caitlin gannon

Resurgence magazine has in their online archive a delightful article summarizing wabi-sabi by Leonard Koren: A Culture of Simplicity. His book-length treatment of the subject is called Wabi-Sabi: for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese aesthetic and philosophy of simplicity, humility and naturalness. In the era of information anxiety, this sort of approach is regaining popularity–”wabi-sabi” the new design trend now graces the covers of numerous books on home design, lifestyle, and pocket guides to zen.

As a designer of primarily digital information, I’ve been pondering how this aesthetic (of natural materials, impermanence, taking time to let things develop) might apply to the web medium. Obviously I cannot design a website with bamboo paper. Even if I were to scan images of natural materials, the website visitor is still confronting a computer screen between herself and that image–the very antithesis of naturalness.

Simplicity in design is not just about sparse, minimalist design. This approach can feel harsh and cold, knife-like. Simplicity should still have life:

Pare down to the essence, but don’t remove the poetry. Keep things clean and unencumbered, but don’t sterilize.

The culture of technology has its own momentum. New software products are released daily it seems, and trends are born and die off faster than bean sprouts. We are attached to the newest ideas, the latest techniques–and as a result we create things that cannot last. Simplicity is the latest keyword, but that doesn’t mean it comes from the perspective of the wabi-sabi philosophy:

Things wabi-sabi are unpretentious, unstudied and inevitable looking. They do not blare out “I am important” or demand to be the centre of attention. They are understated and unassuming, yet not without presence or quiet authority. Things wabi-sabi easily coexist with the rest of their environment.

How possible is this in the web design culture 0f awards, accolades, and IPOs?

Here’s an easy bit of javascript that helped me solve a big usability problem.

The issue: we designed an application that requires users to fill out a form, then displays their errors in a popup window. It’s a lengthy form that can present many errors, so showing the errors on the form itself wasn’t a good solution. We chose the dreaded popup window. Certainly our choice warrants further debate, but the coding is done and here we are.

Our thinking: we’ll explain to people how to allow popups for our site, and their popup blockers won’t be a problem. (Tools - Options - Popups - Allow. Not so hard.)

Not so. In end-user testing, we realized that some people don’t know they have popup blockers in the first place. Hence, they don’t try to unblock our site.

Example: “I didn’t need to remove the popup blocker — the site worked fine. However, I didn’t get a confirmation message when I submitted the form.”

Hmm…. what the? … lots of chin scratching. Aha! She didn’t get a confirmation message because the form had errors she didn’t see. This user never knew she was missing the popup windows.

So here’s the solution, after a bit of Google searching: Will Bontrager’s popup killer test. Thanks Will! His site explains very clearly how to implement this code.

Basically, create three small blocks of javascript code in the Head section of the page; then call the function in the body tag, put one bit of script inside the body section, and you’re done. The javascript tries to launch and close a popup window when the page loads. An alert message displays after the test, informing the user that she either can or can’t see popup windows from that site.

Problem solved.

If you’ve already installed IE7, it ate IE6. That means you can’t use IE7 to test how websites perform in IE6 and what strange IE6 quirks might be lurking in the shadows.

This standalone version of IE6 works pretty well for basic testing of CSS and layout issues.