Simplicity Rules

A couple good quotes from an interview with Craigslist’s CEO:

“Keep things simple. Be patient. Focus on user feedback.”

“Financial metrics aren’t something we focus on; they’re a pleasant side effect if we manage to do a good job by our users.”

That’s certainly a good path for them with their loyal user base. Could they really be a pattern most could follow?

For more of Craigslist shunning convention, check out some redesigns they’ll never use.

via Reemer

Somewhere around the dawn of Internetdom, a study said that users don’t scroll. Ever since then, we’ve been cramming everything we’ve got into the first screen, “above the fold” (a term borrowed from newspapers).

Enlightenment from these dark ages has been slow. Over the last few years, new beliefs have emerged to eclipse the flat-earth thinking.

1. Users can learn to scroll
2. Encourage scrolling by flowing content beyond the fold
3. Reward scrolling with a good footer

Milissa Tarquini summarizes the Above-the-Fold Myth, referencing research from as far back as 1997 that says, “don’t worry–let them scroll.”

Comparison of Web Design Viewpoints

Jared Spool suggests using the cut-off look to encourage users to scroll. By not designing to squeeze above the fold, we engage the user to scroll further.

Mind The Bottom

Tarquini’s also points to ClickTale’s research on scrolling, which shows that 22% of people scroll all the way to the bottom. Considering that a good number of people probably find something click-worthy before they reach the end, that’s a high number of people scrolling way to the bottom.

What do we give them? Derek Powazek says to Embrace Your Bottom:

“In this business, a user that actually reads all the way to the bottom of a page is like gold. They’re your best, most engaged, happiest users. You know, because they haven’t clicked away. They did the best possible thing they could do, and now they’re at the bottom of the page. And how do you reward them?

With a copyright statement. Maybe, if they’re lucky, some bland footer navigation.”

Justin Kistner has some good footer examples. Do you have any?

Paging through search results is part of life on the web. The best ones give perspective. Where am I?

Two types of perspective

1. Global perspective: where am I in the entire search results?
2. Local perspective: what results am I near?

I looked at four sites that I use often and have paged search results. There is a lot more to search than paging between results, so there are other ways to show perspective. For now, I’m going to focus on navigating around results.

Technorati:

Looking at the first list, it appears there are seven pages of results. I go to the seventh page and learn there are at least three more pages. This will happen again if I click the tenth page, and continue on and on.

While Technorati gives me a good idea of where I am locally, my vision forward is obstructed. On the other hand, their global view backward is pretty good, making it easy to take me to the first result.

Flickr:

This is very similar to the Technorati results, but Flickr has changed a couple things. The addition of the ellipsis after the seventh page warns me that there are more than seven pages. An ellipsis is also added to the left side of the list when I get to the tenth result.

Flickr makes me very aware of where I am locally, but sends me for my calculator globally. 32,120 results at 24 per page means… 1,339 pages?

Yahoo! Real Estate:

Easily the worst of this group. When I get to the tenth page, I have to click the next link to roll over into the second set of ten pages. Yahoo! Real Estate gives me no local perspective, nor much global perspective beyond the total listings.

Realtor.com:

Finally, the best of the lot. On the first page of results, I can access the final page. When I’m somewhere in the middle, I had ready access to the three adjacent pages in either direction. Realtor.com has good local perspective, and globally, I can always navigate to the first or last page.

These are four different result sets, which are searches with very different purposes. The paging mechanism can be generalized to a long, ranked list. Providing some perspective of where we are locally and globally can communicate the list’s organization and make a little more sense of a search.

I’m looking for other examples, and your thoughts. Is this sort of perspective important? Who does it well?

MySpace rolled out a new feature recently called “Status updates.” It lets me tell my friends what I’m doing. This is an outright feature copy from Facebook, but that’s not the biggest shame.

Learning from others and making something better is a practice that built the web. At Kinkos, if I continually make a copy of a copy, the quality will decrease. Online we have the opportunity to avoid degradation.

MySpace should have seen Facebook’s status problems, avoided them, then found a way to be unique.

I applaud them for poking fun at themselves with the default “extended network” message. It provides a clue about what they expect the user to enter into the box. Otherwise, their status entry is incredibly confusing. It doesn’t tell the users whether they should write their name or whether the “is” will be included. Everything has to come from the original example.

That’s not simple, that’s simplistic.

The mood is a neat addition, ripped from LiveJournal. But again, they haven’t taken it anywhere. All they’ve done is created a long list of adjectives. Some have emoticons, others don’t, but I don’t know until I make my mood public.

Like most things MySpace, this is only halfway there. They’ve simply created a copy of a copy, which leads to a watered-down feature unless you come to it with something new.

The reasons MySpace is losing users to Facebook is not because people want to share their status. Facebook is succeeding because they’re a place for originality, not another useless junk heap.

I’m impressed with how Martha Stewart grasps iterative design:

“Whether you’re a programmer or a seamstress, it’s all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster–but not worse. Better.”

And yes, that’s her frosting a Wii cake. The quote above comes from an interview with Stewart about assorted geekery, including Marthapedia, her forthcoming user-contributed home tips site.

Consider this story of a father and daughter playing checkers for the first time:

“I eventually jumped her last piece… She stared at the board very carefully with furrowed brow and I finally said, ‘You don’t have any more pieces to move.’ To this, she simply replied, ‘Can I move one of yours?’”

