1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive voice when you can use the active
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous!

“He cited VA’s failure to develop a system to schedule patient appointments at its hospitals as a prime example of what the department must avoid. VA has been building the system for eight years at a cost of $167 million, without delivering even a portion of one workable application to clinics or hospitals.” source nextgov.com

Stories like this fuel the shift toward agility.

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I started the quiz at Driving.ca. It was fun at first. You had to link logo to car company names. I liked how many questions were about European car brands that I’m not too familiar with. But here’s the kicker, my call was a taking a long time, so was the quiz. I’m 18 questions in… and here’s what starts running through my head: where’s the end? How long is this quiz? If I wasn’t stuck on hold I’d be a bit frustrated at how long it was taking… What’s the point of this quiz? Who made it? Why in the hell did they think anyone would want to play for so long? How much longer will this take? F%*& I’m kind of roped in here now and I do want to know my score – I’m a bit driven to finish.

My call ends. I play a few more questions. I start to look around the screen to see if there are any other indicators of how long it will take. There are none.

I finally abandon the game. I’m actually pretty cheesed off at this point. I feel like my time has been wasted and if I’d had been given better indication of how long this ‘stupid‘ pop quiz would take I could have made a better decision at the beginning to start the game or not.

I take a deep breath and remind myself one of the golden rules of designing a smooth multi-step process: Set clear expectations for the audience up front. Early in my career as an interaction designer I worked at a market research company. We built online surveys. We collected a lot data about participant thresholds – you know how long people will remain engaged in a survey. It’s short, about 12 questions is recommended for surveys where the participant isn’t incented.

We used to always recommend to our clients to make sure to explain the approximate duration in time and exact duration in questions at the begining. We spent a lot time designing ‘progress indicators’.

Despite all our advice our clients often felt the need to cram as many questions as they could into a survey. Often to the point of severely impacting the survey’s abandonment rate. I always used to think that part of the need to ‘cram questions’ was a ‘buyer’s syndrome’. They are buying a service and feel that the more questions they get, the better value for their money they are getting – if you guage value on a questions per dollar scale. The funniest thing is… when we’d be working on these projects and the number of questions had gone sky high, everyone knew there was a problem-including our client. The inevitable solution – suggested by the client – take the progress scale off the survey and remove the text in the instructions that explains the estimated duration and number of questions to be answered.

Our response was always the same… don’t. You must set clear expectations up front, and you have to show the participant their progress as they move through. What’s at risk is your reputation and credibility. You are trying to measure your customer’s attitudes in order to improve your service delivery to them. But by creating a situation where YOU WILL frustrate them. And you ultimately risk losing a customer.

Full Symmetrics team kit… and a musette bag for candy

Originally uploaded by ttcopley

Ahhh the S-club was a fan fav.

Very interesting.

I guess you kind of have to be Canadian to get the humor in this… but it’s hilarious.

I think there were one or two things that are no longer relevant. But, as I was reading,  I realized a common pattern I see over and over from various ‘design’ communities – competing for preceived importance. “Call me in – earlier the better” is the common message. The  impact is always the same – “you’ll be sorry because its a bitch to change if you don’t consider it up-front”.

The interaction designer is an obvious designer brought in early, the visual/graphic designer, the programmer-architect, the information architect too. The database guy wants in there early, now the SEO guy too. What I see more and more is this emerging pattern of specialization, where these specialists are less and less tuned in to the specialties of their team-mates. But, here’s the kicker, one thing that I think takes a big back seat in web planning is – maintenance. By that I mean mostly content maintenance.  I have never seen a website or web app that didn’t need to be changed the day after it went live.  And how to maintain what is built is often so overlooked. Especially when the business owner is targeted as the person intended to make change.

Design everything for immediate change. Make change a priority. Get all these players at the table early – Yes. But don’t let any single one prevail in the battle for perceived importance.  The result – a overall simplicity, loose coupling (likley), cohesion (likely), the simplest thing that can possibly work – also likely… hmmm I”m sounding like an advocate for ‘agile’. Design can scale, don’t buy into the message from someone who says it can’t. And maybe just maybe we need to define a role for a new architect – the maintenance architect – the person who can look across the landscape of what you are trying to build, determine the areas that really do need a bit more priority, but ensure that everything is changeable. Because nothing is static on the web.