Design Like a Lady. Code Like a Geek. » learnings

Find Out Why – You Don’t Know C.R.A.P. about UX & UI

Lindsay — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 02:11:09 +0000

Stop banging your head against the wall, asking the wrong questions of your users and processing the feedback incorrectly; learn how to get ahead of the curve by designing better experiences and interfaces for your applications! I am very excited to announce that this month I will be teaching a beginner’s class on User Experience and User Interface Design as part of the NY-based startup SkillShare’s launch in Philadelphia!

Who: Yours Truly (View My Portfolio for Credentials)

What: Learn practical UX & UI skills to user on your future projects.

Where: CitySpace, 2200 Walnut Street in Philly

When: August 23rd, from 7:00PM – 8:30PM

Why? Because the future of application development is in the experience and you only get one chance to make a first impression! It’s not just a matter of redesigning your Web 1.0 (alternating colored rows in a table, yuck!) app by implementing the flashiest new jQuery plugin (Woohoo, the form slides in from the left!!), it’s about picking the right design for the right use, and converting visitors to real users.

If that’s not enough, all proceeds go to the local Philly organization TechGirlz, dedicated to training the next generation of female technologists.

>> Register now for the course!

Let’s Start a Learning Revolution

Thinking About It?

I would like to hear from you if you cannot make the class (so I can schedule Take 2) OR if you want to take the class AND have questions about what you will learn OR have specific goals for the class that you would like to share with me. SkillShare is all about teaching and learning, as well as building a community, so please contact me in the comments or via email (lindsaytabas [at] gmail [dot] com).

Take a Gander At…

My Top 10 (UX/UI/IX) Design Principles

Lindsay — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:04:35 +0000

No one would ever want to design an interface like the HCFA, but I had to because it was what the user wanted. I couldn't be stubborn, I had to admit I was not a user, I had to come to a 360 degree understanding, and realize that I could not change what the users do.

Last week, I posted my tips for being an effective designer in a lean environment. This week, while perusing the UX topic on Quora, I noticed someone posted a question “What are the top 3 commandments of Web UX?“. It reminded me that I had started a Top 10 list last year and never got around to publishing it. So here you go, my Top 10 Design Principles.

Build something that supports what people do, not changes how they do it. I do not believe I have to expound on this one.
Training is not an excuse for poor design. I wrote a blog post on this topic last year. If you ever hear a teammate say “Oh, but we can train the users how to do this” then your product’s design is going in the wrong direction.
The users are always right, but they never know what they need. Listen to your users, they have vast wealths of information about their problems and what they would like to see fixed. But software designers, they are not. If a user tells you the solution, ask them first to describe the problem. Once, a non-profit explained to me that they needed users to sign-up with their website so they could RSVP to events and download a member registration form. I could have spent hours developing a multi-user system, but instead I asked them more about their event planning and how one become a member of their organization. It turns out Eventbrite could handle their events, and they were fine with the form being publicly available.
I am not the user. My teammates are not the users. The customer is not always the user. This is fairly simple. The users are the users, and they have to be able to use what you design and build for them.
Empathize with the users’ problems and end goals. If after discovery, you don’t feel like you are burdened by their problems too, you’re not going to design a world class product and the solution they need.
Don’t settle until you have a 360 degree view of the problem. If you do not have a full grasp of the entire service system, something like accounting or managerial over site will come bite you in the behind when you’re about to launch. ”Oh, the solution cannot work like that, you did not take into account XYZ.” Oh, well no one told me about XYZ. That’s not their fault, you should have asked.
Your Design should be C.R.A.P.-y : In my first semester in HCI, the first homework assignment was to redesign posters by the C.R.A.P. principles: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity. Here’s a nice post about C.R.A.P.
Friends don’t let friends design alone (i.e. share your designs with others). It took me at least my first semester at the School of Information to go from an objective, standards-based engineer (things were fairly black and white), to a designer that fully grasped the subjectivity that is the human language and opinion. Pull in your team members, it’s part of operating in a lean environment anyways.
Stubborness is the worst trait of a designer. If a user or co-worker critics your design, take the feedback and go back to the drawing board. It took me 4 iterations to get a 10-key form right, but the users love it.
If something is difficult to do, people will not do it (ref) Also, fairly simple. It also goes very well with a sentiment I have been building that goes like, “If people don’t already do it, just because you make it easier, doesn’t mean they are going to start.” This goes well with #1.For example, providing easy social media tools to niche populations. If they’re not already talking and sharing naturally, they probably won’t talk and share just because you build them a custom app.

