Interview

⇒ PART 1, Scene 360: What are common accessibility or/and usability errors found on websites? Do you care about issues from W3C (w3.org)?

Eric Jordan: This is an interesting question for me, since many people in the Web industry would probably tell you that I am the last person you should pose this question to. I consider myself a “liberal” when it comes to accessibility and/or usability, as I typically opt for giving the designer and/or information architect the freedom to decide how much attention should be paid to usability, if any.

I can, however, tell you that in the course of running a professional Web Design Studio, I have come to learn that you cannot simply ignore these types of issues and run around designing websites like a cowboy, winging it as you go. It all depends on the type of project, the type of client, the target market, and the collective views of everyone involved in the project as to how closely you follow the standards of accessibility and usability.

Working with my team over the course of the past year, many issues have been brought to my attention that do indeed have an impact on the success of a project, whereas before I would have tended to dismiss them. I give a lot of credit to my team for this. Some issues are more important than others of course, depending on the particular situation, therefore it is tough to peg general rules that apply to every website, but there are some common standards that everyone should try to adhere to. Some of the standards we try to follow are as follows:

First, you should never assume that Flash should be crammed down the audience’s throat, unless you really understand the audience. It is a fact that not everyone loves Flash. Being a Flash advocate, it is an issue that I wrestle with time and time again, but is a fact nonetheless. What 2Advanced started doing about 3 years ago, is providing people with a “turn flash off” button. This allows for the user to load an alternate version of the site where any flash components have been replaced with html counterparts. We try to recommend this to as many clients as we can, although some are reluctant for various reasons such as budget constraints, time concerns, etc.. It takes extra resources and money to build the alternate metaphors. However, we have received very positive feedback regarding sites that we have deployed this feature on.

Another fundamental usability/accessibility nightmare is the use of frames. It took us a while to learn this lesson, but I can say that of all the websites we have developed in the past 3 years, I cannot recall one that made use of frames. Frames essentially breach the model that Web is built on: a system of pages with a unique URL. Frames go against this fundamental principle, making pages no longer an atomic unit of information. I know what you are thinking: “Well then doesn’t Flash break that same principle?” It did, until recently. Before, the information in Flash movies could only be accessed from the top layer of information and navigating down to it. One of our aims in 2006 at 2Advanced was to develop a system of deep-linking into flash movies that could be directly accessed from a unique web URL. We implemented this system in the latest version of our website, “Attractor”. We have been recommending it to our clients ever since (to those who have the budget for it of course).

Another error that many websites typically make when it comes to usability, is allowing the important content to get lost in the presentation. A large part of our ongoing adoption of (reasonable) standards is simply the separation of the content layer from the presentation layer. As a Flash-heavy studio, we search for every opportunity to improve the delivery of important information and not allow it to get lost in the wiz-bang of Flash. For this reason, we almost always push some sort of hybrid design, a marriage of Flash and HTML that best serves the user, by enhancing their experience from a design/aesthetic perspective and still allowing them easy and intuitive access to important information. This also improves SEO rankings, thus achieving the best of all worlds; a slick design, easy access to information, and great rankings with search engines.

Jakob Nielsen: The biggest accessibility problem is definitely low-literacy users, because they constitute 40% of the population. Most current websites are much too complicated for this big group of people who can’t understand the information that’s being presented. Sadly, nobody cares about low literacy. I have one consulting client that does, but otherwise there has been zero interest in our research on usability for low-literacy users.

The second biggest problem is older users, who are about 15% of the population. They have a lot of special issues related to the human aging process, including reduced eyesight, precision of movement, and memory. Again, almost nobody cares about this large (and rich, I might add) group of users. The usability guidelines to support older users is one of our least-selling reports. It’s fascinating to conduct user research with seniors, so I don’t regret doing these projects, but it’s sad that so few companies care about the findings. Many websites could increase their sales substantially if only they would start catering to older users.

The W3C issues are certainly important as well, but they are not the most important ones because they focus on the technology instead of human needs. Yes, the technology should work, and I am grateful that somebody takes care of that. We definitely need standards so that when a user goes to a website, the headline will display if using a visual browser or be read aloud if using an auditory browser. But what should that headline say? Can people comprehend it? Do they understand where they are and what the product does that you are trying to sell them? Those are usability questions that should be resolved though user research, not technology standards.

Lynda Weinman: The biggest culprits: text size that can’t be altered, lack of alt tags and text labels, using graphics for text instead of markup, exclusive use of multimédia, lack of contrast in color. Usability issues include unclear navigation, bad search or no search, and no contact information. I care about the issues personally—yes. I think everyone will be forced to care eventually. Right now Target is being sued because their site isn’t accessible. If that case wins, my suspicion is that major corporate websites and smaller sites alike will scramble to become compliant.

Matt Mullenweg: The biggest problems I have with most websites is bad typography, overly small type, and lack of clear navigation. I care deeply about the W3C, and I’m a member of the Web Standards Project. Sometimes the organization can be fairly opaque and academic, but I would never even consider a developer who isn’t familiar with the specs where they absolutely nail it, like CSS 2.1 and XHTML 1.0.

