Design on a Dime

I’ll be speaking at BlogOrlando in just over a week and a half, hot on the heels of my vacation in Orlando this past week, whew. The plan is to discuss blog and social media design, in particular helping people understand design expense and finding some cool resources to spruce up their projects when time, budgets or size don’t allow for outside design assistance.

So what expenses am I talking about. Simply put - Money, Effort, Time and Quality. We all have to evaluate and weigh each of these with any product and determine where we have a resource deficit and where we may have an abundance. The reality is that many projects, particularly direct-revenue generating sites should involve professional designers at some level. These projects usually require an investment to offset all four of the long-term expenses mentioned above. However lots of other projects may not need this kind of attention. Those are the projects I’d like to concentrate on in my talk.

So You Think You Can Type?
Copy. But wait this is a design discussion right? Yes, but copy plays a huge part in all visual design, just ask Jeffery Zeldman. I’ll have some tricks for helping mock-up text, finding copy-writing resources and an inspiring site or two.

Are you User Experienced?
I’ve spent nearly ten years designing experiences for users, many of those years with a billion-dollare software company working directly with both users and engineers (I carried the specs to the developers so-to-speak). Users matter, even on the smallest, personal projects. I’ll provide you with some handy resources to get up-to-speed on who you’re designing for, how to design for them, then how to make sure these new users don’t hate you.

The Goods
Alright, I promised you I’d be providing some frugal tips and tricks and I intend to not let you down. here’s a list of categories I have in mind for free links, resources, templates, etc. If you don’t see something that interests you let me know in the comments on this post or drop me a line. I’ll have a special ma.gnolia tagset ready for these and you can save and share ad nauseam.

• Templates - Primarily Wordpress but I’ll see if I can throw you other folks some love
• Fonts - Everyone loves free fonts, and contrary to popular opinion there are a ton of free, high quality fonts out there. Maybe once you get hooked you’ll consider throwing some cash towards the fine folks at Veer.
• Testing - Sounds boring right? But if your site sucks in one browser you are throwing away viewers. I’ll provide some (almost)free resources for reviewing your projects, including HTML email clients.
• Grids/Layouts - Maybe you feel like an off-the-shelf template is cheating and want to muscle through designing your own, if so you’d better check out some of the many great articles out there about grids and why grids are good.
• Stock - It’s all out there: photos, vector illustrations, audio, video - just for the asking (and the occasional dollar or two). If you can’t find it in my discount list of resources you can always check-out the big boys and spend a bit more.
• CSS - Looking for some handy CSS resources, I have lots that’ll be happy to share.
• Inspiration - A list chock-full of the best of the web, or the best of the parts of the web I’ve seen. You’ll see stuff from friends, colleagues, people I’ll never meet and a few sites that look great but may be in Dutch or Japanese, I’m from Iowa I don’t know the difference.
• Odds and/or Ends - I’ve got a lot of just cool bits and pieces I’ll include (well tagged of course) in the link list as well.

Please share your thoughts and let me know if there’s anything missing or if this is something that interests you.

Daily Ma.gnolia Links for Sep 18

Vienna You’ve Ruined My Day

I spent several years as a usability engineer and in one session with a defense contractor, testing a complete rewrite of a big enterprise app that wasn’t going well, a participant told me that our products ruined her day. She dreaded her workday because she knew she had to come in and use our stuff. Ouch. That’s the nature of usability, of putting the user first. Somedays you get praise and hugs and somedays, well, somedays you realize how important it is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk around a bit. That product ruined her day because it worked fine functionally but the developers had never walked in her shoes, had never lived the life of a procurement specialist or supply-chain manager or dock foreman.

So while no one came and sat in my cube this week I’ll send Vienna feedback the only way I know how, by writing this. Vienna, if you’re listening, YOU RUIN MY DAY. I love your app, it’s free and easy and no-longer crashes incessantly. It has just what I need in a feed reader, but it lacks one crucial thing: empathy for it’s user. You’ve failed to walk in my shoes.

Exhibit A

This is the toolbar, under that damn gear icon is a host of features. Unfortunately they only exist in that menu, I can’t break them out as individual buttons. That means marking an entire feed “as read” requires click+drag+select+unclick every single time. It should just be *click* and done. Seriously this is an awful, awful bit if UI undesign trotted out as an enhancement. One of the downfalls of open-source is that criticizing an unpaid developer feels a little dirty, but it’s the truth. No one ever hesitated to tell me about issues with the interfaces I’ve designed, I guess it’s only fair I do the same.

Hello Wordpress, Are You There?

Looks like MT has joined Typepad (surprising I know) and now has an iPhone optimized admin. Wordpress needs to take a minute see if this is worth the effort to implement. I’d love to have it, but it’s not nearly compelling enough to consider a switch. Sure I could build my own, but I don’t have that kind of time - maybe someone reading this does. If so drop me a line and let’s chat.

Dassault Systemes Ads on CNN.com

As some of you may know, I worked in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) world for a number for years. If you want to know more about PLM, checkout these videos or keep an eye on Cris Kelley’s blog. Our biggest competitor was a French company, Dassault Systemes which was allied with IBM. In my opinion they trailed us in almost all avenues - innovation, vision, strategic understanding of how work is done, usability, etc. However, they always seems to kick our butts in marketing and communicating the value of PLM.

We always struggled both externally and internally getting the point across to developers and support folks why PLM matters to business. DS always finds ways to express that value, or at least does it better than we ever did. Even within our products we found it difficult to convince users why features mattered to them, partly because these are abstract ideas to express and partly because we tended to choose technical answers to nearly every question. DS seems to take another tack, they choose practical or conversational answers, something Arena seems to do as well, almost to the point of throwing out features. That was something we could never do.

Along those lines DS has extended beyond the borders of trade journals and B2B routes, and has been advertising on sites like cnn.com of late. The latest ad, appearing as of 7am central time on cnn.com, is really well done and can connect with people - not just users or managers or executive - but people. Hats off to them. Many time it’s not about the features you pack in, or the platform or the license - it’s about value and how you communicate that value to the people who make the final purchasing decisions. Ads like this can help do that, hopefully others in the space will follow suit. One great way would be to invest in the visual mapping done by a company like xplane, I had been working on such a plan for a few years while I was there, but never got the traction to complete it.

Flowers Bloom Again

It’s been awhile since my breakup with Ma.gnolia. In the time since we’ve bumped into each other a few times, and it seemed like she was getting smarter, friendlier, speedier each time. Then last week I get a note that she’s graduated from college and has this great new job (actually a blog posting gig that seems pretty cool). Well I think it’s time to give this relationship another go-round. Del.icio.us is busy all the time anyway, and let’s be honest she’s not getting any prettier. Looks like Ma.g is happy to take me back, she imported all of my ol’ del.icio.us links like nobody’s business.

Honey I’m home! Hat tip to Todd for staying on this and delivering something better than I expected. If you get a chance to have a little more element granularity/css gouping post-beta that would rule.

Someone Has a Secret…

My Daily Links 2007-09-10

• Information Architects Japan » iA Notebook » A Word on Design Value
  (tags: design ia usability business web)

Ma.gnolia Daily Posts

Hey gang just a quick word of warning, I’m going to try the new beta ma.gnolia links for daily posts rather than delicious. There may be a day or two of wackiness, hopefully nothing major - fingers crossed.

My Daily Links 2007-09-07

• Free Texture Stock Photos
  (tags: free stock photos resources design)
• RecruitPress
  (tags: wordpress jobboard recruiting plugin app)