Thoughts on Inspiration from the Edge Interfaces

Below is a presentation by Stephen Anderson at the IA Summit 2008:

The presentation really hit home for me and coincidently, a lot of what he said has been on my mind for a while. Although I wasn’t at the presentation, I got a good sense of where he’s trying to get at. I herein wants to emphasize two points in his presentation.

Point 1: We always look at competitors’ sites for answers when design as a default step – agreed.
This has really evolved into a standard practice, aka research phase. Don’t get me wrong here, I totally agreed that this phase is needed when getting into a space where we are not be familiar with. We need to understand what others in the same space as us are doing before we get our hands dirty. We need to look for inspirations and see if someone has tackle our problems differently, in a good way. In fact, a good designer should be looking at other sites for inspirations. On the other hand, this default step becomes shameful when we look at what others are doing and apply the exact same solution without giving a second thought to the problem (aka plagiarism). We certainly don’t want to go too far out of the box and deliver something that a user doesn’t understand. But it is important to take in what we have seen from the other sites and determine what really makes sense. Are the others solving the problem correctly or is it simply a cut-and-dried solution? Best practice really is just common practice.

Frankly, sometimes common practice do break. Let’s talk about a site with huge amounts of data, and need a way to organize it. The default way will be to have a first order organization dictated by business and IAs. IAs might also suggest letting people tag things and use a tag cloud as an alternate way to navigate. But rarely does those two intercept. Why? Because we might get garbage fields, or fields that will get us into trouble unless we let people tag by controlled vocabularies, which might be less fun? Is this common practice really the best way?

I usually have a lot of problems which how multifaceted navigation gets designed. Common practice uses clear and reset after a user has selected something. I haven’t seen any test data on it yet, but I really can’t get myself to watch my mom try it.

One website which gets this is Buzzillion.com (which was also mentioned in the presentation). As shown below, when I was looking for a camera, I can identify myself as someone who is getting started.

Their multifaceted navigation is also notable. Instead of relying on technical features of the camera(common practice), it uses intuitive terms, as well as the ability to eliminate features we do not like.

Looking further into it, those pros and cons are actually tags. Click into a product to get directed to a product detail page. When you click on Write a Review, you will be able to tag an item as shown below:

Some are controlled vocabularies, but you can also enter in your own tag. I don’t know how they solve issues of garbage fields, but I think this is the most intuitive use of tags thus far. Tags and categories intercept in a great way to help any users find things efficiently, and will most likely satisfy their needs.

Point 2 – Anything is possible – Agreed
And why are we limiting ourselves to common practice? The technology has came really far, and we no longer need to confined ourselves to work with the computer. We no longer needs to make users learn codes or rules in order to use our products. The final goal is to design something that is intuitive. Intuitive as a term is really overused, but for something to be intuitive in my dictionary needs to satisfy the following:
1) Easy to use and understand to a human being and not in the tech world where we used to live in
2) Allow us to think like or be humans while using it

What does #2 means you ask? My boyfriend’s parents came to visit us last Fall. We shown them Wii Sports, namely Wii Tennis and Bowling. They picked it up in no time, and beat my ass at it! We got into a group competition in less than 10 minutes of playing.

On the web, I guess we are stuck with mouse and keyboard. But is that so? I know a lot of websites are experimenting with webcams, using eye tracking as an alternate navigation. Stephen Anderson asks us to look at our cars, gaming consoles, or anything in our environment that we took granted for.

There are further great points from his presentation and is worth reading. Notes from other bloggers on the presentation:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?671
http://www.poetpainter.com/thoughts/article/ia-summit-2008-inspiration-from-the-edge-presentation

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