Rich Web Experience coming in December

Excited to be speaking at the Rich Web Experience Dec 1-4 in Orlando, Florida.

If you sign up before Nov. 2nd you can save $200. Hope to see you there!

Mental Note Cards - Stephen Anderson

I mentioned a great talk a while back by Stephen P. Anderson. In that talk Stephen teased us with a project he had started for capturing design principles/patterns in a deck of cards. The good news is you can actually pre-order a set now at a discounted rate! Already ordered mine.

Check it out at getmentalnotes.com. He also is offering a preview set of 7 cards in PDF format.

I am Hiring! Looking for a Ninja Web UI Engineer - Oct. 7th 2009.

New opportunity as of today (10/7/2009).

UPDATE: All Positions are currently filled!

I will add the official job posting later this week. But if you are interested please contact me at the email shown on the t-shirt.

NOTE: This is not a UX Design role. This is a UI Engineering role. Looking for very sharp DHTML engineers (you can bend Javascript, CSS & HTML to do your bidding) with a strong background in OOP (Some Java experience or other OOP is desired).

Update: Details can be found at the official posting on the Netflix jobs site.

Job opportunity at Togetherville for UI Web Dev

I am an Advisor for the startup Togetherville.com.

Togetherville is an early-stage, funded startup that is centered around ways for kids and parents to engage online. If you are excited about getting a ground-floor startup experience and are a sharp UI engineer then please contact Rajveer Singh Tut (raj _AT_ togetherville DOT com).

Here is the job posting.

Are you interested in using your web dev skills to change the world? Togetherville is building our founding tech team. This is your big chance to get into a very early startup and help build its foundation. We want someone who is tired of the same ol’ same ol’ and wants to take their skills and capabilities to the next level as a technology leader and company builder.

You will begin your Togetherville experience working alongside the stellar engineers at Pivotal Labs (www.pivotallabs.com). This will help you build your skills (and show them off) as we rapidly build out an amazing new way for kids and parents to engage online.
If you are somebody who has:

• The skills/potential to build an amazing interactive social web environment
• Strong experience with the LAMP stack
• Comfort with Javascript/DHTML/CSS/AJAX
• Strong collaborative skills and ability to work in multiple roles both locally and with offshore development teams
• Experience with/ interest in Agile Software Development
• Passion, Strong values, Likability, Intellect and Skill

Then, WE WANT TO TALK TO YOU!

Togetherville (http://Togetherville.com) is an early-stage, funded startup that is sitting at the crossroads of learning, technology and society. Starting with our highly-respected and successful Funders and Advisors, we are building a team that is excited about getting a ground-floor startup experience and is capable of consistently meeting and exceeding the high expectations of success we have set for ourselves.

We are extremely passionate about what we’re doing and just as passionately looking for focused and fun people to join our team. We are not hung up how many years of experience you have. We’d rather start with your potential and what you can do and then go from there! If you think this job description was written with you in mind, contact us. We’ll tell you more about Togetherville, the job opening and the change we are making in the world!

Slot Machine Tabs (Needless Fanfare)

Ok, one more in this vein. Please indulge me as I find it humorous what abuses can be foisted on the user.

Jumping Tabs (Needless Fanfare)

Another example of the Needless Fanfare anti-pattern. Do we really need tabs leaping up to meet your mouse?

Silicon Valley Code Camp Talk - DHTML Prototyping

For those at the Silicon Valley Code Camp (and anyone else :-) here is the talk from today. I added references that I mentioned to the end of the slides. Also I mentioned CSS Specificity via Star Wars. This is a great way to learn the rules for CSS Specificity.

DHTML Prototyping: Silicon Valley Code Camp

View more documents from Bill Scott.

You can also download the PDF for a larger version here.

'Designing Social Interfaces' Book Available

Designing Social Interfaces by Erin Malone & Christian Crumlish is finally hitting the store shelves. It should be available on Amazon for direct ordering in the next day or so (still on pre-order when I checked).

I had the privilege of reviewing early versions of the book and wholeheartedly recommend the book.

Erin & Christian do a thorough job of cataloging a large number of design patterns covering all aspects of designing interfaces with a social dimension. It works on two levels. First it is an excellent reference book. With dozens and dozens of patterns it's easy to pick up the book and read any pattern in isolation of the others. But it also works when you come from a specific problem. Wonder about building community participation? Or the merits of tagging? Or just need to add some "social" to your site? This book covers all aspects of social interfaces.