Subject to Change

Lindsay — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:24:48 +0000

While in Southern California this past week, I made my way over to Hennesy + Ingalls in Santa Monica at the behest of my friend Nate. The store is packed with books on creativity, architecture, graphic design and photography; basically it was amazing!

There, we picked up Adaptive Path‘s “Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.” This was the first time I had a chance to hold the book in my hands and check out the bibliography in the back. Lo and behold, there was my name (along with the primary author, Professor Bob Glushko from Berkeley’s School of Information) for a paper I helped author called “Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage of Service Design”. To be honest, it was pretty amazing to see the citation, and my name in print. It’s also great to know that someone else read what I had to say on a topic, and found it thought-provoking enough to share it with others in their own publications.

Here are a couple of pictures Nate took to capture my “moment”!

Signs of San Francisco

Lindsay — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:38:49 +0000

Signs of San Francisco from Lindsay Tabas on Vimeo.

Katie came to visit me in August 2009. She helped herself to my city of 4 years so I helped myself to her images. Through her lens, the city refreshes in my eyes.

Like any person in your life, a city cannot be all things to you through thick and thin. As much as I love this city, after 4 years, I’m looking to shake things up. I set sail very soon, stay tuned.

Produced by: Lindsay Tabas
Photos by: Katie Delaney
Song: Signs by Bloc Party (buy on iTunes)

PS: Happy Birthday Katie!

Avoid Using Flash: The jQuery Cycle Plugin

Lindsay — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:02:38 +0000

My cousin Alexandra ran into an entertainment industry snafu earlier this year when an uncredited appearance on Lost gave the tv show’s internet fans free reigns to guess her name. Unofficial credits began appearing on the photographer’s flickr photos, then TV Guide and, finally, on Lostpedia entries in English, and Spanish. When she realized that a search of Alexandra Tobas wielded more content than a search of her correctly spelled name, Alexandra Tabas (with an ‘a’), she called me for help. We did a bit of troubleshooting on her IMDB page, and on each Lostpedia entry. I then did a ‘whois’ on her domain name. She owned her domain name and didn’t have anything up yet! This is a tidbit for everyone out there – if you do not like your search results, you only have yourself to blame if you do not have a site up under www.yourname.com.

While I do not have time to build her an entire portfolio right now, I went ahead and put up a simple page using the jQuery Cycle Plugin. This plugin is an excellent way to mimic Flash objects without having to actually use Flash. I never learned to use Flash seriously because it is a black box to search engines, although I’ve heard this has changed in recent years. If this is old news, the new headlines are reporting that Flash uses unregulated cookies and is invading our privacy, which means I’m still staying away from it with a ten foot pole. Many web designers hate Flash on similar principles, if not just for the sole reason that there is this misnomer that your website, brand or image is somehow cool because you use a Flash intro on your site. Flash is fun to play with, but not necessarily the tool you want to use for heavy lifting.

That being said, jQuery Cycle Plugin is about the easiest thing you can use to add some pizzazz to your site. In about three easy steps:

Reference the jQuery library, and the Cycle Plugin in your header.
Create a
and list your within that div tag. Make sure to specify each images height and width, and include an alt value, not just to be xhtml compliant, but because you want to add extra, search-able text, to your site.
Set the height and width of your .pics class in your css. Make sure they are big enough to hold each image.
Add the following script to your file:

$(document).ready(function() {
$(‘.pics’).cycle({
fx: ‘fade’
});

The plugin’s demo site is super easy to follow for any beginner, and if you want to get fancier, you can change your transition type in your script. I will definitely be using this plugin for my own portfolio in the future!

View AlexandraTabas.com here!

How Much Food Can You Get in Chinatown for $12? #hchal

Lindsay — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:51:49 +0000

More than 35 million people in our country are on food stamps – up 3 million just since January.

Living in Russian Hill, I’m just a stones throw away from the grocers lining the streets of Chinatown. I’m almost 100% positive most of my peers in this neighborhood and the other adjacent neighborhoods have never ventured in to these stores. To them it seems off putting, signs are in a foreign language, and the foods are exotic, even unidentifiable sometimes. To me though, Chinatown is my little secret. I love to cook a lot, and I could go to Whole Foods, but the spirit would dissipate once I checked my credit card bill after.

At Whole Foods you can get cherries for $7.99/lb, and in Chinatown you can get cherries for $0.99/lb. Even at Safeway, conventional apples are $1.99/lb, and in Chinatown they are $0.59/lb! Scallions? $0.39/each! Cilantro? $0.49/each! Eggplant? I bought some for $0.39/lb today. For the exchange in price, you get a cultural adventure. Some may argue that the quality is not as good, and I would agree. But not all fruits and vegetables need to be organic. And to be honest, I would rather eat some fruits and vegetables for cheap, rather than none at all because they are too expensive.