Nick Finck: On an accessibility level it’s often things like pages that are only accessible via JavaScript or information that is not captioned or otherwise accessible in a Flash file. Those are the more common ones but others such as tab order come up once you start looking at common accessibility issues in web applications. On a usability level there are hundreds. Everything from mystery meat navigation (thank you Vincent) to links that don’t look like links to any degree.

So when you say do I care about issues from the W3C…. when it could potentially cost a company like Target millions of dollars an impact the very core of how e-commerce sites are coded, you sure as heck bet I care. That aside, I care on a professional level because I care about the quality of code and markup I am delivering.. it’s what separates the hobbyists from the craftsmen.

Todd Purgason: Well being that most our work is advertising based and very visual/interactive we don’t really pay much attention to accessibility issues.

Sodaplay: To my continued embarrassment the old Sodaplay dates back to some of the least accessible graphic design dogmas of the web in 2000 with tiny un-scalable text and an irrational aversion to upper case letters. These days we’re much more mindful about creating designs that work on all levels and so accessibility is an integral aspect of our process. W3C is a useful tool but no more.

WeWorkForThem: There are many reasons I use the sites that I do, information being the number one reason. Many sites do not treat information as something that should be organized and thought through. When we used to design sites, we often spent a day or more just on narrowing down sections, placing info into other areas, working on how the user will access the info, etc etc. The “KISS (keep it simple stupid)” is great, but you really need someone who can do that job and sometimes simple isn’t “thoughtful”. Another job of design is to present the organized information in a clean and functional manner. This is also another problem. You have these web standards people who know very little about design, yet they are experts in the subject because it is a new format? I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but many people solved many of these issues in the mid 1900’s and the rules apply to the web. Read grid systems, think about it for two seconds and you can easily see how it transforms over to the web. I often thought about writing a grid systems for the web, but I couldn’t be so arrogant.

So I may be missing out on a lot of things but I have this frustration with usability experts. It’s sometimes painful to use the net because of poor decisions with big sites. Even the back end (how the code is written) is a huge problem also. A slow or broken website is pretty much an unusable site.

⇒ PART 2: To improve website creations there has been awareness about usability, which enforces standardization of techniques and tools. If you conform to specific rules, does it limit visual communication and creativity? An example is when we talk about sites requiring visual impact to promote branding of soft drinks or cars.

Eric Jordan: There are scenarios where we deal with clients who have tunnel-vision when it comes to usability and it almost always has an impact on the end experience. Sometimes people are so blinded by an article they just read in the latest web design magazine that they forget what the Web is about and it is nearly impossible to get them to budge on certain aspects, and it ends up compromising the original vision of the experience. Those are the unfortunate cases.

In other cases, it is a different story. We are very lucky at 2Advanced to have some very progressive clients, who are willing to try something new which pushes things and doesn’t necessarily comply with all the latest standards. We must remember that the web is a progressive medium, and it must continue to evolve. At one point in time, television was only black & white. It took people with a forward-looking vision to see that it could do more. Eventually, color came. Now we have HDTV, and surround sound. If someone doesn’t push the medium, it will never evolve. If we site back and accept the status quo, nothing will move forward. We MUST push the medium…people and technology will evolve. It will take time, but they will.

Jakob Nielsen: Soft drinks don’t have much of a role on the Web, just as they don’t play much of a role in opera. It’s a mistake to believe that every medium is equally good for everything. The Web is more suited for problems where you can *do* something, such as home banking or configuring a new car to your preferences.

So of your two examples, cars are the more appropriate one. We know that most new car buyers visit websites before doing to the dealer in order to better understand their options and choices. I don’t know what percentage of the purchase decision is determined by the website, but even if it’s a small percentage, there are still billions of dollars and euros at stake for car sites.

There’s definitely no reason to believe that usability limits the ability of the site to build a car brand. You just have to recognize what aspects of the brand the Web is most suited to promote. Users don’t want a site that’s just big photos or that focus on trying to push “wow, it’s exciting to see this car speed through the desert.” That aspect of branding is better left for TV commercials, because that’s what they are good at. (Interestingly, one of the things the Web is good at is to have an archive of TV commercials that users can play on demand, thus turning these well-produced mini-videos into actual content instead of being advertising.)

Usability is simply about making things easy, which means to conform to expectations, so that users know how to use the site. It doesn’t at all dictate what your content should communicate. One car site might emphasize the safety of the car, while another could emphasize its performance, while a third could highlight the ecological responsibility of driving a hybrid car.

But in all three cases, if you click the button to customize your own car, the controls had better be easy to understand. And, in fact, all three sites probably ought to offer a feature to customize the car, since that’s something users have grown to expect. Similarly, as the user proceeds with the customization, each site should provide a running tally of the retail price of the current configuration — again testing shows that users want to see the price change as they work, as opposed to getting the final price at the end.

So yes, usability sets some limits on how you should design the site, but those limits are really set by the users. If you do what users want, you will have more success, and all usability does is to tell you what users want. You can ignore this, but only at the cost of losing users and thus losing business.

