Corvus Consulting

Background

To make the most of learning to live with a broken arm, I created the J. Walter Weatherman Game in tribute to Arrested Development’s one-armed man of lessons. While couched in humour, I hope to make the most of finding accessibility issues in everyday designs that I never noticed previously and to share workaround tips with others who might find themselves with an arm in a sling or cast someday.

Scoring is as follows:

• Every time I figure out how to do a two-handed operation with one hand: 50 points
• Every practical design improvement I come up with in doing so: 100 points
• Every design improvement I blog about: 150 points

The goal is to hit 50 points per day. Every day I don’t hit the goal scores -25 points. If the scoring seems generous, I expect that coming up with new innovations will get harder as time goes on.

You can read how this all started with the kickoff blog post.

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While riding to the office on Thursday, life added an unexpected to-do to my list. Avoiding a car that suddenly stopped to avoid another car’s u-turn didn’t work out so well, and I spent a couple days in Vancouver General getting patched up.

My dominant right arm will be in a sling for at least six weeks. I’m ambidextrous on the computer, but quickly finding just how many two-handed moments in life I take for granted.

Making way around the house today and thinking of the learning curve I’m in for, Jane McGonigal’s story of recovering from a head injury through an inventive game came to mind. My situation isn’t as serious as what Jane faced; my arm will get better in time, and out of curiosity I see a cool opportunity on hand (yes, it’s a pun).

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A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of teaching with Haig Armen and a lineup of local design pros in the SFU Publishing Summer Workshops. The course, a four day design intensive, was geared to bring graphic designers and others with careers in publishing into the world of web design.

We structured the four days around creating something concrete rather than just hearing the faculty wax philosophic, and with hypothetical design briefs in hand, the students applied each lecture across the four days and on the final day pitched their concept designs. It was simply incredible to watch the ideas take shape and turn into concepts that I would have loved to work on.

In addition to speaking on research methods, card sorting and sketching, I also presented on usability. There was a real challenge here, as I had 40 minutes or so to speak, but the lessons and methods of usability are too numerous and in-depth to pack into such a small amount of time.

The approach I took was to boil things down to three golden keys, crafted to pair with Kathleen Moynahan’s presentation on usability testing methods. I also included a fourth tip on creating engagement through progressive disclosure and the idea of the Mystery Box, but I won’t go into that to keep that part unique to those who were there.

I could tell you those three keys, but Crissy Campbell at Boxcar Marketing has done a great writeup of them as part of a guide on giving websites an autumn tuneup. Thanks Crissy!

Links

• Haig is the founder and creative director of LiFT Studios
• Kathleen’s website
• SFU Summer Publishing Workshops
• JJ Abrams talks about the mystery box as essential to compelling narrative

A prevailing direction in online registration has been to ask only for the minimum information required to create an account.It sounds like a surefire formula: less=easier=better=more customers. Despite whittling down what we ask for at registration and innovations using 3rd parties as authentication points and basic profile data sources, we never seem to get past treating registration as an unpleasant tax that new members must be hurried past.

No matter how immediate the gratification of minimalist registration, the approach boxes us into few choices for crafting the experience past the front door. As such, we end up dropping new members into an impersonal and uncalibrated signed-in homepage, or into an orientation or personalization process that is also abstracted from the core experience.

I’m a believer in “Less is More”, but I’m not sure that persistent problems with new member registration are just about the number of fields. Can taking signup out of the frame of mere account creation turn it into a more coherent first step of the new member experience? I think so.

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Joe Clark has a near-perfect short post that rejects the grandiose wailing of bloggers falling apart over the iPad. I’m tempted to quote the whole thing, but this is where he hits the bulls-eye:

…one’s inability to hack an iPad means precisely nothing. Nobody needs to program an iPad to enjoy using it, except those who have no capacity for enjoyment other than programming and complaining about same.
This was the weekend those of us with high standards lost their remaining residue of patience for ideologues who hyperbolize about open systems without actually creating something people want to use.

Amen. That treat was all the more enjoyable after finding it especially hard to read Cory Doctorow’s over the top rant against the iPad…

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The proverbial They are often heard to say that a hallmark of good design is that it’s obvious.

It’s hard to argue that understanding what something does should not be as immediate and easy as possible. There are exceptions, such as in games where exploration and challenge happen in part by decrypting the utility and purpose of the unfamiliar.

Embracing that maxim, however, can lead us to dismiss the reasoning behind a design choice when the need itself isn’t immediately obvious. I learned just that by taking a close look at the recent update to the Apple Remote and its puzzling addition of a Play/Pause button.

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A couple years ago I learned from Paul Hibbitts a way of using slideshow applications for testing the flow and completeness of a design. Typically, I use Apple’s Keynote for this, though PowerPoint or Impress can work as well.

The essence of the method is to put all screens and all their states into sequences that follow a task or scenario. Paging through that sequence, imagining or even pointing to screen elements as you go, brings missing pieces and potentially confusing points into focus, often with shocking speed.

I’ve used the technique in a number of projects since then, always with good results. But in describing it with others I could rarely put my finger on why it worked so well for spotting what was otherwise missed when just looking at the wireframes on their canvas.

Yesterday at lunch I was talking up this method once again, but this time I hit on what I think explains its effectiveness by drawing from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

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