Talking Heads

Every information technology has its particular limitations and specialties, which define the ways in which it can present its information. These conditions evolve into the formation of a style.

I think of this phenomenon every time I'm listening to NPR and the sound guy has designed in all these auditory cues -- cowbells dinging and cattle lowing behind the reporter's voiceover, or what have you.

But sometimes the style persists even after the initial limitations have melted away, and that's interesting.

Example: The first newspapers were printed in black ink on letterpress. Thus they were restricted to the written word and -- initially -- the engraved illustration style. One side effect of these restrictions was that the illustrator could play a real dramatic role in influencing the storytelling (drawing things that never happened, for one extreme).

If you look at a current issue of the New Yorker, you can see a continuation of this style which persists now not because of technological need, but to reach a particular audience which has been prepared by newspapers to prefer its information to be delivered in a particular way. Lots of column inches, set off by illustrations. I mean, they have artists create caricatures to accompany their movie reviews -- who does that? It's not like they have to send Robert Risko to the sound stage to sketch the actors. At this point, the aesthetic is a stylistic choice.

The New Yorker looks the way it does to please the aesthetic of the magazine's creators and audience, and this is all right and proper. But this aesthetic has been more formed by technological constraints than we know.

Television, of course, is the new newspaper, defining an aesthetic for pretty much everybody now.

When I look at the video library on Businessweek.com, I see an information delivery technology which inherits the aesthetic of television, with clickable rows of talking heads instead of a sequence of talking heads, and I have to wonder what the Web would look like if it hadn't been preceded by both the newspapers and television.

I also can't figure out whether what I'm looking at is information-sparse or information-dense. One thing's for sure -- it'd take a whole lot of clicking and watching to find out.

Adobe UI Gripes

Adobe UI Gripes is an awesome kvetch-blog with plenty of screenshots of the funny things that happen when Marketing makes the decision about when the software is ready to ship. I can already think of an error message dialog I need to screen capture next time I see it.

The Future of the Layers Palette

John Nack, product manager for Photoshop, requests input on ways to improve the interface for managing the increasingly complex variety and number of layers in a typical design PSD. This should sound familiar:

People end up heavily overloading the few tools they've got--layer names, layer visibility, and nesting layers into folders/groups. Naming conventions work up to a point, but they're clumsy and fragile.

The Layers palette is really a simple outliner of visual data right now, and a lot of the ideas Nack proposes have to do with ways to make that outliner better able to respond to the need for a more automated, error-free design pipeline.

It is a quick and anonymous survey so I encourage you to fill it out if you would be affected by these changes. The last time I took an Adobe survey I got a personal follow-up; it seems like maybe they're finally getting on the clue train.

Visualization

In which I start out talking about decision trees, and end up talking about shelf sets.

Matt Neuburg has an interesting writeup at Tidbits of a decision making tool called Flying Logic. The program creates "intelligent" decision trees that provide visual feedback as to how to navigate the complex web of dependencies required in order to get to a goal.

Yes, you can do this with a whiteboard (or Omnigraffle), but those don't let you offload logic out of your head.

This is a tool that's probably only worth checking out for major initiatives, but more broadly, the power of visualization in aiding group decision-making can't be overstated. Without visual reference, planning meetings are essentially Socratic dialogs, which is unnecessarily hard work.

Even in the world of brand design, I am often sitting in a meeting talking about "the chosen design" and what needs to happen to it... without any visual reference. Looking around the table, you can see everyone's eyes focussing off in the middle distance as we recall what that design looked like. More unnecessarily hard work.

Think ahead about what needs to be in your library of visual reference material, and keep it at hand in your team's public discussion areas. For CPG design, this means comprehensive shelf sets, and reference for visual equity elements and physical materials. Don't have your meetings in conference rooms, you'll just have to bring your stuff there, and that's too much work, so you won't.

to do list

Seen on a WW2 sub at a submarine museum at Pearl Harbor. The diving officer would stand at his station and call back (through some kind of pipe) to each post to verify verbally that each hatch was closed, etc. This metal indicator panel was just a physical checklist for the officer to go through before issuing the order to dive.

Don't you hate it when you get ready to dive and there's just one thing you forgot to check? Kind of like thinking, hmm, did I turn off the iron?

I would improve the survivability of the device by making it so that you couldn't see the words "Rigged for diving" and"Rigged for surface" simultaneously. You'd only see the phrase which was true, like a big if-then statement.