Some might call this thinking outside the box. I’d say it’s a darn fine example of not thinking like a technician. But I think it goes beyond that, to say a lot about humans’ innate ability to let go of constraints and be passively creative (much different than brainstorming on a whiteboard and voting on the “best” ideas later).

It reminded me of my friend Mike’s commencement address:

“If there is only one thing you remember from my comments here today, it should be this: This is all made up.

By that, I mean that what appears to be ‘the way things are’ is really just invented by people. You, each of you, get to invent what your future will be like.”

What could you do if there were no rules, no laws, and no “way things are?”

The innovative online rental company Netflix is pretty great. They send me a CD in a little sleeve, I watch it, then I send it back. We’re only on the one movie plan, so I always chuckle when I see Netflix’s elegant solution to losing an envelope or DVD sleeve.

I’m guessing most people have the two DVD plan. So, Netflix’s solution works for most people. Is that good enough?

I’m a big fan of my Mac. One of the best things about Apple is that they provide generous support via their retail stores. The other day I was calling in and received the following message:

“We regret that Genuis Bar reservations can only be made online.”

That works for me. I have a couple other computers. What about someone with a fried motherboard on their only computer? I guess they go to the library?

Again, most people probably own or have access to a second computer. Does that mean Apple should make some customers jump through hoops to get access to their otherwise great support?

This is a decision we all have to make on the Web every day. Do we support people who have disabled Javascript? What about people with small monitors? Are we alienating a percentage of our users who don’t know what “FAQ” means by using the term?

Nobody can be everything to everyone, obviously. These decisions have to be made at some point, but they need to be made consciously. Who is our audience and how much work is it worth to support the outliers? Is the good for most solution good enough?

I like to ride my bike into the office. We live about ten blocks from the east side of the river, with downtown on the other side. Most of my morning trip is downhill. I almost never have to peddle.

The ride back is much harder. Naturally, it’s uphill most of the way. Recently, coasting down in the morning, I realized that I would much rather have the easy ride on the way home. Even though it would mean some tough peddling at an early hour, I’d be leaving myself a reward for the afternoon.

I have no plans to swap my home and office yet, but this then got me thinking about projects. Like my ride to work, we don’t really have much of a choice of where the hard work comes, but what if we did? I would still take the hard stuff first. Consider this graph:

The blue represents my current roundtrip ride (where the easy stuff is in the first half, the morning). The orange is the reverse ride I wish I could have.

Perhaps it’s about delayed gratification, in which case I guess that means I have a successful mindset.

In terms of projects, I think it’s more about tempo. Getting through the tough stuff and “coasting” through the end would be lovely. Try as we might, the tough stuff is probably meant to be at the end. That’s where the details are.

If you had a choice, would you want the blue project or the orange project? Where do you want your hill?

I saw Harry Potter on Wednesday night, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about the new version of Unthirsty. The happy hour map has added some social features, and they’re good.

Oh, and they have an iPhone version for you. Ya digg?

Yes, I am still using the web to plan my binges. And remember how much I liked the first version of Unthirsty. They’ve done better.

Before you say how me-too and blasé social features are, take a look back at my social website rules. Unthirsty hits them all, but they especially get the part where they make it useful for me, regardless of whether other people are using the site.

Looking for what happy hours are happening right now has always been a great feature of Unthirsty. Now they narrow the scope, just to my few favorite spots. I can see at a glance which of my haunts is in happy hour.

Since the site is useful to me, and since happy hours are naturally social, I actually find myself wanting a way to connect to my friends. In this day when everyone seems to be asking me to add people as contacts, it’s refreshing to see a site where that feature would actually be beneficial.

Techies Tom and Terry were working on a web site about rodents for Fritz the Cat. Fritz’s collection was extensive, and he had named each one. So, the two guys started creating the online gallery of Fritz’s rodents.

The main page had types of rodents, like mice, rats, and hamsters. Each type had a link to a special page with all the names of that type of rodent listed out.

Tom and Terry thought they were done with their work, so they showed it to Fritz. “I want to know how many I have in each category,” said Fritz.

“Oh my,” sighed Tom. Their system had not made it easy to get at the number of a particular type of rodent. They only worked on listing them.

“Aha!” cried Terry. “We can use an ordered list when we output the rodents. That way, a user clicks on ‘chipmunks,’ say, and then on the next page, we see there are four.”

“A wonderful, simple, gorgeous, brilliant solution,” exclaimed Tom, who was happy to save himself the work of rewriting the system to count rodents.

Fritz grimmaced, because he was thinking of the poor user, having to click to a new page just to find out the number of hamsters. “No,” Fritz said, “it should look something like this.”

Tom and Terry whimpered in unison, and went back to re-write their code. Eventually they admitted Fritz was right. It was much better to have the count in parentheses on the first page and not make the user over-click.

If Fritz knew all the toil it would take to make the system count his rodents, he might have acquiesced to the poor solution. But Fritz was not thinking like a technician, so he was able to come up with the optimal solution.

Of course, even better would have been if Tom and Terry showed Fritz what it would look like before they finished all the coding, but we can’t always think ahead, can we? For what it’s worth, this is a true story, and I am Tom.