If book designs disrespected attention as much as websites do, they’d probably look like this.
is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
• Ask me anything
Christopher Butler
Christopher Butler
Designing for Attention
I’m not a fly. I’m just putting that out there. Not that there’d be anything wrong with it if I was. I mean, I’d be able to see across an almost complete 360 degrees! Sure, I’d have massive, grotesque, compound mirror-ball eyes, and sure, I’d probably get picked up by G-men and spend the rest of my days in a government lab, but I’d be able to focus on more than one thing at a time! Actually, I’d be the ideal web user. I could read an article while simultaneously reading all the other information on the page. I could divide my attention ten ways if I wanted. That’d be nice. But I’m not a fly, website designers, I’m a human! I only have two eyes, ok? I can only focus on one thing at a time. And you know what, I’m ok with that. I really am. I’m glad I can walk down the street without having to worry about scaring innocent children. So I just want to clear that up. I’m not a fly. I’m not even a “fly-person.” I’mjust a person. So, here’s my question: Why are most web pages designed for fly-people?
Designers, seriously, let’s make today the last day we create pages for fly-people. Instead of continuing to create confused, unclear and unfocused pages—pages that include more information than is necessary and in a way that undercuts their core purpose—let’s adopt a new standard, following a very simple rubric: enabling attention. Most of the ways in which we go about getting attention ensure that we will fail at keeping it. See, we’ve been adept atstealing the attention of viewers (ultimately from ourselves, mind you)—that eye-catching graphic, the moving advertisement, the blinking text, the many, many links to click—but we’re now learning that stolen attention never stays long. Lasting attention must be earned, and in order to earn attention, we must first respect it.
In designing for attention, there are two particular issues that we need to be concerned with: the “readability” of our pages, and the distance we expect web users to cross to reach information. Let’s get into it…
5 Things I’m Thinking Right Now
(Saw it first here. Then here and among other hip UK designers that I don’t know personally but wish I did.)
Giving myself five minutes for this:
1. I’m learning that there is a limit to the amount of information I can take in and synthesize properly. Rather than just cutting some out, I want to give serious thought to what I take in. Particularly in regard to reading web content, the echo chamber is a significant factor. I want to impose a rule, something like “don’t read pseudo-writers.” Now about that definition of “pseudo”… oh, and “writers.”
2. Trust and knowledge. In many ways, human knowledge is a house of cards. Trying to dismantle it carefully, getting to the root, fundamental, non-negotiable concepts without which everything else you know cannot be is an exercise not to be undertaken at bedtime. During walks to work is probably better…
3. Workspace. Finding a balance between efficiency/productivity/inspiration.
4. Design simplicity for tomorrow… My last two articles have dealt with this - what the underlying purposes should be for web design and marketing and how we should strive for increased simplicity. My next one will be out this week and hone in on the idea of respecting attention.
5. Time travel. Because I often am, and because of this.
What are you thinking about right now?
Musing on the App Marketplace, Value, Ethics, etc.
Right. I’ve given myself 15 minutes to get this out. No editing, just a brain-dump of a thought I had at lunch today.
My feeling at the moment is that the app marketplace is, for the most part, comprised of applications that are not valuable. They’re not worth paying cash for, nor are they worth the time spent developing them at all. Their worth should be a measure of how helpful they are, but if you have to try hard to integrate them into your life or workflow, then they are not helpful. A good tool is indespensable and proves itself by use.
So what does that mean for iPhone/iPad apps? I guess it means that the app marketplace is an essentially (brute) capitalist market. The validation is purely a matter of whether someone will buy the app, not whether the app is useful, or valuable by any objective measure. Are we alright with that? For developers and designers of these terrible apps, there must come a point - pre-launch, of course - at which they realize they are creating useless junk. Yet they proceed anyway, not out of any malice, I imagine, but just out of a desire to make something and hopefully profit from it. But how unsatisfying. For consumers, I get the sense that people consider apps to be throwaway purchases. They’re mostly so inexpensive that if the app doesn’t become indespensable to them, the loss isn’t a concern. But what about in the aggregate? I’d love to know how much the average apps marketplace customer has spent since it’s launch - both in terms of cash and in terms of the number of apps downloaded.
My worry is that this structure degrades critical thought, creativity, care for objective value, and a whole host of other things pertinent to regard for humankind. It certainly can’t be sustainable.
What do you think?
Simplicity
This is a page from “Why Design Now? The National Design Triennial,” a book given to me by a friend on my birthday.
The second paragraph begins with:
How does simplicity happen?
Interesting question. Does simplicity “happen” or is it just something that is?
