Closer To The Ideal

This sounds like a great service:

2. Upload the image at www.fivesecondtest.com and plug in your email address.

3. Email the URL for the 5-second test (shown on the subsequent page) to anyone willing to give you some quick feedback. If you have a decent amount of followers, post the link to Twitter and/or Facebook and ask for volunteers.

4. Sit back and relax.

When a user clicks the link, she sees a page that explains how the test works and what to do. When she clicks the button to start the test, your uploaded image displays for 5 seconds, then disappears. The user is then asked to enter everything she can remember about the image (via 5 input fields on the next screen). When she clicks “Done”, she sees a Thank You page and an email is sent to you that contains all of her responses.

Once you have replies from a few users, you’ll spot the trends. Are they noticing the most important things in your design? If not, tweak the design and run another test.

You can set up a website for free. And Google has spent over $10 billion on its website. So it is safe to say that most websites cost between $0 and $10 billion. How much will your site cost? There is no way to be certain ahead of time, but we can offer some advice.

 All websites fall into two categories:

 1.) they offer content

 2.) they offer a service

 Examples: A blog about computers offers content. A site that lets you put dates into a calendar is offering a service. Many of Google’s websites offer a service: email at Gmail and spreadsheets at Google Docs. If you have an already existing company and you’d like to put up a few pages describing (or selling) your products/services, then you are envisioning a content site. If you’d like to do a magazine style site, then you are still considering a content site.

Price Ranges

 Different kinds of projects have different price ranges. We can only offer very rough guidelines as to the kinds of prices we’ve seen for previous projects. Talk to us about the specifics of the project you are thinking of and we could probably offer you a better idea of how much you need to be prepared to spend.

 1.) A personal or company blog, set up using a free service: $0 (or whatever value you place on one hour of effort). But to keep this going and acquire traffic will probably cost thousands of dollars, at least in terms of your time.

 2.) A small company site that has 5 to 10 pages describing the products/services offered by the company. $1,000 to $5,000 depending on how prepared you are, and also on how clear in your own head you are about what you want. Disorganization and changing your mind are both expensive.

 3.) A company site describing the products/services offered by the company, and operated by software that allows the staff at the company to continually update the content on the site: $4,000 to $20,000.

 4.) A company site that both describes products/services and also offers some kind of software service. For instance, a real estate firm might allow users to look up listings based on zip code or a manufacturer of skateboards might allow users to design their own skateboard, mixing and matching those variables that can be customized. $10,000 to $40,000 depending on the complexity of the software to be developed. 

 5.) An online store that sells digital downloads of songs or videos: $25,000 to $100,000 depending on the variety of prices/royalties you want to support with your suppliers and how much marketing you want to do. If you want original technology for handling the songs or videos, you might easily burn through another $50,000 on computer programming.

 6.) A company wiki so the staff can document a particular kind of information – perhaps support information for your customers, or technical info for use by your sales people, or a human resources directory aimed at answering common staff questions. This should be on the low end of $2,000 to $30,000. The biggest variable is whether you need some special, custom feature. If you can use unmodified, off-the-shelf software, you can keep things quite inexpensive. But as soon as you get into custom programming, the cost will sky-rocket.

 7.) An online magazine/blog meant to dominate a particular niche: $25,000 to $100,000. For instance, you might want to cover fishing in Alaska. You’ll probably want to establish commercial relationships with 6 or 7 avid fishermen who are also known to be good writers. They might each post something once a week. You might spend $50 or $100 a week on each of them, depending how much news they can commit to delivering. You should also hire a lawyer to create an agreement you want the writers to sign.

 8.) An information resource that, to succeed, must be the best: $500,000 to $5,000,000. One fellow came to us and said “I have $20,000. I’d like to build America’s largest database of foreclosed properties.” We replied: “This is obviously a great idea and, if you can pull it off, the site will surely be a great success. But you should really go out and raise $1 million to get started. You’ll need a team of programmers working constantly to get data into your database, you’ll need a lawyer to work out multiple deals with your sources of information, and you’ll need national marketing. You’ll probably need $2 or $3 million over the first two years, but you probably should not even start unless you can raise $1 million.” The other possibility is to start small and build a database of foreclosed properties for a single metropolitan area. If the site is successful, it should be easy to raise the money to go national.

 9.) An online social network for some demographic niche, for instance, new moms, or hockey fans: $20,000 to $500,000. You can keep costs low by using off-the-shelf software, but you will probably want to customize the look and feel of the site, for the purpose of branding. The more services you offer (upload photos? upload videos? search for other users in the same geographic area?) the more expensive the programming will be. If your target demographic niche is risky (perhaps you want to run a site that offers services to recovering drug addicts) then you’ll want to hire a lawyer to write an air-tight Terms Of Use agreement. Lawyers are expensive, so this will drive up your start-up costs. Also, you’ll need a budget for marketing or you’ll never acquire any traffic.