In interest of full disclosure I must mention that I worked closely with both Erin and Christian at Yahoo. Erin Malone, Matt Leacock and others created the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. After I joined Erin's team I took over pattern curation for a short while and Erin & I launched the public version of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library. When I left the pattern curation role Christian Crumlish was wisely brought in to be the pattern curator. While I focused the library on rich interactions (at the start of the Ajax wave), Christian, Matt, Erin and others begin to supply many social patterns. It was from that work that this book is born. It was greatly extended via their Designing Social Interfaces Wiki site (you know make the book on social patterns via social mechanisms!).

If you are designing sites with social features or are just curious about the idioms and patterns in this space then go buy the book!

Also you might want to check out this presentation on the material from this past year's IA Summit.

Designing Social Interfaces - IA Summit 09 Talk

View more documents from erin malone.

Designing for Interesting Moments Talk

I gave a talk on Designing for Interesting Moments for the IxDA at the Google campus also at Microsoft for the UX team as well as at the Ruby Meetup Group at CMU and finally this week at The Ajax Experience in Boston.

If you want to hear it in person I will be giving it at the Rich Web Experience in Florida the first week of December.

Here is the longer version of the talk.

Designing for Interesting Moments

View more documents from Bill Scott.

"50 Most Usable RIAs" on InsideRIA.com

Theresa just posted our article 50 Most Usable RIAs on O'Reilly's InsideRIA blog. The article provides fresh, new examples of the six principles outlined in our book Designing Web Interfaces.

As always feel free to use these examples in your own presentations or in communicating ideas in your organization.

Renting an Idiomatic Experience

When my wife & I arrived in Seattle recently, we rented a car from Avis. After an exhausting re-route to a different counter than the one conveniently located beside the baggage claim area and a long, long wait to get a car (geez, what do most people do at the rental counter? I just say "rent me what I ordered, I don't want an upgrade and no I don't want insurance") we got to our 2009 Altima.

Now I am not into cars. Except for a brief stint as a teenager tricking out my Camaro with Keystone Classic chrome wheels and hosing down the glass-pack mufflers to make it sound really loud I have mostly settled for "cheap & paid for". So when I was confronted with "keyless ignition" I was frankly baffled.

Here is what would have been the key.



Now I get FOBs and I know that keyless ignition exists. So I thought, ok this is cool. I looked where the keyhole should have been and saw this:



So I pushed the Start/Stop button.



Hmmm. ACC. Ok, accessories are now on. Radio, etc. So I need to push it one more time.



It says "On". Right. But the engine is not on. Just the stupid "On" light is on. Ah. Maybe I need to hold it down at this point to get the engine to start.



Back to square one! Defeat. Deflated. Ok, so now I do what every user does when faced with something that didn't work. I do all of the steps again. And again. Now I know better. But still I keep cycling through Off-Acc-On-Off again and again. I look around the car. Checking out the dash.



I look to the left side of the dash.



Ah. Maybe I need to buckle my seat belt... Nope that did not do it. I see the Brake indicator. Take off the emergency brake? Nope that did not do it either. By this time I get out of the car and look for an Avis representative. I feel really, really stupid by this time. I am a geek. I am a designer & an engineer. I decide there is no way I am asking someone how this thing works. I will figure it out if it kills me. So back in the car.

Finally I notice (by peering over the steering wheel slightly) some items lit up in the center of the dash!



First icon. Foot on a brake. Second icon. What is that? Hmmm... the gas pedal is next to the brake. So that must mean madly press the gas as I press the brake while pushing the Start/Stop button.

Success! Although I almost flooded the engine.

It turns out the second icon means "push the button". Maybe if it had been a finger on the "button" I would have gotten the sequence: foot on brake, finger on button.

Ok, so now that I know the magic sequence, keyless ignition is cool. In my everyday experience it is much better than keyed ignition. Just hop in the car with "key" in my pocket, put my foot on the brake and push the button -- awesome! Normally a car salesman would have happily explained it to me. But in the Avis parking garage I had no car manual nor anyone explaining the process.

My experience figuring it out was very frustrating. Yet the everyday experience was not. Why was this?

Since I was left to figure out this sequence on my own I had to rely on what I already knew about about starting cars. And it had nothing to do with putting your foot on the brake. This you see is not an intuitive interface. It is what Alan Cooper calls an idiomatic interface.

In Cooper's book, About Face 3 he describes three types of interfaces: instinctive, intuitive and idiomatic (pp 273-275).