I have learned the laws of shopping in Chinatown over the past 3 years, and I will share some of them with you here:

Put your food on the scale as soon as the person in front of you is finished, else someone behind you will get there first.
Do not substitute an unidentified green leaf vegetable for spinach just because it looks like spinach; it won’t taste the same
Be prepared to see carcasses and single fishies lying dead in the freezer. If you don’t like it, don’t buy seafood and meat (I don’t).
Find the less busy stores – prices are $0.10/lb higher, but the food hasn’t been picked over.
Feel out the prices for the day. 1 store may have red peppers for $1.99/lb, another may have them for $1.29/lb.

Here are the foods I purchased today. I had a few recipes in mind while I was food shopping, and knew that I had some bulk foods to use at home which are not pictured here. I’m hoping my assumption that multiple recipes using similar ingredients will make my life easier will prove true.

Tonight I’m going to finish cooking for tomorrow. I’ll post the recipes and what I eat in tomorrow’s post.

What do you think?

60% of the clients San Francisco Food Bank served last year come from working households.

My First Time Driving Stick

Lindsay — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:02:49 +0000

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It’s storytime again, and this time, like so many others before, I was prodded to share this online. It was Friday, June 19th, and I had just flown to Washington DC from San Francisco for my friend Jess’s wedding the next day. Jess said she could pick me up at the airport, and I, in turn, said that I would pick up our friend Kenzie from the airport 4 hours later. Kenzie’s family lives outside the city, and her parents left the house unlocked and her car keys on the table. I spent the morning at their house, working remotely, and a little before Kenzie’s flight was to arrive, I grabbed her keys and got in the car. Being that I was so excited to drive her Mini, I jumped in the car and turned it on. Or tried to.

When I realized that her car was manual, I panicked…just a little bit. “Crap, crap, crap, how am I suppose to pick her up?” The brilliant person I am decided that everything is online, so instructions on how to drive a stick must be online (aside: this is where everyone says – tabas! you thought you could drive stick by reading about it online?). I ran back in the house and searched “How to Drive a Manual”. I read a few lines on About.com and felt sufficiently able to go on my way. Or at least start the car, try to reverse, and stall.

I go back in the house, read some more and then call my friend Katie who is at work. She tells me enough to get the car to the front of the development where I can get cell phone service and call her back. Katie gives me a couple pointers, I make it out of the development and on my way. Or so I thought.

Driving the two lane roads and coasting through my first right turn worked out alright until I had to get on Leesburg Pike – at least 4 if not 5 lanes on each side. The first light I get to, I stall. It turns green, I have to put the blinkers on, people behind me are visibly annoyed. I break a sweat. Second light; the same thing.

I turn into an abandoned parking lot and call Katie again. She tells me she has to work and can’t talk. I call my Dad. He picks up. I put him on speaker phone and he gives me our first father/daughter lesson as I drive around an abandoned bank parking lot. Park, reverse, forward, drive around the decrepit teller window. Repeat. He tells me he regrets not teaching me how to drive stick (there’s a first for everything!), and tells me some funny stories about my older sister’s steep learning curve. Being the supportive father that he is, he tells me if I’ve gotten 3.5 miles so far, I might as well go all the way to the airport. I think differently!

Finally Kenzie calls me to tell me she landed and I tell her the story – “Kenzie! I don’t know how to drive stick, my dad’s teaching me right now!” She thinks I said that my dad taught me once before, not just this moment and tells me to come pick her up. I repeat myself and when it finally clicks she says “Tabas! Why are you driving my car?? You knew it was a mini.”

“I really wanted to pick you up, I’m excited to see you ” I exclaimed! “But I didn’t know all mini’s were stick”. She proceeds to make me feel clueless; apparently all mini’s are manual, or were when she bought hers. We try to figure out if I should come get her, or if she should take a cab to where I am, or if I should attempt driving home. We pick option #3, and I get back on Leesburg Pike. Surprisingly, I made it all the way home without stalling once; I must have learned something.

Of course this became the story of the weekend at the wedding. That, and we were running so late to rehearsal dinner on Friday that we got dressed in a gas station bathroom.

