With Easter Seals as one of our clients, we’re all into accessibility. I even got a coworker who’s visually impaired in one eye and she has strong opinions about some of our designs. Together with Richard (our accessibility compliance guru), that’s great for us because it means our team’s under the scrutiny of some pretty watchful and interested parties. It means we have accountability for this thing called accessibility that all too often gets short shrift in the www.

I recently read a post titled, Are you giving accessibility the consideration it deserves in the user experience? Talk about direct. But this is worth noting:

There are still lots of ways for designers to screw up accessibility, and I think that a lack of exposure to how our work behaves for people using assistive technologies means that we don’t understand the impact of the decisions we make sometimes.

Developing an understanding and awareness of simple ways to avoid common accessibility problems, and ensuring that, as we design, we spend just a little time checking our work to make sure that we’re making life easier and not unnecessarily difficult will provide lots of benefits for very little investment.

I guess that’s why subscribing to blogs like 456 Berea Street is a good thing, as is watching videos of people dealing with computer accessibility.

A big part of usability has to do with taking complex data, and presenting it in a visual form that makes sense of as much information as possible as simply as possible.  After all, spreadsheets with their many rows and columns of data are great, but they’re not the most intelligible.  Good information design is one of the problems our team’s constantly trying to tackle.  There’s a whole lot of complex data our clients are trying to pull, having to do with click-thru rates against different segments from major donors to activists to those who are mildly interested, parsed out by geographic location across different swathes of calendar dates.

All of this is just to say that we’re always on the lookout for interesting ways information is graphically visualized and presented.  When the thing being represented is interesting, all the better.  So recently I ran into this graphic of the mysterious world underneath the seas that powers and drives our internet.  Ever wonder how many cables run between Japan and the United States, or which cities are the hubs of our information network?

Smashing Magazine has a treasure trove of modern data visualization, and how can we talk about this topic without referencing the very famous (perhaps, most famous) Charles Joseph Minard’s graphic of Napolean’s March to Moscow?

Talk about an ideal web 2.0 mashup for our clients and the constituents they serve: OpenCongress.  From their About page:

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

The site aggregates bill information, senators and representatives, vote tracking history, and what’s happening in the news and blogosphere.  In essence, it aggregates all the info made available from government sources and pairs that up wiht relevant news and blogs.  They aggregate using GovTrack.us, Google News, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  Very nice site, rich in functionality, easy UI and organization to get the information that interests you and all related information easily.  Plus, you can customize and save off your searches, or pull an RSS feed based on your own defined criteria.

As a civic-minded constituent and voter, OpenCongress is an invaluable resource.  Looking to the needs of the non-profit organizations we serve: imagine crafting an RSS feed for a particular issue or legislator, and importing that into a webpage.  All an org needs to do is write their own position on the issue, link this to a campaign (e.g. take action, write a letter, or donate now), and then populate the rest of the page via RSS import with good content that’s already been aggregated from OpenCongress.  Why do extra work when other great applications do it for you?

Viral videos like this one–

Inspire emotion.  But it’s just an idea, word art, and accompanying music.  The website is well-designed too, but not being able to copy/paste any of the snappy, smart text throughout the site is a big usability no-no.

But speaking to the video, the takeaway lesson is that simple can be extremely powerful, but only if its execution is top-notch.

Wells Fargo hired Pentagram in 2005 to start a project redesigning their ATMs, both the hardware and software UI.  ATMs, we all know, are a bane of interaction design.  They’re prevalent, necessary, and well-frequented for most of us.  Unfortunately, they’re also terribly confusing and cumbersome.  Among their many problems include:

• the path to completing tasks often crisscrosses different buttons at different cardinal points of the screen.
• “Yes” and “No” actions are frequently switched depending on which task you’re trying to complete
• the only feature most people care about is “Withdraw Cash”.  And no one really knows what else you can do besides “Make a Deposit”.

Former Pentagram designer Holger Struppek writes about the Wells Fargo ATM project.  Research:

From looking at usage statistics, the design team learned that the single-most used feature of an ATM is the cash withdrawal. Even though many more services are available, most people simply want to be able to quickly and safely punch in their security code, get the cash, and leave. The objective for the new UI was to continue to offer quick and easy cash withdrawals, while making the other services more visible and accessible.

Being clear about the objective, the task and the goal that needs to be accomplished and completed, is one of those “must-haves” for designers.  For Pentagram, not only did they do away with the antiquated hardware buttons on the side of the screen (hooray!), they thought about how to meld shortcuts and personalization together:

Instead of one Quick Cash button, we introduced a whole column of shortcut buttons that behave somewhat like the History menu in a web browser. It is still possible to customize them through Set My ATM Preferences, but hardly necessary since they always reflect the most recent transactions.

Cool idea.  I think it actually works well.  My one beef with it (besides the color palette, but what can you do? Those are the corporate colors…) is the use of the icons on the top right of each button.  Why does “Get Cash” have a negative “No Smoking” “don’t-do-this” icon?  Shouldn’t it have been a cash with a 3D down arrow, signifying withdrawal?

Good read nonetheless, and a reminder that interaction design is the same whether online or offline because the subject is always the same: the human person.

When we first put the idea and mockups in front of Ben Brumfield, the lead developer for the project, his enthusiasm erased any doubt we might have had about how far we could actually go. For designers, after all, that road between concept and implementation is seldom trod faithfully. I mean, the concept is like the charted course at the beginning of the voyage, and one can only hope s/he doesn’t end up like Columbus in a totally different place, on an unpredicted, unplanned route.

We’re very thankful to say the designer/developer rift prevalent in much of our industry didn’t exist at all in this project. And what was produced is, I think, a rather pleasant and rich user experience. From static experience to a fluid, inline, fully CRUD (create, read, update, delete) UI, we were pleased at the result:

This cross-posted from the original post on our Convio company blog.

I was talking to my brother over dinner about some of the innovative designs in interactions. I was talking to him (a recent Mac switcher, well sorta, he still runs Windows on it) about first impressions, such as the Apple Click Wheel, or closing the lid of a MacBook for the first time. The feel of it is priceless. Well, I thought about the MagSafe power connector found on the Apple’s recent rev of laptops, and one thing that occurred to me was a key aspect of design interaction. It’s not just 1st impressions but recurring impressions. And the thing is, the MagSafe connector exhibits both characteristics! Not too shabby. My bro told me every time he accidentaly trips on his cord and sees it wistfully detach from his computer, he says, “Wow! Boy, you know, what would’ve happened if I didn’t have this magnet connector. Ingenius! Good thing I have a Mac!”

I realize, the greater challenge in design is not just to get the first impression right (which is incredibly challenging to begin with), but to actually get recurring impressions to validate or re-promote the existence of the feature/product to begin with. Too bad few things designed these days focus on the first bling, and not the bling, bling, bling, bling.