An example of an instinctive interface is when you can't keep your eyes off of the dancing cowboys in the ubiquitous mortgage ads. Your brain is hard-wired for attention processing.

An intuitive interface is one that utilizes the brains ability to do a mental comparison between familiar experiences and a new one. An example might be guessing what the trash can icon on a desktop does since you already understand a real world trash can. Putting items in it would throw them away.

But getting items into the trash can may not be something you could intuit without being shown drag and drop. This is the last type -- idiomatic. Idiomatic interfaces are what make up most user interfaces. Scroll bars, nested folders, radio buttons, drag and drop are not instinctive or immediately intuitive. Instead you have to learn how to use them (yes there is a gray line between intuitive & idiomatic). In the original Mac the shortcut for ejecting a disk was to drag it to the trashcan. Not intuitive and not instinctive, but idiomatic. Like learning the idiom "beat around the bush" once it is learned it is easy to use in common speech. Ejecting a disk by dragging to the trash can was a nice shortcut (before the mac had right click menus).

Once I was shown this idiom I did not forget it.

Another example of an idiomatic interface is the iPhone's ability to move items around. You hold your finger down for a second or so on the icons on the home screen. They get jiggly. Then you can drag them around. Totally not intuitive. But idiomatic. Once learned it is easy to do.



So back to the keyless ignition. This is an example of an idiomatic interface. Not intuitive. Why the brake + the button? Why not just the button? I am guessing this keeps the kiddos from starting the car up. Also guessing the seat requires someone sitting in it before the brake + button would even work -- all safety features. But even though it was not intuitive it was learn-able. And as with all good idiomatic interfaces once I learned it the interface was simple.

Alan Cooper states it this way:
All idioms must be learned; Good idioms need to be learned only once.

My eBay Talk - Doodle Version

Courtesy of Ahmed Riaz, designer at eBay. Amusing take on my talk :-D

Cooking, UX, Team Building and Job Opportunities

Over the last year I have fallen in love with cooking. I think what I enjoy most is taking some simple ingredients and from that creating a delightful experience. That is why I fell in love with user experience design & engineering so many years ago. Just a few instructions (well usually a lot more than a few -- but you get the idea) and you can create a delightful experience for others.

I was reminded of this today when I celebrated a new member joining my team (user interface engineering at Netflix). As I set up for some massive grilling action I got a lot of joy in talking about what went into each one of the items that I was going to grill. Then just laying out the food on the grill with all of the beautiful colors and watching it cook into mouth-watering delight was exciting. But the biggest thrill is when my team members got so much enjoyment from the food (or at least that is what they tell their boss ;-)

It also got me thinking about team building. Earlier in the year when I mentioned to a candidate that I was about to take my team to Angel Island he asked "for team building?" And I immediately said "NO". In fact my reaction was really strong. I have never really cared for official "team building" exercises or outings. I have never thought that engineering or design teams were built on the shallowness of forced activities. Instead I have always felt that team building is accomplished not as a goal but as a product of being in an environment generously peppered with hard problems, smart colleagues, respect & trust and yes a sense of humor. Outings like today are just icing on the cake.

And of course I am fortunate to have an amazing team and work for an awesome company.

By the way while I am not recruiting for my team at the moment Netflix has some great openings in Product Management, UX Design and engineering!

In particular, I want to call attention to a job that has been hard to fill but is a great opportunity -- Senior Software Engineer in the Software Infrastructure team. I have always been partial to these roles. And have worked in and led infrastructure teams. It takes a special breed of engineer who can grasp what the organization needs (understanding the real customer is our members) yet be able to craft flexible solutions that can multiply the efforts of the rest of the organization. If you are this person or know of someone let me know and I will pass along to the hiring manager.

You can reach me at "B" _dot_ "scott" _@_ yahoo DOT com.

Netflix is Hiring Test Engineers

We are looking for Test Engineers with solid software engineering skills. Interested?

Kevin McEntee, VP of Engineering, described to me what kind of talent we are looking for:

Netflix is hiring Software Developers for our Test Engineering team. The most difficult challenge in team building comes from staffing Test Engineering teams. I have seen many engineering organizations in Silicon Valley fail at this challenge because the development teams and engineering leaders don’t truly value what Test Engineering can bring to an innovative company. On my team at Netflix, the opposite is true. Test Engineering is a critical component of our technology innovation. Our model is to hire Software Developers to innovate and build our Test Engineering solutions.

Check out our job board where you can see some of our current openings.

