My there! My name is Steve Kwan. User experience design is my passion.

He blogs hard for the money

(October 21st, 2008 - 1:37PM)

I was informed recently that Vitrium will be creating a company blog, and I've been asked to contribute.

I find this incredibly amusing. Five years ago, I would have been reprimanded for spending all my work time surfing the Net and writing crap. Now, they want to pay me to do it!

I'm happy to participate in the company blog, but I'll have to sit down with the team and figure out what our goals are. A lot of companies start blogs, and most of them wind up discarded and forgotten. I don't want Vitrium's blog to wind up that way. So before we kick it off, I want to make sure we understand what we're trying to achieve with this blog, and have an idea of what it will be about.

When I get more details, I'll post the URL here.

The RSS feed is working again

(October 15th, 2008 - 10:45AM)

Some of you may have noticed that you haven't been receiving RSS updates from my site in a while. It was reported to me that my RSS feed had stopped working (it was reporting a 403 error when accessed). The error has been fixed, and you should start receiving updates about my wonderful content again.

The pitfalls of generic UI components

(October 6th, 2008 - 5:05PM)

We're in the process of redesigning protectedpdf, a product that hasn't had a UI refresh in several years. We're rebuilding the UI using Microsoft SharePoint. During prototyping, an interesting issue came up that I thought I'd share here.

Microsoft SharePoint, like many application platforms, comes with a library of generic UI components: list views, data grids, entry forms, etc. Also like many application platforms, these pre-made components suck. Although ready-made components save time, they're invariably too generic.

Since thousands of developers use SharePoint, Microsoft needs to ensure that its UI components are generic enough to accomodate the nearly unlimited number of ways they could be used. This means they designed for the lowest common denominator. And while these "lowest common denominator" components can do thousands of different jobs, they aren't designed to do any of them particularly well.

Of course, developers love generic UI components because they greatly speed up development time. Developers hate nothing more than reinventing the wheel. When prototyping protectedpdf, our development team encouraged me to use SharePoint's generic components wherever possible.

But after a few days of prototyping, it became clear that bending my design around these generic components would result in a hard-to-use application. I wouldn't be building something intuitive; I'd be stacking together a pile of generic components.

Have you ever used an application that felt like an endless assortment of lists and forms, all tenuously linked together? That's not good design. A well-designed application should feel smooth and continuous when used. It should clearly navigate your users through their goals.

A lot of developers make mistake the mistake of thinking like this:

"I'm building a course registration system for a school. Well, the major entities are the course, the student, and the registration, so I'll just use generic lists and entry forms for each. Done!"

Unfortunately, the ubiquity of generic UI components makes it easy to create systems like this one.

The problem is, this is a data-oriented view of the universe, whereas most users think in a goal-oriented view. When you present someone with a kludge of lists and forms, they often don't understand where to start or what to do. In fact, almost all badly-designed UI I've seen has this commonality: the application is basically a pile of generic list vies and entry forms.

So let's wrap all this up into a single thesis: Generic UI has no notion of your user's goals. It encourages you to build a data-oriented system. Most users prefer a goal-oriented system.

Canadian "Do Not Call" List

(October 3rd, 2008 - 4:49PM)

Now, like our American neighbours, we have a national "Do Not Call" list. I'm not sure how well it'll work, but I recommend all Canadians register.

www.dncl.gc.ca