Lynda Weinman: The term website is such a loose term — conforming or non-conforming to standards is important depending on what type of site you’re creating. An experimental web site design wouldn’t be experimental if it conformed. Story telling is different than information-based communication. The answer to this is totally dependent on what’s been communicated and the objectives of the site. In general, guidelines and standards are good things. It’s often easier to be creative with limitations than to have no limits and push up against nothing.

Matt Mullenweg: All of Western music is built off the same 12 notes. Constraints, when embraced, enhance creativity, not hinder it.

Nick Finck: I am not 100% sure I follow you question. I mean if you are implying that standard usability practices have influenced how we today design and build web pages, sure. Does that mean that every page needs to have the navigation on the left, the same three colors for hyperlinks, and the same types of tabs across the top, no. Is web professional who only knows Flash or malformed HTML forced to learn modernized web standards that are accessible, usable, interoperable, and extensible such as XHTML and CSS for layout, heck yes. I think that if you know the technology well enough you should be able to only limit yourself by simply the limits of your own creativity.

Todd Purgason: Yes it is limiting, it really depends what your doing, why your doing it and who your doing it for. It makes little since to worry about accessibility for a viral game or video right? It is a rare thing that a tv commercial has been designed to be accessible by some one with severe sight disabilities. However, if your creating content or information based sights it is important to support all groups. I’m a proponent of a site version completely optimized for accessibility and then a separate version that takes complete advantage of the medium to communicate with the non impaired.

Sodaplay: Design and implementation are not distinct stages at Soda, our processes are more integrated and iterative. Hence usability and accessibility concerns do not simply impact on visual communication and we don’t see the visual aspects as having a monopoly on creativity.

I’m uncertain what the relevance of promoting soft drinks or cars would be to the question, is the assumption that they should be all eye-candy and no functionality? Either way the brands in question may well wish to access the largest possible market share by enabling as many customers as possible to access them.

WeWorkForThem: I do not subscribe to the standardization theory but there are rules for sure that can help everyone out. If browsers should all read code the same, that would be a good start. I think conforming to “broad rules” are actually more freeing than a free-for-all. You know what you are dealing with. I think this is more of a problem with the way people see things today and that is a different discussion.

⇒ PART 3: Flash technology is popular. Adobe confirmed it with buying Macromedia. We see web studios, Group94 and HiReS!, dedicating a big percentage of projects in Flash. Are Flash sites just a trend and overall useless? Or do you consider there is room for Flash as there is with CSS, and yes, there are well-constructed sites with usability?

Eric Jordan: Flash sites are in no way a trend. Humans are sensory organisms. We need interaction, we need emotional response, we need things to move us. Flash is just the beginning of all this. Flash is the best way to provoke an emotional response, because it involves more of the human senses than just a static image or text can provide. I can promise you that you will have a stronger emotional reaction to a product advertisement with sound and motion than you will to a static one. At this point in time, there is definitely room for Flash AND CSS AND properly constructed websites that take usability into account.

As with all progression, it is going to take time for this technology to develop, and for people to feel comfortable with it. I think, as we move forward, people will grow and learn the technology faster and faster, and hopefully 300 years in the future we will have moved past assuming that our audience is not smart enough to use a certain function, or find a certain button, or understand how an interface works. This is when the gloves truly come off, and I see humans doing some amazing things with technology. But for the meantime I think we must settle with our own ineptitude.

Jakob Nielsen: I am sad to say that I continue to see relatively little good use of Flash. This is particularly annoying to me because I did a project to study people using Flash to derive the guidelines for good Flash usability. So I know that it’s possible to build good user interfaces in Flash. There is definitely room for Flash for applications that are highly interactive or where animation inherently communicates something better. The problem is just that very few sites use Flash for these purposes. Most Flash is still just flashy stuff that annoys users instead of helping them.

Lynda Weinman: No Flash sites are not just a trend, and Adobe is putting a huge effort into insuring a solid future. A lot of the limitations of Flash are being resolved, and the medium is becoming just as flexible, usable and accessible as HTML or CSS. Flash can be misused and abused in the hands of the unskilled, but with skills Flash can provide a much more rich and usable experience. Not all sites are appropriate for Flash, but many sites wouldn’t work without it. It’s another tool – one to pull out when you wish to develop a rich experience.

Matt Mullenweg: I think Flash works best when it is used only when absolutely needed for a particularly rich interaction, rather than just for the sake of being flashy. Some good examples that come to mind are Sphere, Measure Map, and YouTube for tasteful and useful Flash.

Nick Finck: First, I don’t think Adobe bought Macromedia for Flash alone, that’s a misunderstanding of the complexity of that purchase. I wouldn’t say any work is useless. I think there is room for any technology so long as the user needs, business needs, and technical needs are clearly understood. Flash tends to lean towards the business needs with little regard for the technology (ever tried to load a Flash site on a Nokia 6683?) or the user (ever try to navigate a flash application via a screen reader blindfolded?) at times.

Todd Purgason: This is an absurd question really we are doing major interactive applications in Flash and video based solutions that are only possible with Flash. CSS is great for some things and frankly sucks for other things. The same can be said for Flash but to call it a trend is really funny as Flash has been around longer than CSS. Trust me I started hand coding in 1995 and worked with the design and coding side as HTML developed as well as Flash.