 10.) A completely original idea for a software service that no one has ever thought of: price unknown. There is a rule in software design that the more original the idea, the harder it will be to accurately estimate the cost of the project. Robert L. Glass has written several books on why this is so. Check out his book “Software Runaways: Monumental Software Disasters”.

 Below are some guidelines about factors that will effect the cost of your website.

How does a site acquire traffic?

 If you are considering a content site, then the site’s most urgent need, and one of your biggest expenses, will the be the effort to acquire traffic.

 Rule #1: a content site, to be successful, needs new material everyday.

 Rule #2: do not underestimate how utterly demanding it is to provide new material daily.

 Rule #3: if you do not yet have the amount of traffic that you want, re-read rules 1 and 2.

 Rule #4: if you find yourself wanting to ask something like “Does the word ‘daily’ include the weekends?” then re-read rule 3.

 Rule #5: providing text-based content is cheaper than providing video, therefore, even if you are focused on video, your site will need at least one writer to provide high-quality, professional content that can act as filler between the videos. Or you need a big budget.

 Rule #6: flows of traffic on the web have become increasingly rigid and hard to change, therefore more effort (and expense) is needed to acquire an audience.

 Rule #7: it is extremely difficult to transfer an offline audience to an online destination. Even authors like Lee Stringer, who’ve spent months on the New York Times best-sellers list, attract little attention when they blog online.

 Rule #8: when you hire a writer who has an already existing online audience, you usually capture a substantial portion of their readership.

 Rule #9: the previous two rules imply that hiring an online writer who already has traffic is a better way to capture traffic than hiring an offline writer, even if they are a star. Sites focused on sales will generally want to aggregate news relevant to whatever is being sold.

What drives software development costs?

 If you are considering a software site, be aware of what drives the costs of software development.

 Rule #1: the more customization you need, the more expensive things become

 Rule #2: the bigger the project, the more customization you’ll need

 Rule #3: when programmers invent things from scratch, the number of bugs increase, and the amount of time that will have to be spent beta-testing

 Rule #4: if you want original technology, then your programmers will need to invent things from scratch

 Rule #5: to control risk, all programmers must live by the “Hit By A Bus” rule, which is, if they are hit by a bus and killed, with a project only half-done, another programmer should be able to easily take their place

 Rule #6: the more original the technology, the harder it will be for other programmers to understand the code (creating possible violations of the “Hit By A Bus” rule)

 Rule #7: cost, risk, complexity and understandability (of the code) can be controlled by the use of a software “framework”. Some of the popular frameworks for web development include Ruby On Rails and Symfony (written in PHP)

 Marketing

There are two main approaches to marketing a site:

1.) The Big Bang (hire a PR agency, buy lots of ads, make a big splash)

2.) Slow and Steady (produce quality material/service, rely on word of mouth)

Slow and Steady is always more cost effective than the Big Bang approach, so the Big Bang approach  should not be pursued unless you have money to burn and you are in a great hurry.

Success

The success of your website will depend on two things:

1.) Clarity

2.) Discipline

In some ways the web is a revolutionary new medium with new potentials and new dynamics, but in many other ways running a website is exactly like running any other kind of business. You must have clarity about what you hope to achieve, and then you must have the discipline to stick to your plan. You should be able to describe the goal of your website in one sentence (and if you can’t, then how will your visitors ever understand what the site is for?). If you are unable to sum up your goals when you are speaking with us, there is a good possibility that you haven’t yet achieved clarity (but we would love to talk to you about your idea – we may be able to help you achieve the clarity you’ll need).

An entrepreneur is in trouble if their description of their idea for a new startup comes out as a confused run-on sentence, such as this: “We’re going to be an agency that puts ads into videos and we’re also going to be funding new video artists with our ad money, because we believe in the possibilities of nurturing these new talents, and we’re going to be an aggregator that accumulates the best new talent in video and our software will offer unique technology to advertisers, such as the ability to keep track of exactly how long each viewer watches each ad.” And yes, this is similar to something that was actually said to us. There are at least 4 different business ideas in that sentence, which is at least 3 too many. (If you have an existing business with many divisions, it is fine to have a site that reflects the diversity of those divisions, but a startup needs to be more focused.)

Clarity controls costs. If you are unsure of what you want to do, you will probably change your mind half way through the project, and that will lead to additional expense.

Imagine you hire a carpenter to build a deck on the back of your house. You tell the carpenter that you want the deck to be 10 by 20 feet, and to be built of oak. The carpenter goes out and buys the needed wood. Now you change your mind, and you tell the carpenter that you want the deck to be 8 feet by 18 feed, and to be built of mahogany. The carpenter has to charge you for all the oak that they bought. Changing your mind is expensive!

