caitlin gannon

Jacob Nielsen just proclaimed the lightbox the “interaction design technique of the year“:

In UI terms, a lightbox draws the user’s attention to a dialog box, error message, or other design element in the middle of the screen by dimming the rest of the screen.

Yes, the lightbox has some benefits. It shows you an Important Message within the context of the page you were just looking at. And it doesn’t get blocked by popup killers. And it looks super-cool, especially when used as a slideshow.

But lightboxes are starting to crop up everywhere. In my Yahoo mail (I hope the guy got paid a lot for that), in half the applications I interact with, even in my own website (OK, I put it there, but that was 2 years ago when it was super-cool and cutting edge).

Is anyone else starting to suffer from lightbox fatigue?

Great presentation about the perceived lack of women in open-source development.

(I love that she mentions ravelry.com, my favorite web community, as an example!)

I came across an interesting article on hand-drawn interfaces here. Sometimes a Sharpie and good, strong paper tell the story better — and faster — than a fully fleshed out wireframe. (I must confess that ballpoint sketches on notebook paper don’t pack nearly the same punch.) So hang on to your paper napkin drawings, at least for posterity’s sake.

If you’ve ever tried to communicate a site design via paper, you know the value of also presenting an interactive version with live hyperlinks. Visio users know that it’s pretty easy to create an interactive HTML prototype from a set of wireframes (File>Save as Web Page), but for me, the major drawback to this approach is that the prototype isn’t portable. I need a way to communicate designs via email, and there’s no way I’m emailing a bunch of HTML and GIF files to people (or even a web link, since not everyone has network access).

PDF is ideal for emailing, but it takes a little work to create a clickable PDF prototype in Visio. Here’s what I discovered.

1. Create hyperlinks on the foreground, not background — and use the document stencil to manage revisions

It’s pretty standard practice when wireframing in Visio to put the standard page elements — header, footer, navigation — on a background page so that these elements automatically repeat on every page. However, when you publish a PDF, Visio doesn’t create hyperlinks from the background layer. For an interactive PDF prototype, the hyperlinks have to live on the foreground pages. This means that for a standard page layout, all the navigational elements have to reside on each page in the wireframe.

You could copy and paste the navigational elements onto every page, but that’s a beast to maintain. Instead, use the document stencil (credit to this explanation at User Experience & Design blog).

Here’s how it works:

1. Create a navigation panel, using a distinct shape for each link. For example, to create 5 tabs across the top of a page, make each tab a separate text block.
2. To add hyperlinks, press CTRL-K to open the hyperlink dialog. Next to Sub-address (not Address), click Browse and find the page within your wireframe that you want to link to. (Or enter a complete URL next to Address.) Click OK.
3. Repeat 1 and 2 as needed. Once the navigation area is done, group it (select all the items, then Shift-CTRL-G).
4. Open the Document Stencil: File>Shapes>Show Document Stencil.
5. Drag the grouped navigation elements onto the document stencil pane.
6. Right-click the grouped elements (probably called “Master.16″ or something like that) and rename it (i.e. “NavBar”).
7. On each of your wireframe pages, drag this element onto the foreground and position it accordingly.
8. If you ever need to make changes to this navigation group, right-click it in the document stencil and choose Edit Master>Edit Master Shape. Any changes you make will automatically be updated in the other pages.

2. Use PDF menu in Visio, not print to Adobe PDF in printer menu

For the hyperlinks in the PDF to work correctly, use the PDF menu in Visio (Adobe PDF>Convert to Adobe PDF). For some reason, if you use File>Print and choose Adobe PDF as the printer, the hyperlinks in the PDF don’t work.

(Don’t ask me why, I’m just happy to have found a workaround.)

The final result will have live links on every page. To change the over states of buttons or create additional interactive elements, you’ll need to edit the file in Acrobat (avoid this step until you are certain the file is finished, otherwise if you regenerate the PDF from Visio, the Acrobat changes are lost).

3. Take it to the next level

This article on Boxes & Arrows provides a fantastic review of how to create clickable PDF prototypes with layers, multimedia and more. It focuses on using Acrobat’s advanced editing tools.

The November/December 2007 of Ragged Left, the newsletter of the STC Berkeley Chapter, is now online.

The issue includes my summary of a talk given by Adaptive Path’s Sarah Nelson and David Verba, entitled “Lessons Learned from Web Applications and User Centered Design“.

In their talk, they defined Ajax and Web 2.0 and then offered insights into how these developments in web application design offer both opportunities and challenges in designing effective user experiences.

Sliders in web design are becoming as ubiquitous as the fading yellow highlight. They certainly offer a more interesting and sophisticated way of interacting with a lengthy data set (remember the old days: choose from a drop-down, click Submit, wait, look at new page, click Back button, get lost …).

Some sliders allow changes to the top and bottom of a range of values:

Movoto.com

Kayak.com

Other sliders are designed to help the user choose a value (especially useful when it’s a hard value to remember):

Yahoo! UI Library - RBG Slider Control

Some sliders even include sparklines (small data displays), a very data-rich approach:

Prisjakt.nu (via IXDA-Discuss):

Oakland CrimeSpotting

Other than the obvious cool factor, there are definite advantages to using sliders:

• instant feedback allows the user to focus on the data itself, rather than on manipulating it
• it’s much faster to modify a number of criteria at once (price, bedrooms, bathrooms) while keeping the cursor in one place (compared to a bunch of drop-down lists)
• small changes to the chosen ranges display right away, allowing for faster decision making

There’s always a downside:

• Sliders aren’t good for small adjustments or for choosing very specific values, because they require too much fine coordination (not everyone uses a mouse, and some of us have a lot of cat hair on the mouse’s infrared sensor, which makes it jump around a lot)
• People who aren’t used to seeing sliders may not even notice it’s there, and get frustrated.

Nonetheless, sliders are a very useful design element, so get going and use one! Better yet, use one on every page!