1. Is Spec Work Ever Okay?

Threadless is a popular t-shirt company who crowdsources its designs from user submissions. Chosen designs are awarded $2,500 with bonuses for reprints and a shot at a larger prize in a yearly "best-of" competition. But of course, the company might make a hundred times that in sales, which has led some to accuse it of basing its business on spec work.

Jake Nickell, CEO of Threadless, doesn't argue that he uses spec work, but he disagrees that what his company does is a bad thing. His argument is that Threadless submissions 1. Allow designers to keep their copyrights 2. Are an open process with no specifications (no brief) 3. Pay quite a bit. Most importantly, he says, people who submit to Threadless do it for enjoyment and not for the money.

I'm torn. On one hand, it doesn't answer the critics of spec work which argue for professional engagement-- that design is serious business which is not something to be farmed out on the cheap to amateurs. On the other, people who aren't designers like to make things and Threadless actually seems to give them a fair shake. I'm not sure what the breakdown is ethically. But if you're going to solicit spec work, I suppose there's a sea of people out there doing worse.

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How do we read online? It’s a good question for designers to ask when blogging or creating content for a website. Since a monitor is obviously not like the printed page, we need to be careful not to make assumptions based on former reading (and writing) habits and figure out how best to take advantage of the medium.

Over the summer, Michael Agger wrote a tidy little piece about the topic, paraphrasing the work of usability specialist Jakob Nielsen, who used eye-tracking studies and other experiments to determine how we read online.

Nielsen says that users are “selfish, lazy, and ruthless.” When they arrive at a page, they are not prepared to read it. They scan it for information and if they don’t see what they need, they leave.

To summarize his suggestions, writing online should address:

Scannability

Make it easy for users to get into the piece and get out if they need to.

• One idea per paragraph (users skip large blocks of text)
• Highlighted keywords (prevents skimming)
• Meaningful sub-headings
• Bulleted lists
• The inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
• Use half the word count of conventional writing

To this, I would add: Graphics are another good way to help users scan. Consider having at least one image to anchor every piece. I don’t have any data to back this up, but pages without pictures are extremely boring.

This image makes it easier to see what Nielsen is talking about.
Ironically, he is famous for having very few graphics on his site.

Credibility

Writing that contains hyperlinks carries greater authority. Users consider this when judging whether to stick with a site or move on to another.

Don’t use links in lieu of explanations. Do use them to verify claims.

Simplicity

“Promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts.”

More simply: Readers prefer facts, not filtering through market-speak.

Conclusion

These lessons may seem obvious, but I don’t think anyone begins writing this way naturally, so it’s a helpful list to have. Content is king, but we can all stand to make our writing a little more usable.

Putting an email address on a website is a lot trickier proposition than it used to be. These days, the web is populated with evil spambots, crawling the web and scraping email addresses off websites, which they can then use to solicit your interest in perverse sexual apparatus or imitation Rolex wristwatches.

But for those of us who are selling something, we have no choice but to provide a way for our readers to contact us. Now, in the past, many things have been done to accomplish this: overly elaborate or unnecessary contact forms, replacing part or all of an email address with an image, or munging an email address.

All three of these techniques are unsatisfactory. First, all of these techniques are often beatable by smart spambots. Second, and even more importantly, the bottom line from a usability perspective is quite simple: These strategies convolute things for users. The easiest interface element we can provide for our users is link that, when clicked, opens up a new email addressed to us in their email client.

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Here's the lead sentence from my post Monday:

As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

When I wrote that blog post, I revised that sentence several times. It occurred to me that there is an insidious problem with the ambiguity of link references, a problem at which I thought it might be instructive to take a look.

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Last month, the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL) at Wichita State University put out a new eye-tracking study, focused on differences in eye-movement patterns between single- and two-column web pages.

For some reason, I always read these, and inevitably end up frustrated. Not just because of the standard objections to eye-tracking as a useful methodology, but because out of the 20 of them I've read, it feels like numbers 2-20 haven't added anything substantive – or, more importantly, generalizable – to the information I got in the first one, which taught me about the "F"-shaped eye pattern (later popularized as the "golden triangle").

So this time, I was determined to review some of the secondary literature on these studies (in the form of scanning the first page of Google's search results [note to self: touché]), and see if I could generalize the lessons of eye-tracking studies for myself and people like me.

And when I say generalize, I don't mean come up with a Smashing magazine list of "The Top 276 Things Designers Can Learn from Eye-Tracking Studies" that basically recapitulates the bullet points of all the harvested literature verbatim. I'm talking about getting this down to a set of rules of thumb you can write on the back of a business card.

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I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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