Sodaplay: Flash can be a great tool where it is compatible with the requirements of a brief; we’ve used it before and are sure to use it again.

WeWorkForThem: You have to look at the audience. HiReS does sites that are for entertainment, so if they function in that area (and they do!), they have served their purpose. Flash can work in areas such as that. Using Flash for a content driven site would give me a headache trying to solve how it would work, but it is possible. I am sure if you had the right people on the job they could do a wonderful execution. It’s all how you use the tool and Flash seems to be more than a tool sometimes. I personally do not like Flash sites most of the time if I am trying to use it for informational purposes. It normally is slower and hard to grab info from.

⇒ PART 4: Name a site that you consider an exceptional example. Explain briefly why.

Eric Jordan: I consider FWA a great example of usability mixed with Flash. They have taken the time to develop a complex deep-linking system within Flash just as we have, and make important content directly accessible via unique URL’s. This is a prime example of Flash developers looking to the future and determining how they can make their websites more usable and accessible.

Jakob Nielsen: Yahoo! has always been my favourite site. The pages are usually very simple and scaled-back, while providing the information and services that people need. Most impressively, Yahoo has achieved a sense of consistency and integration across a huge number of specialized services, so that you always feel that you are on Yahoo! and know what to do, even as you move between subsites. Contrast this to the “microsites” that many companies build, where everything changes every time you click.

Lynda Weinman: Exceptional example of what? Of Flash—my current favorite is leoburnett.ca. Visually compelling, surprising, original, intuitive, inviting, fun to explore, and informative. It’s a masterful use of everything that’s good about Flash.

Matt Mullenweg: I’ve been really impressed with Bloglines lately. They have been refining their interface without succumbing to needless complexity or feature bloat. That is an incredibly hard thing to do, and I respect them for it.

Nick Finck: OK, I would normally pick out a well known corporate web site like Flickr that is standards compliant, beautiful, simple, and easy to use… but I have one site that comes to mind for all of those things that isn’t a business site. It’s Jeffcroft.com …what can I say, I am a sucker for simplicity… though there is actually a lot of information on the page there. I think the point to drive home with this example is look at the designer of the site.. he’s a graphic designer with a knack for web standards, thats what really counts… that is what I would call a web designer by definition.

Todd Purgason: Google is an exception example of functionality.
Flickr is an exception example of community and exploration.
MySpace is an exceptional example of social interaction.
Youtube is an exceptional example of video content.
Digg is an exceptional idea.
FWA is exceptional at highlighting interesting Flash work.

Point is that there are a world of exceptional examples depends on what your looking for. I don’t think I could or would pick an exceptional example of design or interactive, I would say go to FWA they have lots of exceptional examples of this kind of stuff.

Sodaplay: Youtube.com has some of the most widely watched Flash on the planet; I can’t deny success like that.

WeWorkForThem: I have been thinking about this and I am trying to think of sites that I use a lot. I think Flickr is a great site because of its usability, backend and its functions. I think they have done a great job of taking a site that people use and making it functional and fun to use.

⇒ PART 5: Other than all the technical details, what are your main concerns when building a project for the Internet?

Eric Jordan: Technical details aside, we build all our websites with emotional response in mind. We attempt to identify who the target market is, what makes them tick, and how we can best appeal to them…bringing our own emotional response to the product or company to bear on it. Whenever we develop a site for a client, we have to BECOME their audience. We must ask ourselves questions, such as “What would make me want to buy this product?” It is only through this type of projection that we come up with any sort of meaningful approach to the design / implementation. It allows us to decide how much of a presentation layer is needed versus straightforward information. Some audiences know when they are being marketed to, especially nowadays. You want to be able to cut through the market speak and touch the audience on a personal level.

Jakob Nielsen: The biggest question is always, “what do users want?” If you know that, then you can focus on the second question, which is making it easy and selling it to them. But if you offer something that people don’t want, you can make it wonderful and it still won’t sell as much as something that they want.

Lynda Weinman: I don’t build many projects. For the lynda.com web site we care about performance, ease of use, searchability, accessibility, approachability. We have a lot of challenges because we push so many terabytes of movie data to so many subscribers. We’ve built a flexible infrastructure that supports multiple web and database servers and load balancing so all customers have the fastest possible connection to our content.

Matt Mullenweg: The first question I ask before even considering the tech: Is this something people want? The most brilliantly executed idea in the world is useless if it doesn’t fill a real need in peoples’ lives. If it’s not something you would use yourself everyday, then it isn’t likely you’ll find any other folks who will.

Nick Finck: The goals need to be clear for the user, the business and the technology. No one goal should trump the others, its a matter of finding the balance or sweet spot between all three. This is the cornerstone for a successful web site.

Todd Purgason: Well I’m more concerned with the concept, content and experience than the technical detail. It is more about doing relevant things for specific audiences to us. The technical details is the sweat work the concept, content and approach is the brain work. Both are important but we have all see sights with amazing technical detail and no real purpose or really lame content, it is a bit like watching one of the last 3 star wars movies that came out, all detail no substance.