When it comes to home renovations, people have an easy time understanding why changes drive up costs. However, for some reason, when it comes to the web, people lack this understanding. It is true that the web is a fluid medium, but still, once work commences, the time invested needs to be paid for. If you hire a web design firm and tell them “I want a simple site that lists the services my company offers” then they will start to build one kind of website. If you change your mind and say “I really need a site where everyone in my company can document their work, so I can track what they are getting done” that is a completely different site and needs completely different code. The work on the first site would be thrown out (but you would need to pay for it) and work would begin on your second idea.

Assumptions to Avoid

Many of our clients have started web projects with (sometimes unconscious) assumptions that, in the end, caused them unnecessary anguish and expense. These are the twelve most common mistaken assumptions that we’ve seen:

1.) I (the client) should be all things to all people.

2.) Feature fetish: “The more features I add, the more popular my site will be.”

3.) If I build it they will come (also know as, “If I have a clever idea, I won’t need a marketing budget, because the site will get mentioned on TechCrunch/Oprah/popular blogs/the local newspaper”).

4.) If one person offers a single piece of off-hand, poorly thought-out, casual feedback, we will immediately re-design the entire site to comply with their feedback. And then tomorrow, when someone else offers some casual, poorly thought-out feedback, we will do the same. And then the next day…

5.) The idea for my site is unique, therefore completing it quickly is urgent. If we are not the very first site that uses this idea, then we will fail. My idea is so good that others will soon imitate it.

6.) Things that move or blink grab my attention, therefore if everything on the page moves or blinks, we will have a truly attention getting site.

7.) Text is boring.

8.) The more unusual and unique the interface, the more interested people will be.

 9.) Websites are fluid so any problems that arise can probably be fixed in a day or two.

 10.) If my site starts off with a narrow focus, then its prospects for growth will be limited. People will pigeon-hole it and I won’t be able to add new content subjects later.

 11.) I can spend my money at an unsustainable rate because 6 months from now my site will be bringing in a huge profit.

 12.) I have no experience on the web, but I have uniquely creative ideas, which I think will be enough for me to build a successful online business.

Disorganization

Disorganization will cost you. If you hire a web design firm to build a site for your company, then they will need certain things from you, such as the company logo, and a description of what you are selling. If you are weeks late delivering these things, you inflict delays on the web design firm. Often, the contract you sign will specify some kind of penalty for the delays you cause. A common penalty is to have your project moved to the bottom of their priority list – which could delay your web site several months (this is how client lateness was handled when we worked at Category4). While there is some text and images that the web design firm can provide on their own, there is usually some core material that only you can provide – a description of what you sell being a good example. Have your images and text ready.

Brainstorming

A gold rush mentality has come to shape expectations of the web. Many people now have the mistaken idea that if they can simply come up with an idea creatively unique enough, they can attain great wealth on the web.

Organizations, like people, can suffer pathologies, and the one we’ve seen most with web ventures is what we call “the endless brainstorm”. While it is fun to engage in a brainstorming session, and while this can be a vital tactic to maintain the innovativeness of an existing business, constantly seeking a new idea can be a waste of resources for a venture that has not yet launched.

We once watched, with a certain degree of horror, as almost $1 million dollars were spent on what turned out to be a year long brainstorming session. Many good ideas were hatched during that year, and each idea was pursued for a few weeks, then abandoned once the first difficulties were encountered. The entrepreneur in this case wanted to find an idea so unique that he would face no competition in the field – but this is not the way the business world works. Generally, any good idea will attract multiple efforts, so competition is to be expected no matter what the basic idea is.

We have a friend who worked at AOL during the early days, and who has since worked with several startups, both successful ones and failures. One of the many good pieces of advice he gave us was: “In a startup, ideas are a dime a dozen. Anyone working at a startup will have 2 or 3 great business ideas a week. The greatness of the idea doesn’t matter. All that matters is execution.”

One of the most common confusions that arises from brainstorming is the desire to build a site that offers both unique technology and unique content. In our opinion, a small firm (less than 25 employees) can either create great content or it can create great software, but never both.

Population dynamics

For the last 3 or 4 years we’ve had clients come to us and talk about building up sites using content contributed by users. This can be a great strategy, but you will find it tough to elicit the kind of participation you seek, so if you are targeting a narrow niche, be aware how the population dynamics will work against you. Not long ago a potential client came to us and said “I’d like to build a video site focused on my hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, and I’d like most of the content to come from users.” We put together the following estimates to demonstrate the difficulties he would face during the first 6 months of the project.

500,000 people

In the whole extended region (Charlottesville and the surrounding 7 counties), there is only about 500,000 people.

250,000 people

Since your project is focused on video, only those people with broad band connections to the Internet will be able to view your site. And only about half the population has broad-band access to the Internet.

200,000 people

It is reasonable to assume that very small children and many senior citizens will be unable to use your site. Therefore, at most, your target audience will consist of 200,000 people.

