Experience Design made understandable

Benjamin Surkyn — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:58:55 +0000

A great article that makes the concept of Experience Design a bit more understandable.

Design Principles at Microsoft

Benjamin Surkyn — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:42:34 +0000

Some great design principles at Microsoft.

Whitespace

Benjamin Surkyn — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:47:18 +0000

Just came across an article explaining what is white space and how to use it in modern web design. A must read!

Data visualization examples

Benjamin Surkyn — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:14:18 +0000

If you need to display any kind of data, you should check out this post about data visualization and infographics resources for design inspiration.

Polite software

Benjamin Surkyn — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:27:47 +0000

For some reason, we personify our computers. We get angry at them when they crash or don’t do what they want. We call them names or even hit them.
Maybe this is so because our computers are rude to us. Making the programs more “polite” can help.

What is polite?

Politeness is not acting as programs do now and just adding “thank you” or “please”.
Neither is it when the programs act more human. Humans are more error prone, subjective and slow. We don’t want programs to be that.

Polite software has many different characteristics. Here are some:
Polite software is interested in the user and remembers what he/she told it. It will ask for personal information that will better help it to deliver information back to the person using the software and it will even remember that information so the user won’t have to re-enter is every time the software is user. But the software will have enough common sense not to ask for futile information of the user.

Software should also anticipate the users’ needs. Most software is has a lot of idle time, doing nothing, waiting for the user to be done reading the text displayed. A good example of this is an internet browser. Good anticipation would be pre-loading the most visited sites, or the links that are in the visible part of the screen. This premature preparing makes the software more responsive, cutting down on wait-times and making it more enjoyable to be used.

In order to be able to anticipate the user’s needs, software needs to be well informed. This can be done by asking a lot of information, but as I’ve discussed, this is not advisable. If software is multi-language capable, it can easily detect the language of the operating system the user is using. This will most-likely be a language he/she understands. Another example are search engines. They can check if a link in their results returns an error 404 and just not display that link, instead of the user clicking it and getting a “Page not found” message. This is information the machine can be aware of, so it should use it.

As you can see, making software more polite isn’t really that hard.