Sodaplay: That it works. For sodaplay.com to work it must support a burgeoning ecology of creative play and learning. For irrepressible.info to work it must attract more than 40,000 signatures to an Amnesty International campaign in time to be delivered to the UN this November. To work means different things for different projects, the medium must always be a means to that end.

WeWorkForThem: We stopped designing websites a longggg time ago because we wanted to do sites properly and people do not want to pay for a site that they ‘need.’ So we gave up. It takes a lot of technical skill and a lot of time to design a site. The last site we designed was YouWorkForThem and I think it will stay that way for a long long time.

⇒ PART 6: There is a lot of talk about “Function vs. Form”, which most of the time is actually related to “Visual Design vs. Backend Programming”. This topic has been known to cause frustration and controversy among designers and developers. What is good, what is not?—conflicting opinions that not always contribute to improving the Web. What can we do to unite these professions of different personalities, yet working in the same industry, if not together?

Eric Jordan: At 2advanced we pride ourselves on being able to marry visual design with the backend. We consider it to be our main strength. How do we do it? It is very simple; everyone communicates, everyone shares, and everyone learns from one another. We don’t simply design something up and then hand it off to the development team and say “Here, make this work. Thanks!”

You have to have a lot of back and forth and sharing of knowledge between design and development in order to make this work. It is as rudimentary as sitting down with the programmer and saying “Hey I would like to retain the integrity of this design element, how can we program this so that it isn’t messed up in the end?” Or Vice versa, a programmer will sit down with a designer and say “I really want this functionality to shine through, is there a way you can adjust your design to fit the functionality I am trying to achieve.” It all comes down to communication. If the development team cannot talk to the design team and vice versa, then there is a fundamental communication issue that exists that must be solved before any kind of progress can be made in this area.

Jakob Nielsen: My recommendation is to let the users drive the project. Not by having them design the site, because users are not designers, but by making the design decisions based on what users need, as revealed through user research. Instead of arguing over what to do, and making the decision based on who’s the best debater or the best at company politics, make your decisions based on what works best for your customers. Quickly mock-up your ideas as paper prototypes and test them with real users. This can be done in a day or two, and is usually faster than continuing the debate inside your own company.

Unfortunately, most design teams don’t believe that you can get user data from a rough design draft that you can mock up in a day. Instead, they waste months on programming something that turns out to be the wrong idea. And by the time you find out, it’s too late to make fundamental changes. That’s why I made a video on paper prototyping to convince more teams to try this cheap and effective usability method. Next time you find yourself bogged down in an argument between different members of your team, try making a paper prototype and have your users provide the answer.

Lynda Weinman: For the majority of sites designers and developers have to work together – even though they don’t always speak the same language. Tools are really changing right now – many design tools are adding hooks and handles that programmers can grab onto without changing the design. Two that come to mind are the future Fireworks that will be released with CS3 (previewed at the Adobe MAX conference recently) and Expression Graphic Designer that writes WPF and XAML as the underlying graphics and markup language. Flash is another tool that has a visual design environment that developers can grab onto and make functional without changing the design, and Flash 9 will be able to convert hand-animated designs into kosher Actionscript code with a few clicks. The communication gap is going to lessen in the very near future.

Matt Mullenweg: I think more developers should study visual design. Robin Williams has a few good books on basic design principles and typography. You can get 80% to a great interface with no visual design skills at all, if you think about the user every step of the way and follow a handful of rules. Let designers focus on the last 20% where they can really shine.

Nick Finck: I wrote about Form vs. Function in 2001, it is a very old and outdated article as far as examples go, but interestingly enough it’s still very relevant even today. I think the take away here is it’s not one versus the other, it’s form ever follows function, meaning the two are inseparable and function should always be the first priority.

A good example here would be when you go into a furniture store and see a piece of furniture like a chair that is so beautiful it blows your mind.. I mean really a work of art here. When you go to sit down in it, you realize that’s just it.. it’s a piece of art, it’s totally uncomfortable and cold feeling due to the choices the designer made. Maybe they wanted it to be that way, I don’t know.. but to me it’s just a beautiful chair that I would never sit in if I owned it.

How many designers who build beautiful sites without any consideration for the user actually go back to their work on a regular basis and use it.. I mean really use it like try to find information on that site or fill out a form.. what a pain. I prefer to invest my time in things that cause me little pain.

Todd Purgason: Everything has a time and a place if you over focus on form and ignore function you have big problems and vice versa. The key is to respect each other and work to evolve both in unison to keep up with the needs and desire of culture. With that said the web is a medium of function as such function is a bigger reward to users than form, but at the same time form typically allows for more impact, memorability and influence. So the point is we need both so the people that harness both will out do those that are myopically focused on one or the other.

Sodaplay: “Function vs. Form” or a conflict between “Visual Design vs. Backend Programming” does not apply to Soda’s way of working. We’re all pulling together to make a project work. To answer your question, maybe the thing that can be done is to be less concerned with labels.