20,000 people

If you have some really amazing marketing, maybe 10% of the target population will come check out your site during the first six months.

10,000 people

Assume you’ll have a 50% bounce rate, meaning half the folks who visit you may never visit you again. That is standard. That takes us down to 10,000 people.

100 people

Do you want users to contribute material? That is a high level of interaction, and most sites only get that kind of response from about 1% of their audience. That takes you down to 100 people. Can your engineer your business model to work with 100 active users?

Equity

Except for when we were working at Category4.com, every client we’ve worked with has offered us equity in their business. So far, we’ve always turned these offers down. If you have an idea for a web startup, and you’d like our help, I imagine that you too might be thinking of offering of us equity. You’d be injuring your own best interests if you did so. Offering equity means that you’d like enter into a business partnership, and business partnerships are a bit like marriage. Suggesting such a union to people you’ve just met is a lot like proposing marriage on a first date. First of all, it suggests desperation. There is nothing wrong with that in itself – we’ve all read stories in Inc magazine of a venture started with too little money but which succeeds against the odds. However, second of all, and much more seriously, it suggests that you are not thinking very clearly.

A business partnership means that we need to take an interest in every aspect of your business, including all of the flaws. This can be brutal. This is not a good way to make friends. I’ve said this to clients many times, yet they never seem to understand me. Perhaps I am not using the right words?

Recently, an older gentleman approached us with an ambitious idea that he could not finance himself. He already had a successful operation providing hospitality services to movie companies that film on location in Latin America. His idea for a web startup was somewhat related. He suggested that we take equity in the new startup, as a form of payment. We explained to him that a partnership was a bad idea because we hardly knew each other. If we were to take his offer seriously, we’d have to interview his staff and find out if anyone disliked him, and if so, why. We’d have to find out if any of his key people were planning to leave soon. We’d have to talk to his customers and find out if they liked him or hated him. This should not be any of our business, yet if we formed a business partnership it would be, literally, our business.

As it later turned out, we were very lucky not to form a partnership with this person. We later discovered that he was a recovering alcoholic and, even though he’d been sober for 20 years, he was still exhibiting some of the irresponsibility that one associates with active alcoholism. Incidents such as this are the main reason we are wary of taking equity. But here is the thing – you should be wary too. What about our flaws? What about the stuff we get wrong? If you are offering us equity when you hardly even know us, then you are trusting us too much. And, to us, that indicates that you are not thinking clearly about the risks that your venture will face.

People should know each other at least a year before they can think about forming a partnership together. Web startups routinely break this rule, and I suppose that is fine if the company is built to be flipped - that is, you assume that you’ll cash out in a year anyway, so you don’t have to worry about other people’s flaws. As a general rule, business partnerships should be for people who know each enough that they can trust each other.

Contact Us

 We have worked on sites that had budgets under $1,000. We have worked on sites that have cost $250,000. We have long associations with a network of professionals which allows us to quickly assemble an agile team with exactly the skillset needed for the construction of your website. Whether your site needs graphic designers, computer programmers, videographers, writers, marketers, photographers or system administrators, we can bring together the talent you’ll need. We can even give you some rough guidance about which situations you’ll need a lawyer for. We are especially able to help web-focused startups whose initial 6 month budget is between $25,000 and $250,000. We can also help with existing sites that have so far failed to attract an audience.

 For every rule we’ve written here, we can think of three qualifiers. If you’d like to hear how the subtleties might apply to your web project, contact us. We are willing to meet once for free, to give you our honest feedback about your idea.

 434-825-7694

contact@teamlalala.com

Darren Hoyt has a great post up about “the empty handed client“:

But what happens when a client has nothing to submit — no photos, no taglines, no logos, no text, no identity? …Obviously a project can begin without all the materials, but it’s far from ideal. In the absence of photos and text, you can help the process along by quizzing the client about their industry, business philosophy or desired audience. In this sense, you’re getting a feel for “content” even without materials.

In response to it, I posted a comment about classic mistakes that clients make. I’m reposting my comment here:

If my client is empty-handed, unsure even of the idea of their site, then I feel the best option is to talk to them, to help them clarify their thoughts. Sometimes I feel like a therapist, listening as the client pours out their hopes and dreams and fears and worries.

We’ve acquired 3 new clients this summer. In all 3 cases, I was brought in at an extremely early phase, before the basic idea of the site was decided. I do not mind sitting in on brainstorming sessions. So long as the client can pay me for the time I spend at meetings, I enjoy helping them avoid mistakes.

