Clean UI Design

Ryan has a real ability to simplify and re-structure a UI so that it communicates as clearly and effectively as possible. The basics of his approach are available in a paper on UI Design Patterns he wrote a few years ago. He argues that most of the important work in UI design actually consists of writing copy, rather than creating graphics or layouts. Cleanly written labels and headings are the key to improving ’scanability’ and therefore a clear UI. Sort of reminds me of Oliver Reichenstein’s observation that 95% of web design is typography. And seeing Ryan in action working on a UI was definitely useful for me, even though I already know much of the ‘theory’ and have done it many times myself. It gave me a bit of a fresh perspective.

Designing for Yourself

37 Signals seem to follow a sort ‘expert-led’ design philosophy. They don’t really do user research. And I suspect they can get away with this partly because they are designing for themselves and for people just like them – other web geeks. It’s a pretty liberating way to work and it’s clear that they’re good at what they do, but I wonder if they would be quite so successful if they were designing web apps a completely different demographic. Basecamp is great but I wonder sometimes if non-geeks really ‘get it’. For example, at work when we ask non-techy clients to use it, they often seem to prefer email and telephone calls.

I was also a little bit shocked by Ryan’s admission that he ‘doesn’t really think about accessibility’. Perhaps that also says something about the target audience for their apps. But it wasn’t an entirely helpful stance to take in a workshop teaching a general audience in the UK about web app design.

Workflow

Ryan told us quite a lot about how the team works at 37 Signals. One clear advantage of using an MVC framework like Rails is that, because of the strict separation of markup from program logic, the designer can continue to ‘own’ the front-end CSS and HTML right through the life-cycle of the product. This sounds really ideal and I’m sure it makes a huge difference to the final quality of the interface. It can be really frustrating as a designer to hand over a carefully constructed HTML template, only to see it gradually erroded and degraded as it is integrated into the back-end and new functionality added.

Another key aspect of the 37 Signals workflow is the practice of designing directly in HTML. I think this kind of an interesting idea and has some upsides. Clearly it can work well and it results in designs that work with, rather than fight against, the medium of implementation. But it occurs to me that all of 37 Signals’ applications are very much purely functional ‘tools’. For some web apps imagery and ‘visual design’ are more important and in those cases where you need ‘more graphic design’, working directly in HTML is going to be very inefficient.

Conclusion

Overall it was valuable to see Ryan in action and to get first-hand exposure to the way he thinks about and analyses UI problems. I’ve already found myself thinking in a slightly different way when designing a complex page. It has also led to some useful discussions about how to allow designers to keep ‘ownership’ of HTML markup right through the life-cycle of a web application. I think that is something 37 Signals have got exactly right. I think Ryan could make his workshops even better by doing a bit of extra research about the general environments people have to work in today, and considering some of the issues we face. For example, accessibility is quite an important issue and can’t just be brushed aside, and designing directly in HTML is not going to work for every kind of web application.

Apart from Andy Clarke, I found most of the other presentations quite disappointing. There was a lot of self-promotion, with speakers just telling us about their own company and showcasing their own work. There’s nothing wrong with this, if it is used specifically to illustrate a point, but I felt that in many cases the self-promotion was the key point, rather than saying anything interesting or educational about web design.

There was a useful talk from Derek Featherstone (Furtherahead) about accessibility in web applications, in which he went into some detail about the problems of using the keyboard to navigate through more complex pages. I learned probably more than I’ll ever need to know about Amazon web services from Jeff Barr. And Jeff Veen was entertaining and also provided some interesting insight into how he’s refining the usability of Google Analytics using user task analysis.

After the conference we had time to lounge about on Brighton beach.

The conference was held just up the road from me at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster. One of the first things that struck me as we shuffled in on Thursday morning was just how many people were there. I’d kind of expected 200 or 300, but there must have been around 800 people. I actually think this made getting to know people harder because once you’d broken the ice with someone, you were quite likely to never encounter them again. The many coffee breaks were billed as ‘valuable opportunities to network’ and I have to say I was surprised at the number of freelancers I met, presumably like myself looking to find potential contacts. I did meet some really nice people, and managed to strike up a few conversations about in-depth topics in web design.

I also got quite a lot out of the presentations. One highlight for me was a session called Good Design vs. Great Design with Jon Hicks , Cameron Moll and Veerle Pieters. It was interesting to hear these well-known designers talking about their own design processes. One question that came up was, ‘is it possible to produce Great Design on a budget?’ to which the answer from all three was ‘no!’. Great design takes time. It was also intersesting to learn that Hicks often does a first draft of his designs in black and white, only moving on to adding colour after working out the initial layout. Veerle Pieters showed us a design mockup after the first day of work, then showed us how she came back and reworked it after a night’s sleep.

Another session that I found surprisingly enjoyable was a talk by Chris Wilson, group program manager of the Internet Explorer Platform at Microsoft, who spoke to us about the upcoming release of IE7. You might expect that a Microsoft person standing up in front of a crowd of people into web standards might not get an entirely smooth ride. But things were friendly and I thought he handled the situation with a lot of good humour. It was quite something to hear him admit that he personally had been responsible for the * HTML bug in IE6 for Windows. I think he had to walk a fine line between retaining the open and friendly atmosphere of the conference and not transgressing any restrictions imposed on him by his company, but he did really well, and managed to get a warm round of applause at the end. To be fair, his job was made quite a lot easier by the fact that IE7 appears to have solved a large portion of the bugs that have plagued web designers for the past 5 years in IE6. No firm word on a release date for IE7 yet though, the best he would give us was ‘second half of 2006’.