WeWorkForThem: People can work together if they listen and hear. Sometimes we need to pick battles and concentrate on things that just do not matter. Some things do. I do not know the struggles that designers fight with programmers. It has always been easy for me to work with programmers, they tell me what can and can not be done and I listen to them. They often solve my problems for me or suggest something better, so I like programmers. I just wish we could find a reliable one. ; )

⇒ PART 7: It hasn’t been the first time that a developer comments “Designers just make pretty!”, or a designer telling a coder to “stick to math, do not design your own site!” We know not everyone is pissed off. In the words of architecture Louis Henri Sullivan, “Form ever follows function”; what does this mean to you?

Eric Jordan: Just as before it all comes down to communication. The interesting thing at 2Advanced is we all respect what everyone else does to the greatest degree because we sit down and talk about it. We express ourselves and are able to justify how we feel. The developers can completely see the merit of design in every project just as the designers can see the merit of intelligent functionality. The key is sitting down and talking about how to put it all together to make the best of both worlds happens so that everyone is happy. It seems like a very simple concept, but more often than not studios simply have a problem of internal communication between disciplines.

Jakob Nielsen: I believe that all Web projects above a certain size should be multi-disciplinary. Sites need to look good, and even though it’s not my personal expertise, I recognize that it’s necessary, so I always recommend including a good visual designer on a team. Similarly, the backend needs to work: if the site crashes or says that products are out of stock when they are not, then it doesn’t matter how good the site looks, it won’t sell anything. Also, the writing needs to be good, and there are several other skills that should be represented on the project team, in addition to visuals, writing, and engineering. You can’t really say that any one of these should drive the design, because the total user experience is comprised of all of them. Only when the different elements of the site are well integrated and work together do you get optimal usability. I refer to my answer to the previous question: let customer needs drive these decisions and create the balance between your different disciplines based on what works in user testing.

Lynda Weinman: To me, it means that no matter how beautiful something is, if it doesn’t function as promised, it has failed.

Matt Mullenweg: I think I answered this in the last question:

I think more developers should study visual design. Robin Williams has a few good books on basic design principles and typography. You can get 80% to a great interface with no visual design skills at all, if you think about the user every step of the way and follow a handful of rules. Let designers focus on the last 20% where they can really shine.

Nick Finck: I think I jumped the gun on my last question… but the point still stands. Form comes second to function, but you shouldn’t have function without form or form without function. The two go hand in hand. I think designers who get all upset about this famous quote are the ones who are not clearly reading the full thing… they see something and react to it, instead of hearing the person out first, getting the full story and then responding in a professional manner.

Todd Purgason: Form evolves from function and sometimes the form will be crap because that is the necessary function. Sometimes the form is very straight forward and other times the form so overpowers the function that you don’t even perceive function. Designers have knowledge and strengths that developers don’t even perceive the nuances of, and Designers often do not respect the knowledge and perspective of developers. People that polarize like this are very foolish. A wise person realizes his weaknesses and the strengths of others and allows for group driven solutions drawn out of many perspectives and approaches, that will often lead to more fruitful solutions. But at the same time design by committee can erode the edge of a creative process leaving it marginalized and ineffective. So work together but also do not ignore your instincts and guard the purity of an idea.

Sodaplay: That successful projects encompass many disciplines working together to achieve a goal as a whole.

WeWorkForThem: I think when you work within functional guidelines, your work has the chance of really becoming visually and functionally exciting (ipod?). A lot of people complain that the function is messing with the form and this could be possible. Most of the time I think there is a solution to the functional problem or a happy fix. I like to think function (restrictions or framework) can help create beautiful form (art or design).

⇒ PART 8: Blogs are a phenomenon. Almost everyone has one, and it is simple to set up through open-source software. Blogs have influenced the growing use of standardized structured sites. What is your view of this phenomenon?

Eric Jordan: I can tell you that we have learned a lot from blog standardization, especially from some of the very sharp individuals out there who devote their time to seeking out intelligent solutions to common Web Design problems. We have had several times where we have been utterly frustrated with an issue with a browser, then someone will go search a few blogs via Technorati and low and behold, there is a blogger with a slick answer to the problem. I think Blogs are an incredible source of useful information, because they are an unrestricted platform for people to share their ideas and solutions to problems, which is what we need more of in this world.

Jakob Nielsen: Blogs are proof that usability matters. Weblogs are nothing but personal websites where you post essays as you feel like it, and we’ve had those since the beginning of the Web. In fact, the very first websites in 1991 were for academics to post their writings. By the mid 1990s, GeoCities had a million users who posted their personal writings. The only thing that’s different about blogs is that it’s much easier to post your writings on a weblog than on GeoCities—and because it’s easier, a hundred times more people do so.

However, it’s definitely not true that “everyone” has a blog. There are more than a billion Internet users and only about 10% of them have a weblog. Most of these blogs are updated very rarely, leaving only 1% of users to write frequent postings. This should be no surprise, because it’s always true that the vast majority of users are lurkers who do not participate actively. Data from Usenet in the 1980s, from AOL and CompuServe boards in the 1990s, from Wikipedia in the current decade, and from 30 years’ of Internet mailing lists all show that 90% of users lurk and that the most active 1% of users account for the vast majority of postings.