For instance, one mistake is the behavior pattern I would describe as “too much brainstorming”. If I’m in meeting with the client for the 3rd time and the meeting is still a pure brainstorming session, I warn the client that they are at risk of wasting a lot of money on simply trying to figure out what they should do. I once saw a substantial fortune wasted on what turned out to be a 2 year long brainstorming session.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that the opposite is also true: it is crazy to risk a vast fortune on an idea that you have not thought about carefully, so a prolonged period of testing the permutations of an idea can certainly be justified if the project seems likely to be huge. So, as I said, I don’t mind sitting in on the brainstorming sessions, so long as the client can pay me. I feel especially helpful when the client suggests something that I know, from previous experience, is a terrible idea. Certain thought patterns are traps, they always fail, yet they are quite common among clients considering their first web project. Among those traps:

1.) If I (the client) build it they will come (also know as, “If I have a clever idea, I won’t need a marketing budget, because the site will get mentioned on TechCrunch/Newsweek/The New York Times”).

2.) Feature-itis: “If I add in all the good features from all the popular sites, then my site will be as popular as all those other sites combined.”

3.) I can/should be all things to all people.

4.) If one person offers a single piece of off-hand, poorly thought-out, casual feedback, we will immediately re-design the entire site to comply with their feedback. And then tomorrow, when someone else offers some casual, poorly thought-out feedback, we will do the same. And then the next day…

5.) Flash is more dazzling than anything that HTML can offer, therefore our whole site should be built in Flash.

6.) Things that move or blink grab my attention, therefore if everything on the page moves or blinks, we will have a truly attention getting site.

7.) Text is boring.

8.) Images are always better than text.

9.) I (the client) am over the age of 35/40/45/50 therefore people will think I’m out-of-date and too old to be starting a web business. I will prove my youthfulness by only using the most bleeding-edge technologies.

10.) Bleeding edge technologies are always more interesting than older technologies such as text.

11.) Users prefer cutting-edge technologies over older technologies such as text.

12.) The more creative/unusual the interface, the more interested people will be.

13.) If my site starts off with a narrow focus, then its prospects for growth will be limited. People will pigeon-hole it and I won’t be able to add new content channels later.

14.) I can spend my money at an unsustainable rate because 6 months from now my site will be bringing in a profit.

15.) I have a lot of money right now, therefore I am a genius web entrepreneur (the money may have come from inheritance, good luck selling a house at the peak of the housing boom, or perhaps thrift at a younger age - none of which confers the business skills needed to run a business, online or off).

I could go on. I’ve seen many mistakes, and I’ve seen a few successes, or, at least, glimpses of successes. When a client comes at me empty-handed, I talk to them until an idea takes shape and seems concrete enough that construction can begin.

I do think it is wise to try to get to something concrete as fast possible (as per 37Signals). It might be impossible to get the whole idea mapped out quickly, but sometimes small parts of it can be made solid. I think it is wise to have the graphic designer try to put visuals on anything that can be agreed upon as unlikely to change.

I also liked an earlier post that you (Darren) wrote, over at Sitepoint, about working toward a single mockup for the front page (rather than offering 3 different versions of the front page). I do think that getting the front page into a concrete form greatly helps getting the whole project solid.

This looks like a good site. I’ll post a link so I can remember to go back and check it out later.

These are articles that I’ve often spoken of, and often copied the URLs to emails that I’ve sent to others, so I shall record them here, so in the future I shall only need to point people here.

The illusion of agreement:

“We should build a house!”

“Yes! A house!”

But what kind of house do they mean?

The interface as a spec: including stories inline:

Sometimes designing the static states takes more time, and doesn’t quite represent reality, as well as a brief note about how the functionality works. The key is to make this note in context — right next to the interface element its describing. The combination of real visuals and a brief contextual note shrink the chances of misunderstanding to near zero.

Designing an interface: from sketch to screen

The screen mostly followed the sketch, except for the controls in the upper right and the description field. That’s fine, because at step two those details Didn’t Matter. Coding the real thing, I found room for all three of those pieces in the top-right, and that worked better.

Thinking and sketching took me 10 minutes. Creating the real screen and updating the code can take two or three hours. That lopsided pattern, with short make-believe-time on the left and long build-time on the right, is always a good sign that you’re making progress. Ideas and paper are necessary, but they’re destined for the trash bin. So burn through them and focus on the good stuff.

The often interesting robert hoekman, jr:

Our Stories should be an experience rich site. It should offer an engaging environment that compels users to explore and connect emotionally to the storytellers. But it doesn’t offer this at all. Instead, it offers what looks like any other Google design. It’s plain, minimalist, and it’s focused entirely around the information and not the experience.

Google apparently thinks it has hit upon the secret formula to all successful websites - simple, minimalist designs that offer information in a concentrated form. In reality, this formula only works for certain classes of sites, of which the original Google website was the par exemplar. Google fails when it attempts to build a site that needs a philosophically different approach. As Hoekman explains:

 If Google’s goal here was to create emotional connections, they should definitely have considered something other than the business-as-usual, sterile design work that has become Google’s signature. Granted, some of the site’s pages are geared towards showing people how to conduct interviews for the site, and those pages are probably best left alone, but the main attraction here is an environment of storytelling, not another Google search results system.

