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February has been a busy month for Pathfinder around Chicago!

There was a feature in Technori on Pathfinder Founder and CEO Bernhard Kappe last week.

There was an interview with Pathfinder VP of Product Development at midVentures.

On Tuesday, Bernhard and Todd Wyder, Pathfinder’s Chief Product Office, spoke at Morningstar on Turbocharging Your Mobile App Sales.

And this evening, Michael Walkden will be talking about Incorporating UXD into an Agile Project Inception as part of the midVentures monthly: DESIGN+DEVELOP series.

[note: when you see a painful restaurant website, can you please send them a link to this post or copy and email this to them? It is in all of our best interests that we get better restaurant sites. Thanks!]

Dear Restauranteur,

We realize that as an entrepreneur you wear a lot of hats, but you probably aren’t a web professional. So, we would like to humbly give you some advice to improve the web experience for your customers.

Why we come to your website

Ideally, we want to do all of the above in 1 click without having to wait for all kinds of stuff to load.

A few simple suggestions

Please don’t use Flash We realize that lots of restaurants think Flash sites are cool. But almost all of them suck. Folks on iPhones and iPads can’t even see your site (33% of us). Those who can see it have to wait while it loads and then shows us some “artsy” interlude before we can get to what we want. Sometimes that is so painful, we leave and go to Yelp to get what we are looking for.

Please don’t put your menus in PDFs

Its painful to have to go to another application to see your menu. And those of us who have older devices can’t see them.

Please keep your site up to date

Its not useful to see a menu from 2006.  You don’t have to be a web ninja to update your site. The same guru who charged you your right arm for some flash wizardry can set up a simple content management system for you, where its as easy as typing an email to update your site.

Please don’t blare music at us

With a few exceptions, we come first for the food and service, then the ambience. Please don’t force us to have to listen to Black Betty Remix or Toccata and Fugue just to get your exact address so we can tell our friend where to meet. Thanks for listening to us and we think a few changes will make coming to your site less frustrating. And if you think we are wrong, please Google bad restaurant website and see what folks think!

Thanks,

Your customer

photo credit: Jeremy Levine Design

It’s important to have a common vision and shared values in a company like Pathfinder. We often talk internally about what we value.

A frequent topic is valuing things that are designed as opposed to merely built. The obvious example is the iPad vs. the Android tablets emerging now. A more concrete, less virtual, example is a house. You may have experienced one where the whole and its parts were purposely designed, as evident in the durable choice of materials, comfortable spatial dimensions, a sensible floor plan, appealing surface treatments and manicured surroundings. Both the inside and outside are made beautifully with a timeless style. Then you notice the thoughtful features like large windows situated on the south and west sides to help utilize the sun’s heat in winter, or trees and overhang roofs to help keep the internal climate cool from the summer sun, or air circulating effectively such that the fireplace actually warms the house as opposed to being a static ornament. What makes these desired outcomes remarkable is the architect’s attention to detail and thinking through how each part of the house will be utilized.

At Pathfinder, we recognize, appreciate and strive for good design. We incorporate it into every app we make. Because of this, our apps aren’t just a flat list of features that our clients pay us to implement, but are fully viable products, designed like a house we would enjoy living in and cherishing its sense of craft, from the inside out and vice versa.

Anybody who has been to our office knows I am an Android fan. My prediction is that the Android platform will end up with a much, much larger install base than iPhone OS. Originally, I felt this way because you can get a Android phone on every carrier for a lower cost than the iPhone – many of them are now free with a contract. This is good enough, but I have a new insight. The Android OS does a great job of directing your attention to highly important information. As such, its easier for new users to pick up and for busy people to use. How can this be? You should argue that the the Android OS so similar to the iPhone OS. You are right. However, it comes down to usability. The majority of people out there won’t explore their device to find information. They just want the phone to do the work for them. If it doesn’t smack them in the head it might as well not exist. Android has two crucial features that make it a helper more than just a smart phone.

The value of wireframing even with incomplete information

The task of wireframing in application development, as I’ve come to know it, should begin after user research has been performed, and a complete set of requirements gathered.  But what happens when, for whatever reason, you just don’t have access to user research, or a full set of requirements?  What if all you have are some rather unspecific, vague notions of what the user should and should not be able to do?  Is wireframing at this juncture useful?  I say yes.  With incomplete or even almost non existent information about target users and or requirements, wireframes can still be a valuable tool in the interface designers toolkit.