It’s important to recognize that human behaviour stays fairly constant, even as the technology changes. This is why usability is such a great career: what you learn now will still be useful in analyzing whatever technology turns out to be popular in twenty years.

Lynda Weinman: I love blogs. It’s so great to get the news from individuals rather than single point conglomerates.

Matt Mullenweg: I think blogging is just the next step in the evolution of personal publishing online. They’ve put real web publishing a click away for most people, and despite common blog software limitations the medium has flourished because it keeps things simple.

Nick Finck: I think too many bloggers are using templates. That’s what makes cookie cutter design synonymous with blogging. Go take a look at Bryan Veloso’s blog, does that even look like a blog to you? No. Go explore Veerle Pieters‘s site, does that look cookie cutter to you? No. Check out CSS Zen Garden and see how many takes can be made on a single static HTML page given a little CSS.

Todd Purgason: I don’t have one, it is pretty funny the rate at which blogs are created and then inversely the rate at which they are abandoned. But hey I think they are great I think the simi-standard structure is helpful to all. It is a great simple way to communicate. I think blogs that post good visuals and media along with just text are better for us all. Link code is an amazing thing use it or loose it baby. Just remember these are people your reading and there are all kinds of people in the world you can not believe what you read unless it can be proved by other sources.

Sodaplay: Blogs are but one of many interesting and effective emerging symptoms of the changes pervasive in most media to interconnect and intermingle the roles of providers and consumers of creativity.

WeWorkForThem: Blogs are wonderful. It is an easy way to provide content that people can use. I think that is what the internet should be like. Websites and voices are for everyone. Not everyone can have a wonderful looking and functional site, but if the content is good, people will use it. Look at Google, I find it to be very ugly, but it works.

⇒ PART 9: What technology trends do you think will be used in the future?

Eric Jordan: I typically don’t like to speculate on this subject, but I believe holographic technologies will play a big part in the way products are rendered in 3D space on the Web. Right now the process of conveying 3 Dimensional objects on the web involves either a video-shoot or a 3D modeller to get involved. I like to think that in the future all studios will have access to inexpensive technology which allows us to scan everything from a pen to an automobile into 3D space and return a completely accurate representation of the object that we can utilize for presentation on the Web.

Jakob Nielsen: The hardware trends are the safest to predict: bigger screens *and* smaller screens.

Because big monitors make users dramatically more productive, business professionals will be getting much bigger screens over the next ten years. I don’t see this stopping until computer screens are the size of a broadsheet newspaper, which is about as big a space as humans can comfortably scan. The current debates about designing for 1024×786 are a temporary problem, since business users will get screens that are at least 3,000 pixels wide. Of course, we will need a different approach than scrolling pages to utilize this much space. Something more like newspaper layouts, is my prediction.

Simultaneously, smaller screens will also become more important as mobile Internet use finally takes off. I don’t agree with those people who advocate having a single Web design that can scale across devices. I believe that mobile usability requires a special design that’s optimized for the small screen and the mobile context. For example, articles should be much shorter and there should be a smaller selection of headlines in a mobile news service than for one intended to be used on a big display.

Software trends are harder to predict, but I do predict that we will not get artificial intelligence or natural language understanding any time soon. That is, not within the next twenty years. We will probably get more services that aggregate human judgments and decisions: Google is a great example, because that’s how they derive their ratings of the relevance of different web pages. But the underlying judgments will still be made by humans because they are the only ones to actually understand the content.

Lynda Weinman: Apollo is new from Adobe. It’s a run-time that allows people to create desktop applications that are web enabled and run on different platforms such as Mac, Windows and LInux. WPF – Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft can be used to build rich visual experiences for Windows Vista. Soon, people will be going beyond web browsers and building apps that link to the internet and databases but don’t rely on the browser and browser standards. It’s going to be crazy cool – and work on all kinds of devices other than computers too.

Matt Mullenweg: I think 3-6 years out we’re going to see a lot more attention paid to vector graphics and visually scalable interfaces.

Nick Finck: I think Mobile is going to become more widely adopted and this will impact how we think about the information we are dispensing on our web sites. I think accessibility concerns are going to finally make their way to the front burners, love it or hate it. I think that the lines between film, television, the web, and mobile are going to become even more blurry as technology moves a few steps closer to convergence.

Todd Purgason: Intelligent filtering finding information your looking for is becoming a huge time consuming challenge. In the future operating systems need to know you and know how you work and think so that it can intelligently filter and find the content you most likely care about and disregarding the rest. I’m a bit shocked no one has figured this out yet. It is the only way to take down google do a google with a brain that gives you what you want and gets smarter every time you use it. Instead google is making content that people paid to show up the seemingly most relevant. But hey maybe somebody has done this and I’m not exposed yet.

Sodaplay: I’m sure we won’t be short of shiny new technologies to play with—the more interesting questions is what will they be used for? As we look to the future the rise of the semantic web combined with machine intelligence could be both exciting and frightening.

WeWorkForThem: I think that people will have computers installed in their bodies with contacts that you can put in your eyes to see the information. You will be able to type with your fingers on regular objects and it will know what you are typing. We will become half human, half robot.