…Design is meant to communicate content. With the right design, you can always meet your goals much more effectively. If you want emotional connections, design something that encourages them. If you want people to take action, design to encourage action. Don’t let your usual design style get in the way of doing something great.

I had to look this up and it was harder to find this image than I thought it would be, so I figured I might as well share. A real masterpiece of the power of graphic design to mediate personal or political disputes. In this concert poster from 1965, it was important that neither Joan Baez nor Bob Dylan appear as the featured artist, so Baez’s name appears on the left, but lower, and Dylan’s name appears on the right, but higher. For Western speakers/readers the left comes before the right, but higher comes before lower, so to have visual elements that mix these visual cues is a good way to give both elements equal visual weight.

Does anyone remember the name of the graphic artist who did this poster? I’ve a Joan Baez biography somewhere but it is buried in a box because I recently moved. I need to look the artist’s name at some point.

Yet another example of bad web programming. I was researching the subject of cancer and followed a link on a government site that gets me to this page:

I think its fine to print debugging information to the screen when a website is under development, but on a live site, I think the error messages should try to be more helpful. Perhaps the error message can suggest the average speed it takes the site’s sysadmins to fix problems of this time. Or the error message can suggest that the visitor go get the page out of the Google cache. Even the cutesy error message that Stikipad used was more reassuring than this.

Back on September 24th, I decided to put my Netflix account on hold. I knew I was facing a stretch of time when I was going to be too busy to watch movies. Apparently Netflix only allows you to put your account on hold for 90 days. Nevertheless, the form that I was presented with allowed me to choose any date in December, so I chose December 31st, as you can see here:

Upon submitting the form, I got the following error message:

This is, of course, an example of bad user interface design. They should not allow me to choose a date which they themselves forbid. It is confusing that their form should offer a date which is, in fact, not allowed.

The framework I wrote auto-generates forms based on the definition of a table in the database. These forms are usually quite ugly. The advantage of these auto-generated forms is that they speed the initial set up of a site - I simply define some database tables, based on what the client has told me they want, and the framework auto-generates the form.

On the TSR site, we are still cleaning up the rough edges. Laura Denyes, the lead designer on this site,  is transforming the rough and ugly forms. After enhancing the clarity and improving the use of space, we hope to leave the user with a better experience. You can see Laura’s work in this before and after image:

Lark gets her ass whooped.

Well, maybe “broken” is too strong a word. The CSS failed to load. Which happens sometimes. Which is part of why semantic markup is important. How much does the user experience survive the lack of style sheets? This from the front page of Old Navy:

Just curious, but does anyone know some common reasons why the CSS files might fail to load?

Also curious about the marketing. The front page of the site is aimed entirely at women. Do women buy clothes online more than men?

I was helping a client move their site from GoDaddy to another web server. I logged into GoDaddy and found the MySql database and made a backup. Then I got sidetracked for 15 minutes. When I started working again, I got this error message (screenshot below). GoDaddy is right to log me out after 15 minutes of inactivity, that much is good security. But they tell me where I am suppose to go in the text, without providing a hyperlink. I can only get out of this page by hand editing the URL in the address bar. Badly done.

Yet another story about a badly programmed website, with really bad error messages.

I went to pay my monthly cell phone bill. Just last month, SprintPCS instituted a new policy, requiring stricter passwords with more letters and numbers in them. So I was forced to change my password. Perhaps I was also in a hurry, as I did not write it down in the usual place.

Today, unable to remember the new password, I clicked the link they offer for “Forgot your password?” I came to the screen you see in the first image.

I typed in my “username”, which is simply my telephone number. When I hit the submit button, I got, in response, a blank white page with the text “Error: 500″. That’s it. Nothing else. Just that text on a blank white page. You can see it in this second image:

I offer this anecodote as one more small piece of evidence for the case that most web sites are horribly programmed and poorly tested. I don’t mean to pick on SprintPCS, since there are many sites that are just as bad, but this just happens to be the broken website that I interacted with today.

Mind you, the above incident happened this morning, around 11 AM, and now it is 11 PM. I just went back to get screenshots. Twelve hours later, the problem is still there.

I sent SprintPCS an email about this. I have not yet heard back from them. I’ll update this post if I do hear from them.

UPDATE: wonderful response time. I just got this, on the 17th. The irony:

Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 14:08:18 -0500 [02:08:18 PM CDT]

From: Sprint Customer Solutions <ecare@cc.sprintpcs.com>

To: LAWRENCE@KRUBNER.COM

Subject: Re: Subject: ID # 20070914212929 (KMM38317571I123L0KM)

Hello Lawrence Krubner,

Thank you for contacting Sprint.

A ticket has been submitted in reference to the difficulty you are experiencing logging into your account online at Sprint.com. The ticket number is 16880851.

A follow-up call will be made to you within 36 business hours.