The News Business – The Opinion’s of John Markoff and the Economist

Lindsay — Mon, 25 May 2009 01:21:40 +0000

In the past week, I’ve been tuned in and turned on to the debate surrounding the death of the newspaper, and possibly to the editors, journalists and other parts of the formal structure that delivers us, citizens, the news. I will admit, that I am a stereotypical 25 year old. I don’t watch the local news, I barely watch any network news channels, and I do not have a newspaper subscription. I abhor the San Francisco Chronicle, and the majority of my newspaper news comes from the New York Times daily news digest. My primary sources of news include the 15-20 minutes of NPR I listen to on my way to and from the gym each morning, and the weekly Economist. All this said, I do have a particular affinity for the newspaper. After all, my favorite activity has always been to read the New York Times Sunday newspaper, spread out across the table, and breakfast sitting nearby. If, it’s possible, my grandparents are sitting at the table with me because they provide excellent commentary.

Last Saturday I attended UC Berkeley’s School of Information (my alma mater), primarily because I wanted to hear John Markoff, of the New York Times, speak. I read Markoff’s book “What the Dormouse Said: How Sixties Counter Culture Shaped the Personal Computing Industry” in the Summer of 2006, and have been a fan of his ever since. Markoff’s speech was uncharacteristic of other commencement speakers because rather than offer life lessons to the new graduates, he took the opportunity to propose the “death of the newspaper” problem for the graduates to solve.

The few remarks that I have still been pondering include the following:

Markoff stated that the average New York Times newspaper subscriber spends 30 minutes per day reading the news, where the average New York Times online subscriber spends 30 minutes per month reading the news.
He fully believes that there must be another way of supporting the business of news, editors and journalism besides advertising and subscriptions; it is now our job to figure out that other “way”, i.e. business model.
He likens the way in which we are consuming news online – via blogs, rss feeds, twitter, short headlines – now to the crank of the Model T; very exciting at the time, but outmoded, in retrospect. Essentially, sometime in the future we will look back at the present and be glad that we’re no longer consuming little packets of information at rapid fire.

Markoff alluded to a large point I learned in my Quality of Information class at the I-School. The technorati, and now the twitterati, have stripped away the formal institutions of editorialship. We’ve decided that we don’t need a news channel, newspaper or government telling us what is important information for us to know. We can decide for ourselves what information is important to us, and which opinions we want to hear. If the other old adage of the internet - a wide open place where people can explore new ideas that challenge their existing beliefs – was true, we would be better off in this situation. Unfortunately, homophily (“birds of a feather flock together”) is ever present in studies of human behavior online. This means that different opinions are less likely to circulate outside of those people that already hold those opinions. In theory, with journalists and a really balanced editor, news consumers should be presented with both sides of every story. Without these people, this most likely is not the case; people just don’t look for opinions different from their own.

The writers of the Economist’s “Tossed by a gale” took a very traditional look at the downfall of the industry and the takeover of the “citizen journalists” of the internet. While Markoff spoke to the human experience of consuming news, the Economist offered a more analytical view of the problem, using statistics and commentary from editors and politicians. One paragraph struck a deep chord with me:

The Wal-Marts of the news world are online portals like Yahoo! and Google News, which collect tens of thousands of stories. Some are licensed from wire services like Reuters and the Associated Press. But most consist simply of a headline, a sentence and link to the newspaper or television website where the full story can be read. The aggregators make money by funneling readers past advertisements, which may be tailored to their presumed interests. They are cheap to run: Google News does not even employ an editor.

It was primarily this last sentence that sparked off my internal debate this week, which I externalized to a few friends via personal conversations. My original thought was that the Economist’s definition of an editor led them to misinterpret how Google News actually works. Most dictionaries say that an editor has to be a person, but I argue that it does not. As a user interface designer and engineer, I can say that applications are structured in a way to guide the user down a particular path of actions and assumptions. The design of Google News and its functionality certainly act as an editor, particularly the default “sort by relevance”. This functionality is not a person, as the definition of “editor” states, but performs the duties of an editor.

Google News determines “relevance” by identifying particular news sources as more trusted or reliable than others. This simple act is editing. When a user searches on a topic, the service will offer an article written by CNN over John Doe’s blog, which might be reposting the same content that is on CNN or reporting their take on the topic. A search by date may show both sites with the same article. After Google decides which sources are more “relevant”, its news items on the “relevant” sites rests in the hands of actual journalists and editors. This means that Google News relies on editors employed at other institutions to decide which news is important for the user to know. A friend of mine called this layered editoring, as the preference of different sites over others is based on the reputation of the editors from those sites.

