Last night Duels.com was featured in an article by TechCrunch, a very popular blog that covers what’s new with startups and the internet. Within hours the site was hit by people and the guys were up all night trying to manage the extra load.

By 2am the site reached the top popular bookmarks of del.icio.us. The guys start stripping extraneous database queries and try to optimize every little tiny thing they can to get the site to withstand the beating of traffic.

At 8am a press release hit the wires announcing the availability of the new game. Its hard to measure what kind of impact that will have. When I checked in with the guys before lunch there were 1200+ new account registrations.

At noon the site was featured on the front page of digg.com. Shortly after lunch a user from digg created an entry in Wikipedia for Duels. Needless to say, the servers are possibly going to be unresponsive for the rest of the day.

The great thing is that in the middle of all the frustrated people trying to reach the site, I see a lot of curiosity from their comments. This curiosity should pay off over time when the servers are back to normal because these sites featuring the game are social bookmarking sites. People really do want to know what this thing is about and they’re planning to come back later to see it.

It’s been a year since the acquisition and I’ve learned a lot. IBM is a very stable and profitable place to work, but the trade off is a very unexciting work life. One day I’m sure I’ll beg for that work life, but not while I’m still young. This boredom is why you’re seeing an eight month gap in posts to this blog - I had nothing interesting going on to write about.
I want to take chances, work insane hours on challenging and exciting things, and do it all for an underdog of a company that can fold or get bought up at a day’s notice. What can I say? I practically grew up while working for startups. And I want to keep doing it while I have the youth, energy, and will to do so.

After a little over a month of job searching I’ve signed up with Oxygen Games. The little company has a handful of employees, all of which I’ve worked with in the past and know well. When I was just a kid I always wanted to work on video games. These small web based games aren’t exactly what I had in mind back then, but they lack a lot of the drawbacks that kept me from actively pursuing that dream. The first game is online at Duels.com. Duels has had quite a busy day today, but I’ll keep that story for the next post later on today.

I mentioned that I’ve never used the Yahoo! TV portal. To be honest I wasn’t even aware it existed because I’ve never made it that far into Yahoo’s vast web of information. Now, I have respect for the Yahoo User Experience team. I’ve read a lot of their published papers in the past and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from their work. That said, Yahoo’s pages are often so big and so cluttered they make my head hurt. I’ve heard a lot of people make this statement before, but I’ve never really seen anyone try to explain why. I know exactly why: too many images. I know people hate too much text, but I’m willing to make the claim that too many images can be worse. At least when you’re faced with several paragraphs of text your eyes can easily pan and scan around to find what you’re looking for. I do admit that the new homepage is a vast improvement on the text-to-images ratio. However, that must have been an accident as it wasn’t taken to heart for the rest of Yahoo’s pages.

The specific TV portal design seems to be a rip of the Apple ITMS. Thankfully there are no Appleish image reflections, something I wish Apple could patent or trademark as a branding scheme so I would quit seeing it everywhere. The rip here is the presentation of items in groups. It’s a great use of progressive disclosure, however I think Yahoo’s designers missed the point. I say this because they literally overfilled the page with this for each category of “collection”. Apple uses this technique to comprise multiple categories in one little compact box on the ITMS homepage which is a great use of space. I will say “bravo” though because this is the first time I’ve seen this technique re-used (that I’ve seen) by anyone outside of Apple.

Another rip of Apple’s design team is the rotating content and video panels at the top of the page. This was certainly not started by Apple, but due to the other blatant rip I assume that’s where it was inspired from. And once again Apple did it much better. On the TV portal there are two rotating panels of different sizes and content that are rotating and transitioning way too fast. In fact, I didn’t even notice the transition animation until just now. And the rotation is too fast to where it’s a negative distraction instead of the gentle nudge to the user’s eyes that it’s meant to be. Apple uses this technique to rotate featured Music, Videos, and Podcasts on the ITMS homepage. Apple uses three panels, but they are all the same size, rotate one at a time, and have just the right speed of rotation and transition.

So far I’ve focused only on design. However, there’s a lot more to a re-design than design and that’s where I think the lot of Yahoo’s users are finding themselves at a loss. Yahoo made a few apparent mistakes here. One of them they’ve done well with in the past which leaves me confused.

For instance, there’s the nature of presenting a beta in addition to an existing live site. I have a hard time even writing the word “beta” in reference to Yahoo’s new TV portal due to the fact that it seems to be the only live version available at the moment. In the past Yahoo has used some great mechanisms to allow users to try out betas by switching back and forth between the old version and the new version. That mechanism doesn’t exist here like it did for the Yahoo homepage or like it still exists for Yahoo Mail. This is extremely important because very few people seem to understand how hard it is for humans to embrace change, especially with technology. New things are shiny and great, but typically we fall back on the old and trusted until we’re ready as individuals to “upgrade”. For example, I still use the old version of Yahoo Mail. I’ve seen and used the new version and even dare say I like it, but I have some old applications that allow me to interact with Yahoo Mail but don’t work with the new version (yet). As a User Experience Professional I find my strength in my profession by being someone who understands the affect of change and the need to regulate it - I know I’m not alone.