Thank you again for contacting Sprint. We appreciate your business.

Mary O.
E-Care
Sprint
“Where our customers come first!”

Refer someone to Sprint and get $25.

So after 3 days, they send me an email in which they promise to contact me within 3 days. Then they close with “Where our customers come first!” Hate to think how we’d be treated if we came second.

A very nice point by Robert Hoekman:

We hold up usability as laudable because, sadly, most companies still have serious trouble putting their pants on correctly when it comes to usability. They need the gold stars.

Anyone in the interaction design or usability profession worth his salt knows that usability is a single piece of a very large “experience puzzle”. You need a strong value proposition to get users in the first place. You need a compelling product or service. You need good customer service when things go wrong. You need marketing prowess. You need something that makes you different, and better, than everyone else in your space.

For a product or service to be great, you need all these things. But you also need a usable touchpoint. A strong value proposition gets people interested in your product, but once you have their attention, a high level of usability helps motivate people to keep using it. A low level of usability deters people from using your product.

danah boyd has a new essay about class dynamics and how they divide the people who use MySpace from the people who use Facebook. Everyone has linked to this essay, including such major media outlets as the BBC. One thing that jumped out at me was her idea that even the design of the site, the look and feel, were reflecting cultural values that arose from class divisions. (In the following excerpt, she uses the word “hegemonic” when referring to culturally middle class people, and “subaltern” when referring to culturally working class people.)

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and “so middle school.” They prefer the “clean” look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is “so lame.” What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as “glitzy” or “bling” or “fly” (or what my generation would call “phat”) by subaltern teens. Terms like “bling” come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I’m sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the “eye of the beholder” - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That “clean” or “modern” look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I’m drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

I should note here that aesthetics do divide MySpace users. The look and feel that is acceptable amongst average Latino users is quite different from what you see the subculturally-identified outcasts using. Amongst the emo teens, there’s a push for simple black/white/grey backgrounds and simplistic layouts. While I’m using the term “subaltern teens” to lump together non-hegemonic teens, the lifestyle divisions amongst the subalterns are quite visible on MySpace through the aesthetic choices of the backgrounds. The aesthetics issue is also one of the forces that drives some longer-term users away from MySpace.

Robert Hoekman is the author of Designing the Obvious, which all web application designers should read.

In a recent post he talks about the right way to listen to feedback from one’s users:

I have also long maintained that once you have a product available, you should then plug in and start listening to your audience. In doing this, however, I’ve said you should pay attention to the overwhelming trends - the requests that bubble up to the top over and over again - and not the idiosynracies of individual or small niches of users.

He then quotes a statistic from the Opera web browser development team that shows that a feature that users had frequently requested, and which has been implemented, is never used.

He concludes:

Clearly, even paying attention to trends can be risky. I’ve seen this myself in a couple of situations. It seems that a large number of people can all have the same wrong idea….

Our job as designers is to interpret and define problems, and to create solutions. Very often this means ignoring everything you hear and paying attention only to what you see. When you pay attention to what people actually do instead of what they say they do, you can devise solutions that exceed their expectations.

Instead of building exactly what they ask for, figure out why they’re asking for it. Then find a solution that solves the real problem.

I have occassionally heard designers respond to criticism with the words “I did exactly what you asked me to do” This response, it seems to me, can arise for only two reasons:

1.) The organization for which the designer works has no real respect for design. The designer is not empowered to do actual design work. Instead, the designer is told to follow orders or be fired.

2.) The designer does not understand the actual work of design. The designer needs to spend more time listening to the client/boss so they can figure out the why of a request, rather than the what.

There is no easy fix for #1, which is an epidemic sapping potential economic value out of millions of businesses worldwide. However, for #2, all that is needed is greater design education.

Some fellow posted a commerical notice to the comp.lang.php newsgroup. For a mere $79 per developer, you can get a PHP framework that does all the same stuff as the free, open-source PHP frameworks. And it has all the same problems, too. In an old post on the Category4 weblog I was ranting about the problems that stem from generating HTML from inside of PHP code. When a PHP framework generates HTML and CSS from inside the PHP code, then programmers end up working on problems that designers could solve much faster. Consider this problem, which the PHP Developers Kit offers as an example of all the wonderful things you can do if you use their $79 framework:

The workhorse of PHP Kit is the container class . It is a box containing other objects, like text, links, paragraphs and even other containers. It is under CSS control so you may create a container using several dozen options, like background color, border style, border color, font size and font color.

Note: the containers above displayed correctly in Microsoft IE when displayed inline (left to right). However, Mozilla Firefox version 1.5.0.4 displayed them left to right but with no width or height except for the width of their borders. When displayed as block (one above the other), Mozilla displayed their size correctly. The display property (inline or block) is not suppose to effect an element’s assigned width and height.

