Evan Carroll Experience Designer

Darts

I’ve had a lot of fun giving away Capstrat darts at SXSW.  Here’s a photo for you.

Usable Web Sites

Earlier today I was interviewed by Wayne Sutton and Kipp Bodnar for Talk Social News.  I’ll admit, it was last minute and I felt like a deer in headlights, but it was a good time.  One of the viewers asked for some examples of highly usable sites.  This question is a bit difficult to answer, because there’s so many out there.  In the spirit of answering the question, I’m going to list a few here.

As I said during the interview, it’s important to make your users feel smart.  You accomplish this by ensuring that users know exactly what you would like them to do.  Take Google for example.  There’s a text input and a search button right in the center of the screen. Google is a good example  for accomplishing one purpose, but most sites are much more complex.

During the show Kipp talked about producing content and it’s importance to a successful Web site.  As I said during the interview, having great content is the hardest part of creating a compelling Web experience.  Unfortunately at first glance it’s the most overlooked portion of a site.  Good design and entices your audience and directs them to your content. Let’s take my friend Josh Lockhart for example at joshlockhart.com.  I’m going to step you through what a user might think as they visit his site.  “Okay, what is this site about.  Oh, here it is right in the image: RapidWeaver themes.”  Cool.  I’m interested.  So, how do I buy one?  Look there’s a “Add to Cart” button beside each one.  Great.”  So, Josh is trying to communicate what he does and how you can purchase his products.  Both of those goals are accomplished through design.  Once you get past those initial questions, you can then explore his great collection of content (or in this case, products).

While Josh shows the breadth of his content on the home page, it’s no overwhelming.  Be careful that you don’t put too much content on the page.  Every element on your page is communicating in some way.  If you don’t carefully consider what elements you include, you’ll be communicating too many things at once.  Think about several people talking to you at once.  If they expect you to hear it all and you can’t, you’ll won’t feel smart.  The same is true on the Web.

Friends, I’ve only touched on a few of the basics here.  Here’s one article that I wrote after Robert Hoekman Jr.’s talk with his 7 rules for great Web application design.  I’ll also post some of my favorite resources later today.

Interviewing

I often interview clients, stakeholders and users when performing research for my design projects.  I enjoy talking to people, so this is actually one of my favorite parts of being an experience designer.  It’s doubly rewarding when I can take what they tell me and build features that directly address their frustrations.  I’ve also become accustomed to recording my conversations for later review.  It’s helpful and keeps me from furiously taking notes instead of focusing on the conversation.  I usually hold onto my recordings for reference or transcription.  I hate listening to them and often I openly apologize to the transcriptionist.

Yesterday I recorded my first journalistic interview for production.  You can check it out here.  I have to say that it was a lot of fun and after listening to the track several million times during editing, I’m almost okay with hearing my own voice.  It was a good experience and I’m looking forward to doing a handful more before and during SXSW Interactive.

Along the way I learned a few things about editing that I would like to share.

1. Bundled into Garage Band’s sleek interface is a set of tools far more robust that I anticipated.  I was particularly impressed with the tools for removing background noise and its wide library of equalizer settings and background music.
2. It’s really important when placing the spoken word atop music to make sure the voice is heard.  That may sound obvious, but you should take time to test it out.  I previewed my first take with headphones, but when I exported the audio file and listened to it via my MacBook speakers all I could hear was the background music.
3. Think like a musician.  After making the first cut, I went back into GarageBand to make a template for future podcast episodes.  After a few minutes, I realized that I was trying to place clips into the mix using the seconds as a ruler instead of measures.  While you wouldn’t think that this is useful go ahead and try starting a voice over on the off beat.  You’ll hear what I’m talking about.
4. Avoid over-used stock music.  Of course, I’m guilty of this one.  I used GarageBand’s “Fifth Avenue Stroll” for my background track, but along the way I discovered “Pendulum.”  I’ve heard this track used in three advertisements already, starting with Phi Mu Alpha’s Life Loyal Sinfonian site.  I later heard it more subtly on a television advertisement for lice shampoo, then again at the Triangle ADDY awards last week.  I think the PMA site won an award as well, but I can’t find a source to confirm that right now.  I’m glad this is such a popular track, but I’m declaring it useless.  In fact, I almost used it just to make a point.

Thanks for checking out my first episode and any comments are welcome.