Another mistake I see here is the loss of features. It’s hard to analyze this having not experienced the previous version, but I’ve read the comments of people on Yahoo’s blog speaking about the loss of a “Favorite Channels” feature. Apparently people were using this feature and liked it enough to be angry at it being gone. Some even speak of using competitors’ sites instead just for that feature. While features do come and go, someone didn’t do their homework. It sounds like it would have been important to keep this feature and go out of the way to make sure things such as existing data and preferences were seemlessly transferred to the new version. It’s great that Yahoo has employees responding to the comments on their blog with statements about usability testing before the release, but I question who they tested with.

Now I wouldn’t be a person who is biased against Flash if I didn’t question its use at Yahoo TV. I’ve come to embrace Flash in certain implementations, such as the new Yahoo! Maps, but I find its use here to be frivolous and apparently detrimental according to some of the people who’ve openly complained. There are three instances of Flash on the TV home page: the top-center content panel, the top-right video teaser panel, and the advertisement space below the video. I recommend limiting Flash to about one use per page - anything more and it should be used in a way so insubstantial that I ought to not be able to tell I’m seeing Flash. Now, the top-center content panel could be implemented without Flash. It might be more difficult to implement, but it’s still possible and so there’s no utility or Flash “coolness” factor there. The top-right video panel requires Flash to present the video and would probably be what I would reserve its single use for. However, I think a lot of lessons have been learned from YouTube’s success and one of those is that people like very lean and very simple control interfaces for watching video. This is a preference of users and may even help the performance of the page loading (which is currently laggy) with a possible smaller Flash file. The advertisement space uses Flash to jump and grab attention in a way that’s just obtrusive. It’s instances like this one that led to the creation of flashblock - which some of the Yahoo users spoke of using. I find this to be a kind of obuse of a technology that can often lead to its demise.

This is all for now. They say “there’s no such thing as bad press”, but I wish the circumstances were different since I’m so passionate about the subject of complaint. I do believe however that Yahoo’s awesome User Experience team will rectify the situation and hopefully take away from the experience something positive in learning from their mistakes.

The biggest event by far came out of my employment. August 2nd, 2006 Webify Solutions Inc (the company I worked for) was acquired by IBM. This of course is huge. Suddenly the last two years had a meaning, a purpose, and a sense of pride.

The company has stuck together so far as a separate business unit. As for me, I will stick around in IBM and hope to find as much professional growth as I can. Right now I’m putting the finishing touches on a new release of our software. As soon as that’s released, I’ll take a much needed break and will hopefully spend more time working on this blog.

Well, Don Norman’s essay, “Words Matter. Talk About People: Not Customers, Not Consumers, Not Users”, is a nice reminder of the people I’m fighting for in the trenches. Norman writes that we need to quit using terms such as “customer”, “consumer”, and “user” because “we distance ourselves from the people for whom we design by giving them descriptive and somewhat degrading names”. I can only agree.

In fact, in the past I’ve actually attached names of real people to use cases. It’s easy to do. You go to your Customer Support department (the people manning the phones) and ask them for the name of the person that calls them usually about once a week. Now when you’re in the middle of a design you can ask yourself, “What would John Doe from Acme Corp think?” It’s a wonderful way to stay focused when everyone around you wants the most in the product in the least amount of time. Because if you don’t, no one else will even thing to ask until John Doe from Acme Corp is tying up the support lines.

So, I pulled up an old essay written by Scott Berkun that I remembered reading over a year ago.

The essay is called “Why smart people defend bad ideas.” It’s a very well written account of how people act in arguments. It has tips to help counter people who get away with too much. However, I enjoy reading it as a reminder to myself that sometimes I’m just a smart person defending a bad idea.

I especially like the point about good ideas coming from diverse people. Smart people know what’s to know, but diverse people know what’s different. And in this world, only the new ideas count.

Anyway, this article (Why Features Don’t Matter Anymore: The New Laws of Digital Technology by Andreas Pfeiffer) stood out because it was posted to ACM Ubiquity which is one of the countless ACM online magazines.

So, I decided I would start out with an explanation of why I’m here. Well, it’s certainly not out of boredom.

Creativity

Personality creativity has plummeted over the last few years. Call it burnout or whatever you want. I’ve gotten to where I go home and rest off the day after being pulled left and right between projects at work. My number one hope is that this will be a source of growth for new personal creativity.

Career

Eventhough I may feel like I’m running in a circle, I still have to keep moving forward. People learn best by teaching and remember more effectively by writing things down. Well, hopefully I can do both things here. Yeah, I read about design news/blogs/fads every day, but I fear that it’s become more of a routine than a useful activity. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get some collaborative thought out of this. It would be a blessing as I am the only designer where I work.

Novelty

What I would give now to have written about work life when I started at age 15. I’d probably have a book deal and a decent IRA. Well, that train has come and gone, but I would still be interested in someday looking back at my own words of progress.