So, um, you really should be able to control these containers from your code, but when you run into a problem, such as different browsers interpreting your CSS differently, you (the programmer) are stuck solving it. The designer, who specializes in CSS, can not solve your CSS problem for you, because they don’t know how to edit the PHP code that generates the CSS. Ideally, all CSS issues should be the domain of your designers, not your programmers, but when all the CSS is controlled by PHP code, then solving this problem is shifted from the designers to the programmers. This leads to workflow problems - in too many web design shops the programmers have too much work to do and the designers too little, and frameworks such as this are to blame. This is bad economics - to the extent that your programmers are paid more than your designers you should be trying to shift work from programmers to designers.

Concentrating all of the important design work into the hands of the programmers is also bad for morale - I’ve worked in shops where the designers had no work to do because they were waiting for the programmers to finish a bit of PHP/CSS template code. It is demeaning and embarrassing for the designers to have no work. I’ve seen them try to make busy work for themselves and they always look a little embarrassed and ashamed. A well-run web design shop will strive to avoid this.

Designers are focused on communicating with other humans, programmers are focused on communicating with machines. One’s users and clients suffer when the actual power to design is taken away from designers and given (even accidentally) to programmers. It is a rare programmer whose insight into user behavior matches that of a highly skilled designer. An intuitive sense of the user experience is the most important skill that a good designer brings to their work. If all the real design power is in the hands of the programmers, one’s websites and web software are likely to be less intuitive than what might have otherwise been achieved. By contrast, a framework that maximizes the power of the designers is a framework that maximizes the chances of a great user experience being achieved.

Again, let me repeat (as I said in that previous post), frameworks like this (I mean the one I’m criticizing) are fine for the individual freelancer who does all their own programming and design work. But these frameworks are harmful to web design firms that work on large sites and who, therefore, need programmers and designers to work together. As soon as you have a division of labor, you need a framework that facillitates workflow, rather than blocks it.

The last time I wrote on this issue (back when I still worked at Category4) a fellow named Matt responded:

While I generally agree on your view of no html in your php, I think there are exceptions. It’s really about choosing what for when and where. For example, form elements being generated by code is acceptable to me. Even as a designer, I would think that looking at a page with a few php/template tags would be better than a page with lots of html; it’s still code. Less control, but as long as the code is doing what you want then there is no worry. And you could always either override/extend the classes generating the code or hack it…. I think that my point is that one could continue to mull over what to use and prematurely optimize resources to the point of getting nothing done.

I’ll say again, if an individual is doing both the programming and the designing, then putting HTML into the PHP might speed things up for them, but as soon as the jobs of programmer and designer are split, then anything that robs designers of their power is likely to lead to work-flow problems. And those cost money, time, morale and sometimes management focus. They also limit the ability of the designers to achieve a great user experience. Matt suggests that form code can be generated by PHP code, but if you do that, you will very likely get cookie-cutter forms. Forms are the single most important area for designers to innovate a great user experience, but the ability of designers to innovate is wiped out if the HTML is generated by PHP code.

As to “you could always either override/extend the classes generating the code or hack it”, only a programmer can do this. Designers can’t do this on their own. If the designers need this done, then they need to wait on the programmer to do it. And then, once again, you end up with a work-flow problem that damages the productivity of the firm. Either the firm’s profits will be reduced or the costs must be past along to the client, driving up what they must pay for the project.

As to “one could continue to mull over what to use and prematurely optimize resources to the point of getting nothing done”, I’m sorry I haven’t stressed this, but the opinions I’m expressing have grown up on me slowly over the last 5 years. In 2002 I started work on a PHP/MySql content management system and I made every mistake that I’m now critical of. Back then, I wrote functions to simplify my forms, such as:

textInput(”author”);

All the HTML was in the function. It’s exactly what I’m now critical of. So what I’m expressing in this post isn’t premature optimization. It’s way-overdue optimization. I’m looking back at the mistakes I’ve made over the last 5 years and I’m trying to express what I’ve learned so others might now avoid making the same mistakes I’ve made.

Earlier tonight I found myself writing the following email (one of several) to a designer I’m working with. I was trying to explain why I favored “design lead development”.

Dear wwwwww,

I think another way to think of your job, for the next 3 weeks, is to figure out what assumptions people are making, and draw those assumptions out with Photoshop mock-ups. What are JJJ, MMM, CCC and I assuming? We’re relying on you to attack those assumptions, as much as possible, and make things visually explicit.

I guess another way to approach this is for you to ask, what do you feel ignorant about? What questions would you like to ask about this project? In an ideal world you would never use words to ask any questions, but instead you’d use a Photoshop mock-up to ask every question that you’re curious about. I’m not sure if that is an attainable ideal, but it’s worth keeping in our heads. Ideally you’d speak to us in Photoshop, not English.

Of course, this is merely my opinion. If you disagree with me, I trust your judgement about how to proceed.

– lawrence krubner