The key to a wireframe’s usefulness is that it is a visual document.  Presumably it will be presented to one or more product stakeholders, and they will have the opportunity to review it and comment.  Having something visual to respond to is one of the easiest ways to generate ideas, and identify incomplete specifications.  A good assumption is that if a product’s requirements are incomplete, someone at the wireframe review will notice the gap by responding in the context of the visual presentation.  “Where is the Cancel button?  Oh…not in the requirements?  Well it’s obvious that on this screen the user will need to be able to cancel, so we have to add that as a requirement.”

In this way, a wireframe can be an ever evolving document, which begins by starting the requirements conversation.  Of course ultimately, just prior to feature development, the wireframe should have all of the necessary specifics so that the developers can use it as a guide (along with the relevant user stories).

I was starting up one of the Adobe apps the other day when this somewhat troublesome message was displayed:

Ack! On the one hand, good for them for alerting me that an error had occurred. On the other hand, what’s up with that message? I had no idea what I could do beyond clicking ok (and after reading the message I wasn’t sure all was ok). A bit unnerving, but it did get me thinking about how applications deal with error messages.

The idea that non-technical users will be viewing error messages is one of those things that tends to be overlooked. You’re so focused on getting all the features up and working that dealing with errors on the presentation layer are often left out of both design and implementation.

Even if time is crunched on a project, however, here are three scenarios you should always cover in a user-friendly fashion:

Spent some time playing around with Flash Catalyst, which was released by Adobe as a public Beta yesterday. I downloaded it today and got started on some of the tutorials Adobe labs has put up.
My impressions:
It’s pretty neat stuff. I could see myself prototyping with it, although Keynote and Acrobat are my tools of choice at the moment.
From my limited time working with it, Catalyst’s main function is to make it very easy to take Photoshop or Illustrator compositions and turn them into fully (front end) functional interfaces, complete with animations, transitions, fades, buttons states etc. One of the tutorials had me import artwork of a scrollbar, in 4 layers. Creating an actual scrollbar and hooking it up to a canvas was as easy as selecting the individual layers and telling catalyst which part of the scroll bar it was (up button, down button, track and thumb). It;s also super easy to connect user actions to specific screens (or states, as Catalyst calls them).

Patrick Lynch over at A list apart has just written a great article about the role of aesthetics in web design.  In it, he specifically deals with the question of how much of a role visual aesthetic design should play in the design of web sites.  To answer the question, he delves into the somewhat controversial notion of visual decision making–the idea that aesthetics can help users in their decision making and aid in general website usability.

The article is written in response to assertions made by one Jakob Nielsson, who, citing numerous eye tracking studies that his team has performed over the years, concludes that any images, or other elements on a web page that are not integral to the site’s content or function are routinely ignored, and hence superfluous or even distracting.

But the author says no.  Aesthetic elements on websites, while not recognized as helpful in eye tracking studies, do perform a vital role in website usability.  Mr. Lynch cites the work of early 20th century Gestalt psychologists that have proven that the brain responds to images in milliseconds.  And more recent studies of web sites suggest that users make visual impressions of pages in less than 1/20 of a second–before eye tracking movements begin–and that those impressions more or less stay through the length of the visit.

He goes on from there about why “attractive things work better”, describing Don Norman’s three levels of human psychological processing (Visceral, Behavioral and Reflective), and why they all work together to create an impression of a product like a website.

Read the full article over here.

Business Week had an article earlier this week on Cloud Computing that made a complete hash of the subject. However, there was one paragraph that was right on the money:

Apple and Google understand in their bones that simplicity and ease of use are essential to broad adoption of products and services. That lesson doesn’t come so naturally to Microsoft and IBM.

That’s why we integrate user experience design into the agile development process, and that’s why we advise our clients to release the simplest software they can early, so they can learn from real user feedback and continue to make improvements based on that learning.

It’s like John Gruber writes over at Daring Fireball:

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”
—John Gall

If there’s a formula to Apple’s success over the past 10 years, that’s it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it, steadily over time. Evolve it.

Do you understand that in your bones?

Apple recently released a beta version of its Safari 4.  Naturally it has some really cool new features, including a helpful and slick start screen, and cover flow for your browsing history.  It’s also much faster than any other browser currently out there.  However there is one substantial “new feature” to the Safari 4 user interface that’s been generating lots of buzz (heat might be a better word).  Namely, in this new version of Safari, the tabs (which you use to browse multiple web pages simultaneously in one window) are physically located at the very top of the browser window.  The address bar, and all the other web page navigation controls are now situated underneath your tabs.