Simple Design is Good Design
The sites through which we mostly experience the web are more complex than they need to be. In addition to the basic necessities—a site logo, main navigation, page title, content area, and one or two calls to action—the web pages we spend most of our time reading are overloaded with advertisements, social media widgets, and lures to ostensibly “related” content. We’ve gotten so used to this that we barely take notice when the page’s main content amounts to far less than the extras. A fresh look (try squinting) at the page reveals no sense of order or priority to the information it contains. That’s bad design. Ironically, all the extras often vouch for the professionalism of a website. After all, anyone can write an article, but not everyone has advertising relationships or can afford to pay for custom programming of all those fancy widgets. When we see more than just words on a page, we think, “this comes from something bigger than me, something I can trust.” But bad design flourishes on the web when everyone thinks like that, such that if you were to actually do it better, users would be confused or disregard your page because it didn’t look like what they were used to. How many designers can attest to this when they hear follow-the-leader requests like, “it’s got to look like Facebook,” or “that’s not how Amazon does it?” The error in the follow-the-leader mentality is that the leaders can afford to be wrong about design, but the followers can’t. Mass media sites receive such huge amounts of traffic that overloading their pages with opportunites to click makes statistical sense. When hundreds of thousands of users access a site on a daily basis, it’s guaranteed that just about every link on every page will be clicked at least once. At this level, it doesn’t matter if any of that click activity is satisfying to the individual user. This is shock and awe, not special ops. But a site that receives a few hundred visits or less a day—the majority of the web—has no such luxury. One confusing interaction could cost a potential client or customer. Why do we continue to trust the methods of the mass-media sites? We should know better than that. It’s because when it comes to solidly debunking their strategy and providing a better one for our clients, we fall short of a good argument. We—designers, developers, and agencies alike—don’t do a good enough job reassuring our clients that following the leader is not only unecessary, but bad for their business. So, for the remainder of this article, I want to dig a bit deeper into two examples of influential but poorly designed sites we’re likely to take cues from and then provide a, well, simple plan for staying simple.
The Talk Bubble is About to Pop
Yesterday, Mark (who is building sandcastles on the beach with his family and finally reading that Buckminster Fuller biography I loaned him in 2006) and I were chatting over the phone and got to talking about the value of implementation to what we do and how we are positioned in the market. There is a tension between implementation and strategy when it comes to positioning: with the implementation being almost to the point of commoditization, differentiating your service in terms of a strong point of view and focus on richly researched planning is essential. But without following through with implementing that planning, I’m not sure how to maintain whatever perception of value you may have built. Reflecting upon how the market has been squeezed so significantly over the past couple of years, forcing people to question what they are truly getting, I remarked, “Yeah, the talk bubble is about to pop.” I do think this is a pretty big deal. So this will be one of two posts on the subject—one written by me, the other by Mark. We’re sensing some significant movement in the web marketing space, an frustrated impatience with the hype and the talk and a growing demand for sensible action. Earlier this month, Gadi Amit wrote an impassioned article for Fast Company along these lines. I’d recommend reading the entire thing (keep reading for some insightful points around the double standard we “high-mindedly” hold between gadgets and food), but here’s a piece that cuts straight to the point: Another example comes from designer Frank Chimero, someone who has impressed me with not only his talent but also his thoughtfulness. He writes: Needless to say, I agree with both of them that we’ve hastily given away the method and practice by which we should be refining our thinking, and that there’s something in our short attention spans that causes us to want to focus our present thinking on the “future” but not remember or care about those thoughts when the future actually comes around.“We grew accustomed to deferring the hard work of delivering real, tangible products to someone else, usually across the ocean. We grew complacent, convincing ourselves that white-collar derivatives of such actionable, tangible creations is just as good and even better—we Strategize, Manage, Research, Innovate and Market! Yet when it comes to delivering the finished products, we opt out, assuming that none of “that stuff’ has any value or merit.”
“Lots of writing being done with predictions. Very little being done to test those predictions. My frustration with punditry & futurism (my own included) is that the hypotheses very rarely get tested because the comments are from a spectator point of view. I realize there is an insatiable hunger for predictions, but we need more players. We’ve the tools to try things out, but we’re lacking things to point to as specimens. The pencil can’t hover above the page forever.”
Too bad this poster wasn’t being serious.
Simple poster design by Olly Moss for the videogame podcast, A Life Well Wasted.
“
Sometimes, even I’m unconvinced of the utility of what I’m doing. And, I’d say that the times that we have to launch our $10,000 websites while sitting in the shadow of a $15,000 ice sculpture are the frustrating moments when we think we’ve been found out for the farces that we really are. It starts with anger. Then, a scary thought creeps in: “What if they’re right?”
What is all this stuff for any way? Is it even worth it? Maybe I should do something with my life and teach kids how to add and read or about evolutionary biology, and let someone else worry about how that button looks on that website. But, I don’t think I could make it in a room full of kids. It’s a tough crowd. But, buttons aren’t very good company either.
”— Frank Chimero (I had a hard time figuring out which portion of his honest admission of professional questioning and weariness I should quote. I think I know exactly how he feels, and have felt it multiple times already in my career… In any case, read the whole thing.)
I really liked it, too. I love the idea of “pairings.”
The cover for the newest New Yorker is really, really, really fantastic.
Also, New Yorker on Tumblr! Hoorah!
Sometimes less is more. Sometimes, more is more (see this huge collection of infographics).
Arup Associates have just won the Beyond the Hive Competition, sponsored by the City of London, to design a Bug Hotel for its parks. This one encourages the presence of stag beetles, solitary bees, butterflies, moths, spiders, lacewings and ladybirds by combining all these species’ required environments into one.
What I did yesterday…
…made some 3x5 postcards with the photos I took in Europe and sent them in the mail.
