Designing applications for the Facebook and MySpace APIs have been all the rage (and the newest way to spam). Most of them aren’t very good because the designers don’t understand the nature of designing a limited user interface application, and frankly, the execution of most of the ideas has been poor or non-existent.

I’ve worked directly with the MySpace API team and am currently designing the user experience of several MySpace Applications (probably more of them on the current list than anyone else).

Here are some guidelines for designing MySpace applications.

Read On…

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I was at Mix 08 recently, and got to see the test drive of Internet Explorer 8 while talking to one of Microsoft’s Program Managers. The first question I asked was, “so what did you guys break this time?” and the second question was, “what’s that nifty Emulate IE 7 button?”

(To this day, 15 years or so into the web, I still can’t believe we’re having browser wars.)

While they are still perfecting it and actually striving for a standard compliant browser, some of the notes from the conversations I had were:

• It should be a lot faster (I hope so — I just downloaded the Firefox 3 beta, and it’s smokin’ fast).
• The team says they will try to be as backwards compatible as possible.
• How IE8 will handle Element ID’s will be much different than previous browsers, and could break a lot of sites.
• A lot more built in tools like validating CSS and HTML will be right in the browser (and no more going back to Firefox to check).
• You as the user can choose how compliant you want to view websites, because there will be several modes (including a “quirks” mode) to choose from.

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I work with a lot of rich media developers at my current position, and we’ve been trying to make the journey to SilverLight, a new technology by Microsoft (and a competitor of Flash). It does some really cool things (the whole non-compiled thing will be a plus once they work out some of the details.

I’m not saying it’s a me-too technology — there are some very obvious advantages to it, beginning with standardizing on a programming language people actually use instead of something specialized like ActionScript, but we’ve had the hardest time adjusting to the workflow, and a lot of designers are afraid of this much like they are afraid of Flash CS3 Professional because it is such an adjustment. It was hard enough just moving over to the whole motion graphics world, and now many designers and developers are expected to relearn the application to a certain extent.

To the person who applies for this job, please remember how your job is better adoption in following ways:

• It’s not enough just to have timelines — the application really should be easy to use for designers because they are not programmers
• Make some of the interactions easier to explain like, “how do you make a button so it has the multiple states”, maybe even adding wizards like, “create a new button”
• Produce a product that can actually align text better (text alignment should be one of those 1.0 items, not on the 3.0 product list)
• Cater to the designers that ditched Flash when it moved to Actionscript 2 to Actionscript 3
• Most of all, it’s about user adoption and talking to your audience — if you don’t do that, no one will use it

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I love newspaper design — before the World Wide Web, one of the jobs I had was as a editor of a community newspaper in Garden Grove, California, and designing pages around a regimented grid was not only challenging, but fun, because it was designing within in that phone booth and coming up with something cool was rewarding.

Most good design and screen-based user interfaces follow some kind of grid — whether it be the orderly layout of items in a form, or a multi-column design of a blog. Grids bring order, and the grids don’t necessarily have to be symmetrical to be good design (the New York Times website is a great example).

For newspaper design, the closest guide to designing content sites, asymmetrical grids and number of columns were not only accepted, but encouraged, and most major newspapers are 5 or 7 columns wide. Peruse News Designer to see examples in the front pages of world newspapers.

Resources:

• Smashing Magazine has a really good article on creative usage of grids
• An article at A List Apart about thinking outside the grid
• Design By Grid, a resource with a lot of links

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1. Don't make users think
2. Don’t squander users’ patience
3. Manage to focus the users’ attention
4. Strive for feature exposure
5. Make use of effective writing
6. Strive for simplicity
7. Don’t be afraid of white space
8. Communicate effectively with a “visible language”
9. Conventions are our friends
10. Test early, test often

Click here to read the complete list.

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Proof positive if you build a better, more engaging product, it will lead to more sales — Apple has passed Wal-Mart as the leading U.S. retailer for music (and the only leader retailer in just about any category that’s online only).

More amazing is that Apple holds 19 percent of the space, and the only other on-line retailer is Rhapsody, at one percent. I repeat, one percent.

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I don’t like very many usability or software blogs (mainly because most of the writers aren’t, and when they do explain things, it never seems to be in English), but I really like Joel on Software. He breaks software development and usability issues into nice, easy tidbits anyone can understand.

Many of the topics he covers I have no real interest in (SQL Server Mirroring? What the hell?), but the topics he does cover, like how improving software doesn’t mean a complete rewrite of such software, and usability for developers that don’t really care, are well written, thought out, and easy to read.

Some other software gurus (hey Dave Winer, you listening?) should take notice.

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Even marketers get it: Dosh Dosh has a really good article on 50 Web Usability Tips that Help You Attract and Retain Visitors to Your Website that cover a lot of items even most Information Architects and User Interface Designers forget when designing a website i.e. who’s going to write the help text. It’s a good read.

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