Theresa's Presentation at DelveUI 2009

Fluency and Rosenfeld Media sponsored the first DelveUI, A 2 Day Masterclass on Designing User (Web) Interfaces last week at the NYU Poly Campus in Brooklyn.

Theresa Neil (co-author and cohort) just posted her talk on Designing Rich Interfaces from the conference. Here it is from slideshare. Also, be sure to check out her flip cards she is working in conjunction with her talk & our book.

Designing Rich Applications

View more documents from Theresa Neil.

Netflix Culture

Meant to post this yesterday when we added Reed Hasting's (CEO of Netflix) slide deck on Netflix Culture to our jobs site. It is 128 slides long, but well worth the read. I can honestly say that I haven't worked anywhere else in my career (25+ years) that thinks as deeply about their culture. Also credit Patty McCord. As Chief Talent Officer (yes we have a "C" level talent officer) she zealously guards the cultural environment.

Just one of my favorite thoughts is about talent density: "As rules increase, talent decreases." So we keep our rules to a minimum. And hire "fully formed adults" that don't need the extra bureaucracy.

Don't forget we are hiring :-)

Here it is from slideshare:

Netflix Looking for Top UX Design Talent - 7/21

We have several open positions that fall into two categories. Visual Design & Sr. UI Design. This is a great time to be at Netflix. For one we had an excellent Q1 in the midst of hard economic times. And second, we have some exciting challenges ahead of us to solidify our expertise in connecting people to movies they love on multiple fronts (the TV being just one of those).

From our the job postings for Sr. Visual Designer & Sr. UI Designer (Interaction Designer):

Netflix is looking for an outstanding designer to join our small but amazing team. If you are as passionate about designing great experiences as you are about helping a successful business reach even higher heights, then we would love to talk to you. We are a close-knit team, so our ideal candidate is an excellent collaborator and team player who values complete honesty and candor. Although we are an established company, we still act like a start up in many ways. We offer an opportunity to innovate on a large scale, and our compensation, benefits, and culture are hard to beat.

Get the details here and here.

Or contact me directly (for my email: take the first letter of my name 'bill' and append .scott@yahoo.com to it) and I will connect you with our Creative Director.

Upcoming Talk: Designing for Interesting Moments @ IxDA 7/22

I am busy this weekend restructuring a talk I have given in the past that parallels my book. I will be restructuring the way I present the information as well as bring in new material. When I was at the Big D Design conference in Dallas in May I was really impressed by Stephen P. Anderson's presentation on the Art and Science of Seductive Interactions. Not only was the material helpful, but Stephen's take-aways and presentation organization were excellent as well.

Anyway I am looking forward to a fresh take on this topic. The talk will be titled Designing for Interesting Moments. I will be giving this same talk on 8/24 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond as well as at a Ruby Meetup group (event details in a followup blog posting).

If you can make it meet me at the Google Campus on Wednesday night, 7/22 at 7:30pm. Note: It will be in Seville which is in building 40, not building 43 as advertised!

By the way, I have embedded Stephen's talk (again not mine!) here for your enjoyment:

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions

View more documents from Stephen Anderson.

[Stephen P. Anderson's talk: The Art & Science of Seductive Interfaces]

Anti-Pattern: Needless Fanfare (Turbo Tax)

I mostly love Turbo Tax (except when it tells me I owe a tax payment :-). But here is one that I found to be very annoying and a good example of an anti-pattern Theresa & I write about in our book... Needless Fanfare.

While doing my taxes back in April I was constantly going back and re-entering information that would hopefully bring my tax payment down (numbers below are not my actual tax payment :-)

Here is the real time version.



When turbo tax recalculates your tax burden it plays the Biggest Loser TV show's game of running the values up & down in a random fashion. The change in the videos below is from $10,533 down to $9,177. However at one point it goes all the way up to $98,000! Now we all know that "inside the computer" calculations are not done this way. Someone thought this would be cool way to call attention to the change happening.

But let me tell you this is a horrible experience. It gave me a heart attack as it ran up & down playing with "my money" till it finally said "ok, ok it went down". But because it does this nonsense it makes it hard to see what change actually happened (a variation on change blindness).

Now watch it in slow motion to see what it is doing.



There are other ways to signal a change. The most common is to spotlight the change for a brief moment usually using a fade anything technique (see these examples.)

Torturing me is not a good user experience. This is as fake as the Biggest Loser scale.

Anti-Pattern: Geek Speak (Facebook)

Need I say more?