⇒ PART 10: Because we don’t like concluding an interview with just a typical question: “What the future will hold?” Please highlight three issues or thoughts about the Web that is disregarded or you feel important to share with our readers.

Eric Jordan: I don’t know if I can break it down into 3 nicely organized issues or thoughts (am I breaking any accessibility issues here?) ?

I suppose I would like people to take away the following thoughts:

Is it useful to implement proper usability and accessibility standards for a website? Of course, in certain cases it can be extremely important for the client, their audience, and their success as a company.

Does that mean that every website should adhere to certain compliant standards? Of course not. Compliant standards are great, but if it means sweeping all emotional and sensory response under the carpet, then we may be faced with having to co-exist with a very drab Internet. The need to reduce everything down to a “usable, organized, and accessible” state will only hinder us in our pursuit of what is truly possible.

Jakob Nielsen: In my answer to the first question in this interview, I pointed to two big groups that are ignored by most websites: low-literacy users and old users. Together they are almost half the population. This is where most of the growth of the Internet will come in the next decade, because most young and well-educated people are online already. We need to work harder on making the Web attractive and useful to a larger audience, and not just design for college students.

A second issue is globalization, which has at least two components: First, websites must cater to an international audience, and yet there’s not much known about how to make a good multinational website. There’s also not much work on specific problems like multi-lingual search.

Second, design and development itself is becoming globalized with offshored teams scattered around the globe. This has some positive aspects, because the cheaper it becomes to develop stuff, the more we can get built, which again increases the hope for more advanced features in the future.

Usability may suffer, however, because it requires frequent direct contact with the users, which is hard to get when you are sitting in an offshore country. Of course the usability specialist should stay in the main country and conduct user research there, but that’s not enough. It’s always been a recommendation that the development team should observe a bit of user testing so that they can get a more vivid impression of their users than simply reading the report from the study. Communication between the usability specialists and the rest of the team will be much harder when they are based in different countries. Onshore usability staff must learn be much clearer when they communicate with their offshore colleagues.

As a third issue, we need better business models for websites. There’s a large number of services that we are not getting because there is not an easy way for users to pay for the services they consume. Instead, we have a lot of sites trying to build services that they can give away for free, but that’s not the way to create true value in the long run. It’s more important to invent things that are so valuable that customers are willing to pay for them.

Lynda Weinman: I think user-generated content denotes a new revolution – YouTube and Flickr show the power of sharing content. Online is going to rule more tomorrow than it does today – things that are not wired and internet enabled are going to suffer – TV, books, movie theatres will be some of the casualties – life as we’ve known it is going to go online. More and more people will get their needs met online – kind of scary! We better make a point of moving our bodies and being out in the world or we’ll likely turn into human potatoes. I look forward to more choice and less propaganda – power to the people!

Matt Mullenweg:

1. The more you link out, even to competitors, the more people come back.

2. It’s cheaper than ever to get a new idea started on the web, there are no more excuses.

3. Launch with the simplest thing that could possibly work, you can always add more later. (But you probably won’t have to add 99% of what you thought you would.)

Nick Finck: All to often, and sadly enough, the user is overlooked. We used to call this process user-centered design or the user experience but businesses are beginning to prefer the term “people” over “users” so now it’s people centered design. I don’t think that enough businesses or web companies are taking enough vested interest in the people that have to use their sites be it for information gathering, transferring funds online, buying tickets to a concert, or just entertaining themselves with a game or trivia.

Todd Purgason: Well I thing the answer to the last question is one. Two I think is link code in the OS basically allowing me to add content/functionality into computing and work using shared content and functionality.

Video email, the biggest problem with email is that it lack all non verbal communication coupled with the fact that we are all so slammed for time and attention emails are all quick and often ripe for misunderstanding or miscommunication. Plus when you reach a certain point of getting 100-200 emails a day reading long emails is an impossibility and you can not keep up with the dearth of it all. So in the future I video a personal message and send it. When receiving them I can get the tone of the message instantly in addition al can hit a 2x 4x speed button to have the message spoken to me faster than I could read it. It is effective to keep it a left message as it cuts down on idel chit chat that there is no time for we get to the point, in fact you probably will be able to get auto filters that auto trim unnecessary portions for you to focus on the meat of the message.

Ha..ha.. can you tell I’m kind of a busy guy

Sodaplay: Historically many of the greatest expressions of creativity took at least one generation before they were widely appreciated. Is our medium’s apparent lack of longevity preventing us from contributing our creations to subsequent generations?

Interpersonal sincerity is easier to judge when making eye contact; even with a webcam ones gaze is slightly oblique and fractionally later than real-time.

Sometimes we don’t know what we want, let alone what’s best for us.

WeWorkForThem: Design can create function in forms. Design is often thought of as illustration or form now-a-days. It used to have roots in communication and ease of use. It is possible to harness this information through books like Grid Systems by Brockmann and Typography by Ruder, etc.

How peope read type online with ease and how to apply it to the web should be something to research. Maybe it has. It should have been done in 1996.

Relax and listen to people.