If I have proved to you that Google News search by “relevance” acts as an editor, and the entire service rests on what we call layered editoring, then we can say with confidence that the following two are true: If all the editors in the world disappeared, then Google News could not work. And, if there are fewer newspapers in 10 years, Google News is going to be far worse, not any better. Then we better believe that Markoff’s hope for another business model to support the news industry is out there and ready to be implemented if we are going to have a way to filter through to well-written articles by real journalists.

Working with Photoshop: Uncheck Embed Color Profile Save for Web & Devices

Lindsay — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 01:56:46 +0000

I’ve been working on my design portfolio this week and was, yet again, playing around in Photoshop. When designing a background image that is not plain white or black in Photoshop for your website, you want to make sure that you also set a background-color to take into account different browsers and sizes. If you set a background color, the image and the background color, no matter what the browser size, will seamlessly blend together. Your CSS should look something like this:

body {
    background: rgb(112, 255, 205) url('../Homepage.jpg') no-repeat;
    color: rgb(102,51,0);
}

The url finds the image, and the rgb or hex code is the background color.

As I was designing oogeeyot,(UPDATE 7/31: I’ve totally redesigned the site, and it is no longer using these images) I noticed that the color in the image and the color in the background, although set to the same rgb value, were looking differently in Safari. The color discrepancy was not apparent in Firefox. Here’s how it looked before:

After doing a quick google search I found this thread to be really helpful. Basically, the key is when saving your PSD as an image file, uncheck the box that says Embed Color Profile. With an embedded color profile, Safari tries to read the colors from the image, rather than taking the picture at face value.

UPDATE: Based on Ann’s comments below, and talking to other web designers, the best thing to do is Save for Web & Devices, choosing which GIF, PNG, or JPG fil you need for image quality.

HAMB SF: Why the Idea is Benched (Part 2 of 2)

Lindsay — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:38:22 +0000

In the past two posts (1, 2) I’ve described HAMB SF and alluded to the fact that the idea has stopped just short of execution. I wanted to use this posting to explain why I believe I’m not in the right position to move forward with HAMB.

Lets first start with the Legal Implications. While no state *requires* that you have your personal training certification, you should be certified by AFAA, ACSM or NBFE. Since this type of business involves potential injury, you need to purchase personal training insurance, as well as issue waivers of liability to your clients. I also wanted to form my business under an LLC; this is a prudent way of protecting your assets in the case of a negligence suit with any of your clients.

So there are a couple hurdles to forming an LLC for this type of business. First, forming an LLC costs $80 in California, and mandates a minimum tax of $800 per year. This makes it difficult to keep costs low for the client. Second, from case People v. Pacific Landmark, LLC, 129 Cal. App. 4th 1203 (2005), we learn that an LLC consists of a at least two members who own membership interest. This means, without a partner, you can’t form an LLC. Finally, the PT insurance mandates that you must be an independent contractor, or operating as a sole proprietor. So all together, I couldn’t form an LLC, regardless of whether I could find a silent partner or whether this legal construct could protect me and my assets in a tortious suit.

After I came to this realization, I called AFAA and spoke to a representative about how trainers conduct their business in this state. While my notes are confined to a single page in a small notebook, the implications are huge The major rule is you must document everything to support your case in the event that you are taken to court. After getting all the proper tax permits, establishing your business with the city, purchasing liability insurance and issuing client waivers, you must collect as much paperwork as possible. Add in your clients’ informed consent, policy forms, documents of the time and details of each workout, as well as invoicing and payments, the task became much larger than I had anticipated. You cannot let anything remain as verbal agreement.

When I told her that I was interested in doing the workouts outside, she said that it would take extra work. I needed to check with the city about what I can and cannot do in the parks, and she questioned whether the insurance would cover outside workouts, especially when the equipment (park benchs, play sets and gyms) could not be certifiably safe.

All in all, there was a lot more work to do than I had anticipated. Two workouts a week might turn into hours and hours of preparation; not just preparing for the workout plan, but for documenting the entire workout. And, in the end, all of this extra legwork can’t guarantee that you won’t be taken to court or found guilty. Obviously, the real question is “What is the likeliness someone will sue you?” The answer might be slim to none, but that’s not a risk I want to take right now.

So rather than give myself a hard time for backing away from this challenge, I decided to learn from it. First, as I mentioned previously, I don’t need to make money from my certification to benefit from what is has provided me. Second, because I did the due diligence needed to decide on the viability of this idea, I’ve learned leaps and bounds about incorporation in the state of California and about how trainers do run full-time businesses. In the event that I do want to come back to this idea, I will be fully aware of the work that must go into making this a successful venture.