetings as a fun presentation tool. In a sense, browsing is a personal activity, but you get the idea that people will be coming and going through the room. When I first saw the curtain function, it made a huge impression on me. I walked around with it all over the company saying, “They’ve really come up with something amazing!” Iwata – Iwata Asks on Nintendo.com Text Writing text Unlike the capacitive screens on smartphones, the Wii U’s resistive screen needs to be pressed harder than you’re probably used to for registering a touch event. The gamepad screen is big, which makes it much easier to type on this device than other handheld consoles, even without the stylus. It’s still more fiddly than a full-sized keyboard though. When you’re designing forms, consider the extra difficulty console users experience. Although TV screens are physically big, they are typically viewed from further away than desktop screens. This makes readability an issue, so Nintendo have provided not one, but four ways to zoom in and out: Double-tapping on the screen. Tapping the on-screen zoom icons in the browser toolbar. Pressing the + and - buttons on the device. Moving the right analogue stick up and down. As well as making it easy to zoom in and out, Nintendo have done a few other things to improve the reading experience on the TV. System font One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly is that the browser lacks all the fonts we’re used to falling back to. Serif fonts are replaced with the system’s sans-serif font. I couldn’t get Typekit’s font loading method to work but Fontdeck, which works slightly differently, does display custom fonts. The system font has been optimised for reading at a distance and is easy to distinguish because the lowercase e has a quirky little tilt. Don’t lose :focus Using the D-pad to navigate is similar to using a keyboard. Individual links are focused on, with a blue outline drawn around them. The recently redesigned An Event Apart site is an example that improves the experience for keyboard and D-pad users. They’ve added a yellow background colour to links on focus. It feels nicer than the default blue outline on its own. Media This year, television overtook PCs as the primary way to watch online video content. TV is the natural environment for video, and 42% of online TVs in the US are connected to the internet via a console. Unfortunately, the